character

Even though these two paintings have the same subject, still life, they have totally different characters. The bottom one has very calm and stable atmosphere, but the top one looks more aggressive than the bottom one. It even looks sort of depressed. I wanted to say here is characters doesn't have to have a body and face. Everything around us can be characters. Colors, motions, shapes... can be elements of characters.

Panel Discussion About Disecting Dance Motions And Gestures From The Point Of Views Of A Dance Choreographer, Traditional 2-D Animators, And A 3-D C.G

In this video the discussion is presented to a panel of Character Animation specialists, A Dance and Robot Choreographer (Margot Apostolos), Two Disney Animators (Andreas Deja and Tom Sito), and a Sony Imageworks 3-D Animator (Maks Naporowski). The discussion is based on the question of how dance motions and gestures are conveyed in choreographed dance to elicit a successful movement of emotion, and if these same guidelines or principles of successful motion are used to critique the success of an animated movement in the choreography presented through the character animation performance.

Tom Sito speaking

summary:(1)Facial expression is very important to the personality of the character.(2)Every scene means something to the character.(3)Animation has many different techniques.No matter what techniques we use,the performance is the most important concept.

Miwa Matreyek

Miwa Matreyek's work (which was presented recently at the department's Redefining Animation symposium) stands at an interesting juncture between animation and performance. Typically, an animator performs through the animated character, but in Miwa's case, she performs with the animation. Thus, for example, she interacts with projected animation during her live performance.
In a sense, her work questions the distinctions we create between live-action and animation (and even different forms of animation), and invites us to think only about the performance, echoing the comments of our guest speakers this semester.

Here is a video of her at Platform Int'l Animation Festival this year:





Check out http://www.semihemisphere.com/ for more.

character emotion change

It's pretty embarrassing to upload this footage, because it was almost my first character animation test- the actual first character animation was character bouncing ball. But the reason I'm uploading this footage is I think it could be a good example of changing emotion and status of a character. Well... enjoy.

Andreas Dejas speaking

Summary:
1. Good, fancy drawing is just a minor element for a great character animation; good performance and acting are the most important.
2. Animators should understand the inside of the characters- what's in the character's brain and heart.
(We'd be better study about the character before we really start animating.)
3. Animators should love their characters; animators should have honor and responsibility on the characters.

Madame Tutli Putli & Performance Capture

Continuing on the subject of the threshold between having character and being a character (as well as the emotional connection that determines what we perceive as a character), Madame Tutli Putli is a really neat example of a mixed media character design. This is a stop-motion film, but the eyes of the main character were composited in from footage of a live actor who was recorded after the animation. The result is a very unique, often creepy, look.




This process is a unique form of performance capture in which the performance occurs only after the animation, and is probably why this film has avoided the controversy that typically surrounds optical motion capture such as Beowulf.



But in a sense, Madame Tutli Putli is much closer to reality than optical motion capture, simply because there are no markers, but the actual actor footage is used. Moreover, the eyes are arguably the most important component of facial animation. Certainly, the footage is used very creatively, but there are a lot more adjustments and tweaks to the data in the optical mocap pipeline.

One key difference lies in the role of the animator. In Madame Tutli Putli, the animator's performance drives the actor's contribution, whereas in typical mocap productions, it is the actor's performance that is most important. A subtle difference, but one that appears to be central to the mocap debate.

More thoughts on what makes a character

Can water or smoke be a character? In the era of big-budget effects films, it's common to hear people refer to "hero" waves or drops or puffs. So are these "hero" elements characters as well?

Animators are taught from the very beginning to exaggerate what they see in real life, an idea that is manifest in various principles such as squash-and-stretch, anticipation, breaking joints, etc. But even though an animation as simple a bouncing ball can have character, this does not mean that a bouncing ball IS a character. To give an animated object character is to imbue it with personality, but a character is more than just personality - it is an entity that we can recognize as a living, thinking being i.e. one of our own.

That is not to say that a bouncing ball can never be a character (there are obviously shades of grey here), but I feel that there is a threshold that separates the bouncing ball with character from the bouncing ball that is a character.

Phew, that was a real tongue-twister of a post.

The first few seconds of this video also depicts the difference between having character and being a character. The water has personality, but then morphs into a water character.

Automated Anticipation?

I came across a paper entitled "Anticipation Effect Generation for Character Animation". Basically, these researchers were looking at automated ways to add anticipation to existing animation (presumably 3d animation). It's an interesting notion, and seems to tackle the subtleties of animation from the opposite perspective as motion capture. This technique aims to make it easier to improve keyframe animation. Most animators would object to this approach on the grounds that anticipation is subjective and not easily derived automatically. The researchers found the same thing - they could not automate the duration of the anticipation and needed human intervention.

Here's the abstract:
"According to the principles of traditional 2D animation techniques, anticipation makes an animation convincing and expressive. In this paper, we present a method to generate anticipation effects for an existing animation. The proposed method is based on the visual characteristics of anticipation, that is, “Before we go one way, first we go the other way [1].” We first analyze the rotation of each joint and the movement of the center of mass during a given action, where the anticipation effects are added. Reversing the directions of rotation and translation, we can obtain an initially guessed anticipatory pose. By means of a nonlinear optimization technique, we can obtain a consequent anticipatory pose to place the center of mass at a proper location. Finally, we can generate the anticipation effects by compositing the anticipatory pose with a given action, while considering the continuity at junction and preserving the high frequency components of the given action. Experimental results show that the proposed method can produce the anticipatory pose successfully and quickly, and generate convincing and expressive anticipation effects."

The entire paper can be found at:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h42451j2j38l5216/ and the pdf is at
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h42451j2j38l5216/fulltext.pdf

(You may need to be on USC campus to be able to access the links)

Character Research

Here is some of my own work that examines what constitutes a character - in this case, it's a bridge.

What is a Character?

This is a question that we haven't directly addressed yet, but I think it's important to consider. Certainly, a character in animation is not limited to the rounded biped anthropomorphized animals that we see most often in commercial animation.

There are at least two principles that come to mind when defining what constitutes a character in animation:

Abstraction:
As we've learned from multiple seminar panelists this semester, humans are preprogrammed to recognize other humans. Thus, we are visually tuned to recognize both human faces and movements. In addition, we have an innate tendency to 'see' likenesses of ourselves even in inanimate objects. Thus, the headlights and grill of a car are a face to us, as are icons such as :)

(Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics goes into this subject in much greater detail).

In my opinion, squash and stretch, silhouette, and other principles of classical animation derive from this innate tendency to see ourselves in the world. In other words, even highly exaggerated/abstracted character animation 'works' because our minds are programmed to fill in the gaps. (The facial gesture reserach group also has looked into this)

Emotion:
Since we can recognize even highly abstract characters physically, a series of moving drawings/images become a character when a viewer can can identify with it emotionally. Moreover, this property can be independent of how realistically the character is rendered. For example, in his celebrated film 'Blinkity Blank', Norman McLaren pushes the idea of abstraction to an extreme. His character - a hen - is composed of the simplest graphic shapes, but is remarkably expressive as it dances around the screen. The character even disappears for several frames at a time, but the discontinuities do not prevent the viewer from looking at the hen as a character.

A still from 'Blinkity Blank':


Bill McClure mentioned during his presentation at seminar that all emotions are learned, an observation that implies that character animation is poised between the delicate interplay of nature (i.e. abstraction, which is genetic) and nurture (i.e. emotion, which is learned).

Thoughts?

Andreas Dejas Bio

Andreas Dejas is one of the main 2D character animators at Disney. I believe he studied under the Nine Old Men, and I think it'll be interesting to get his take on some of the recent technological developments in animation since he's almost exclusively a 2D artist.

His Wikipedia page is pretty informative and I'd recommend checking out this interview and this other interview as well.

emblems- example

Ice Age
(click here)