Procedurally Generating Biologically Driven Bird and Non-Avian Dinosaur Feathers

A key element in computer-graphics research is representing the world around us, and immense inspiration may be found in nature. Algorithms and procedural models may be developed that can describe the three-dimensional shape of objects and how they interact with light. This thesis focuses particularly on bird and other dinosaur feathers and their structure. More specifically, it addresses the problem of procedurally generating biologically driven geometry for modeling feathers in computer graphics. As opposed to previously published methods for generated feather geometry, data is derived from a myriad of real-world specimens of feathers and used in creating graphical models of feathers. Modeling feathers is of interest both for media production and also for various fields of research such as ornithology, paleontology, and material science. In order to create realistic, computer-graphics feathers, the anatomy of feathers is analyzed in detail with the aim of understanding their structure and variation in order to apply that understanding to modeling. Data concerning the shape of actual feathers was collected and analyzed to drive attribute parameters for modeling accurate synthetic feathers, during which methods for generating geometry informed by the data were investigated. Synthesized image results, capabilities, limitations, and extensions of the developed techniques are presented

Fairy Tale Films

In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress). As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life— mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.” Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1060/thumbnail.jp

Gender in 21st century animated children's cinema

This e-book is the product of the activities carried out in the elective MA course 'Gender Studies: New Sexualities/New Textualities', taught in the Autumn/Winter semester of the academic year 2020-21, within the MA in Advanced English Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This collective volume authored by the students is focused on how gender is represented in current 21st century Anglophone animated children's cinema. The 57 films dealt with cover the period 2001-2020, from 'Monsters Inc' to 'Onward', and include analyses of film by Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Illumination Studios, Laika Studios, Blue Sky Studios and others

Two in One: the Union of Jung\u27s Anima and Animus in Beauty and the Beast

Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim and Sheldon Cashdan have theorized that popular fairy tales provide children with a way to confront negative aspects of themselves by exorcising these aspects into the villainous characters contained therein. However, despite the fact that the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale contains no similar villain in its literary form, it remains prominent in the popular canon today. This thesis uses Carl Jung\u27s anima and animus archetypes to develop the argument that the two title characters achieve this representation of the self in a different way, ultimately functioning together to create a unified \u27self through the symbol of their marriage. It develops these images through Disney\u27s version of the tale in its 1991 animated film and in two short stories by Angela Carter entitled The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tiger\u27s Bride. Each incarnation of the tale reveals new facets of the characters, but they have the most meaning when considered together because they reflect different concerns within the self. The story implicitly addresses these concerns in each variation, and although the tale does not provide the same sort of psychodrama evident in many of the other fairy tales in the canon of Western literature, it amplifies and resolves a similar set of concerns into a positive and unified self