Jerry Fireman: Modeling Characters for a 1930s Cartoon

Jerry Fireman is concept for a 3D animated cartoon that is based on the style of early 1900s cartoons. It is inspired by the pioneers in early animation, Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney, and designed with the intent to educate people on the social and political environments that influenced the production of cartoons during the 1920s and 30s. During the development of this concept, I investigate different modeling techniques to represent the main stylistic elements of these early animated drawings in a 3D form, and I compare the possible modeling workflows for advantages and disadvantages in this process. In this document I present a summary of the period of influences and my design and models. Rendered poses are also included as a proof of concept

Animating perception: British cartoons from music hall to cinema, 1880 - 1928

This thesis examines the history of animated cartoons in Britain between 1880 and 1928, identifying a body of work that has been largely ignored by film and animation historians, covering the production, distribution, and exhibition of these films. Throughout this history, graphic arts - especially print cartooning and illustration - and the music-hall lightning cartoon act are found to have played a formative role in British animated cartoons. The artists who made the first British animated cartoons were almost exclusively drawn from one of those two fields and thus this work may be considered to form a parallel history of ‘artists’ film’. They brought with them to film a range of concerns from those prior forms that would shape British animated cartoons. Examining that context provides an understanding of the ways British animated cartoons developed in technologic, economic, and aesthetic terms. This work includes the first in-depth history of the music-hall lightning cartoon act, which finds that it anticipates cinematic animation, featuring qualities such as transformation, the movement of line drawings, and the desire to bring drawings to life. Building on this history, a new critical framework for examining these films aesthetically is provided, emphasising the role of the spectator and their perceptual processes. This framework draws upon the work of E.H. Gombrich and Sergei Eisenstein, and extends it to include recent findings from neuroscientific fields. The result is an original aesthetic reading of this body of work, which finds the films to have a deep engagement with the basic perceptual processes involved in viewing moving line drawings

Drawing from motion capture : developing visual languages of animation

The work presented in this thesis aims to explore novel approaches of combining motion capture with drawing and 3D animation. As the art form of animation matures, possibilities of hybrid techniques become more feasible, and crosses between traditional and digital media provide new opportunities for artistic expression. 3D computer animation is used for its keyframing and rendering advancements, that result in complex pipelines where different areas of technical and artistic specialists contribute to the end result. Motion capture is mostly used for realistic animation, more often than not for live-action filmmaking, as a visual effect. Realistic animated films depend on retargeting techniques, designed to preserve actors performances with a high degree of accuracy. In this thesis, we investigate alternative production methods that do not depend on retargeting, and provide animators with greater options for experimentation and expressivity. As motion capture data is a great source for naturalistic movements, we aim to combine it with interactive methods such as digital sculpting and 3D drawing. As drawing is predominately used in preproduction, in both the case of realistic animation and visual effects, we embed it instead to alternative production methods, where artists can benefit from improvisation and expression, while emerging in a three-dimensional environment. Additionally, we apply these alternative methods for the visual development of animation, where they become relevant for the creation of specific visual languages that can be used to articulate concrete ideas for storytelling in animation

A survey of comics research in computer science

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks

Remembering Nostalgia : Trends of Nostalgia within contemporary animated films

The use of 2D animations visual designs within contemporary 3D animated films has become a vastly more popular and far-reaching trend, with big animation companies like Pixar and Disney, releasing several films since 1995 that reveal a re-emergence of 2D nostalgia in main-stream animation. I believe this is a result of a desire in audiences for a more nostalgic aesthetics, in the form of 2D aesthetics in the character designs and overall style choices within contemporary 3D animated films. I will endeavour to explore this trend within this research report by discussing two films from director Brad Bird, The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), that I feel explore this contemporary trend of nostalgia specifically within the animation industry, stressing the importance of the visual signifiers that I believe incorporate this current trend of nostalgia. This paper does not, however, look at nostalgia as a broad based cultural phenomenon, but rather looks at the aesthetics of nostalgia specifically in terms of my two case studies and feature film animation. To do this, this paper will look to define nostalgia in terms of animation, exploring the sentimental nostalgia that I believe is evident in my two case studies, after which it will look at the history of 2D and 3D animation, and how the developments within these two mediums made the aesthetic of my case studies possible. The majority of this paper will be dedicated to discussing my chosen case studies in terms of the visual indicators of nostalgia that can be found within them. Throughout this paper, I will attempt to show that the aesthetic of these two films is a direct result of the nostalgia that contemporary audiences and animation studios have for a specific style of animation and the lifestyle associated with it, from a time that embodies this: 1950s and 60s America.GR201

Animating Film Theory

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahash

Computer-assisted animation creation techniques for hair animation and shade, highlight, and shadow

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3062号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2010/2/25 ; 早大学位記番号:新532

Animating Film Theory

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahash

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) occupies a central place within the history of global animation. Based on the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the film was the first feature-length animated film produced by the Disney Studio and served to announce the animated cartoon as an industrial art form. Yet Disney’s landmark version not only set in motion the Golden Age of the Hollywood cartoon, but has continued to stand as an international sensation, prompting multiple revisions and remakes within a variety of national filmmaking contexts. This book explores the enduring qualities that have marked Snow White’s influence and legacy, providing a collection of original chapters that reflect upon its pioneering use of technology and contributions to animation’s visual style, the film’s reception within an American context, and its status as a global cultural phenomenon