Animating Predator and Prey Fish Interactions

Schooling behavior is one of the most salient social and group activities among fish. They form schools for social reasons like foraging, mating and escaping from predators. Animating a school of fish is difficult because they are large in number, often swim in distinctive patterns that is they take the shape of long thin lines, squares, ovals or amoeboid and exhibit complex coordinated patterns especially when they are attacked by a predator. Previous work in computer graphics has not provided satisfactory models to simulate the many distinctive interactions between a school of prey fish and their predator, how does a predator pick its target? and how does a school of fish react to such attacks? This dissertation presents a method to simulate interactions between prey fish and predator fish in the 3D world based on the biological research findings. Firstly, a model is described by representing a school of fish as a complex network information flow with structural properties. Using this model, a predator fish targeting isolated peripheral fish is simulated. Secondly, the escape behavior state machine model and escape maneuvers exhibited by fish schools are described. The escape maneuvers include compact, avoid, fast avoid, skitter, fountain, flash, ball, split, join, herd, vacuole, and hourglass are identified in the biological studies. This proposed escape behavior animation model can free an animator from dealing with the low-level animations but instead, control the fish behavior on a higher level by modifying a state machine and a small set of system parameters. With the state machine and relatively few system parameters, the proposed system is stable, predictable, and easy to tune, which represent important properties for animators to control the outcome. This system is developed in Unity (3D). In addition, a plug-in is also developed for full-fledged graphics tool Blender software to simulate escape maneuvers. The animator has to simply select escape maneuvers, adjust parameters and work on animating predator using keyframe method. It does not deal with the state machine model. The proposed model is useful not only in generating group behaviors but also in scientific visualization tool for studying fish behavior

To Be Captured

To Be Captured, a 3D animated short, utilizes some toys as the film’s main characters to increase the sense of artificiality, while trying to animate their movements as closely to the forces of the real world as possible. It tells a story of a group of stuffed animals enclosed in a doll claw machine waiting to be captured. The main character, one of the smarter toys, is a seahorse who plays tricks to be captured when a little girl starts to play the game. Once out of the box, he despairs realizing that the girl is a fanatic who only cares about catching the biggest toy in the machine, which is the bear. While playing, she becomes furious when she fails to capture her prize. The bear in the box trembles with fear when he witnesses her ill-treatment of her previous prizes, the carrots and the seahorse, and he begs for help. The animals work together to protect the bear and then have to rely only on themselves to face the challenges of a truly free life. This thesis short shows that the use of fictional narrative, artificial stage setting, and anthropomorphic dolls in an animated film featuring toy characters can still produce a strong sense of realism if viewed from Brecht’s A-Effect perspective and balanced with the realistic representational approaches in animation, such as facial expression personification, varied camera angles, detailed movement analysis, expressive area lighting design, and texture parameter adjustment. This thesis presents a journey of exploration of how to create this fantasy short film and animate it in a realistic manner

Animating Heritage: Affective Experiences, Institutional Networks, And Themed Consumption In the Japanese Cultural Industries

This dissertation ethnographically examines a Japanese historical themed park to illuminate the cultural industries’ role in shaping Japanese identity through creative labor, consumption, and institutional relationships. It argues that cultural heritage is animated through embodied experiences (taiken) with performative elements and contingent contexts that take place around a central organization’s selective interpretation and staging of the past. This dissertation is based on 15 months of fieldwork in 2015-2017 at and around “Edo Town,” the pseudonym for a historical themed park in Japan that evokes the Edo or Tokugawa period (1603-1867) in Japan’s history. I explore the creative labor, institutional networks, and consumption practices around embodied experiences staged by its operating company to communicate an Edo-like Japanese identity. Such an identity recovers an alternate mode of sociality and being that aims to rehabilitate contemporary social anxieties about economic stagnation and the loss of collective Japanese identity. I demonstrate that cultural industry venues exist beyond their representations, as Edo Town is not only a historical themed park but also an employer of local residents, an actor training institution, a touristic destination, a provider of cultural knowledge expertise, as well as an alternate social space that sustain relationships outside of work and home. More broadly, I analyze how human agency is modified through theming and animation frameworks when people develop social senses that are alternate to their everyday lives. In this case, both themed park workers and visitor-consumers merge with Edo-like characters that enable them to encounter each other differently from their usual selves. In the process, they are socialized with the meaning of Edo-like Japaneseness as a corrective to what they have taken for granted in real life. I also highlight how history-themed parks and spaces like Edo Town challenge conventional modes of cultural transmission through creative re-enactments of cultural knowledge as intangible heritage, including the use of theater, characters, and fictional social encounters as the media of communication

Bargaining Without Law

Like a professional athlete on growth hormones, legal bargaining scholarship has transformed itself over the years. Once an amateurish assortment of war stories and folk tales, now it is a hulking behemoth of social science surveys and studies. There is a lot to like in this transformation. Much of the new writing is insightful, sophisticated, and spirited, with things to tell even the most experienced bargainer. But it also is missing something important: law. Bargaining scholars now routinely write about dispute settlement as if the strength of the parties’ competing legal claims is of no consequence. Rarely do they discuss substantive legal argument. And when they do, it usually is in terms of whether the argument is strategically “framed,” or “anchored,” rather than whether it is well reasoned and supported by evidence (i.e., persuasive). This is a serious mistake. At its core, a legal dispute is a disagreement about the meaning of law, and it must be resolved on substantive grounds if the resolution is to be legitimate and lasting. Psychological and social workarounds may paper over a dispute, or suppress it, for a time but they will not resolve it. If it wants to be helpful, bargaining scholarship needs to describe how legal claims are argued conversationally, without polarizing relationships, producing lingering animosities, and provoking recrimination spirals. This is the heart of bargaining; the rest is sideshow. In this article I attempt to describe how this might be done

Now is the envy of all of the dead: an introduction to Don Hertzfeldt, the animator

This thesis is a primer on the experimental independent animator Don Hertzfeldt, whose filmography—described by one critic as “a singular universe of stick figures in crisis”—has for more than two decades been engaging some of the larger questions of post-millennial existence, particularly with regard to consciousness, temporality, and death. First, I will briefly introduce who Hertzfeldt is as an auteur (where he comes from, where his primary interests lie, and what his impact has been); second, I will provide an overview of the historical context in which his oeuvre should be placed (i.e. the history of animation and of experimental cinema); third, I will closely analyze his work, examining questions of style and narrative, starting from his student films and continuing to his more recent films; and fourth, I will explore some of the philosophical implications of recurring Hertzfeldtian motifs and themes (particularly with regard to consciousness, temporality, and death) before concluding

Television Scales

How to reckon with the staggering volume of television materials, past and present? And how to comprehend all the potential, complex scales at which to grapple with television, from its tiniest units of audiovisual content to its most massive industrial coordinates and beyond? In Television Scales, Nick Salvato demonstrates how the problem of scale in the field of television may be turned into a resource and a method for a television studies that would pay better attention to messy medial complexities, peripatetic critical practices, and vulgar psychogeographies. Modeling his investigative practice on the meta-critical writing of social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in Partial Connections and elsewhere, Salvato composes surprising, partial constellations of television’s elements. In the process, his consideration ranges from classic television sitcoms like I Love Lucy to contemporary reality series such as The Biggest Loser, Iron Chef, and House Hunters International. He simultaneously pores over a number of key television phenomena, including technological mystification, performers’ charismatic displays, binge viewing, and devoted fandom. An experiment in style and form, Television Scales maps, weighs, and rules television, while also undoing these very strategies for evaluating the medium

State Conservation as Settler Colonial Governance at Ka‘ena Point, Hawai‘i

This paper argues, by illustrating, that liberal multiculturalism and natural resources are interlinked strategies of settler colonial governance in political debates surrounding the construction of a “predator-proof” fence for conservation purposes across Native Hawaiian lands of deep cultural and historical significance at Ka`ena Point, a state wilderness park in Hawai`i. First, this paper shifts debates framed in terms of the seeming recalcitrance of Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners to recognize the necessity of natural resource management. Second, it considers how these political debates are repeated in the context of legal questions over the forms through which Native Hawaiian cultural claims may be placed against settler state actions. Third, and most pertinently, the paper speaks to an emerging field of critical indigenous legal scholars who analyze the limits of law as coterminous with settler colonialism