2018-2019 Lynn University Academic Catalog

https://spiral.lynn.edu/accatalogs/1046/thumbnail.jp

2022-2023 Lynn University Academic Catalog

The 2022-2023 Academic Catalog initially published as a web-only document. The Department of Marketing and Communication created a PDF version, which is available for download here.https://spiral.lynn.edu/accatalogs/1051/thumbnail.jp

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

2023-2024 Lynn University Academic Catalog

The 2023-2024 Academic Catalog initially published as a web-only document. The Department of Marketing and Communication created a PDF version, which is available for download here.https://spiral.lynn.edu/accatalogs/1052/thumbnail.jp

Kethelavia: Promoting and branding an original cartoon using interactive website design

How to design and promote a cartoon brand are always interesting questions to contemporary cartoon industry. To the rising Chinese cartoon business, they need to find a suitable way for its continuous development. Through reviewing the evolution process of some classical cartoon brands in the world, the history and current status of Chinese cartoon industry, I have found that, cartoon making is no longer purely an art work, but rather a concept of brand design. Like fashion, cartoon brand design asks for a constant self-re-innovation to meet the change in culture and aesthetic standards. On the other hand, new technology innovations always influence the concept of cartoon and its artistic style. Application of novel techniques into cartoon making has already propelled the cartoon industry in fascinating speed. This thesis work will also review some best examples to illustrate such relationship between technology innovation and cartoon industry evolution. As the main body of this thesis work, I will present my original cartoon brand creation-the world of Kethelavia -to demonstrate my vision of cartoon brand making. Kethelavia has a plot and role design derived from a popular Chinese ideology. It incorporates western graphical design style and popular digital techniques in its artistic form. ActionScript3 is one way of the core techniques that is used to power the interactive interface between the designer and the customers. Kethelavia concept and its products will be promoted in the form of interactive webpage through Internet. Its potential customers are actively engaged to experience the world of Kethelavia in multiple ways online

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Reality & Effect: A Cultural History of Visual Effects

The purpose of this dissertation is to chart how the development of visual effects has changed popular cinema¡¯s vision of the real, producing the powerful reality effect. My investigation of the history of visual effects studies not only the industrial and economic context of visual effects, but also the aesthetic characteristics of the reality effect. In terms of methodology, this study employs a theoretical discourse which compares the parallels between visual effects and the discourse of modernity/postmodernity, utilizing close textual analysis to understand the symptomatic meanings of key texts. The transition in the techniques and meanings of creating visual effects reflects the cultural transformation from modernism to postmodernism. Visual effects have developed by adapting to the structural transformation of production systems and with the advance of technology. The studio system strongly controlled the classical Hollywood cinema by means of the modern economic production system of Fordism. Breakdown of Hollywood classicism as a production system gave rise to the creation of digital effects with the rise of the concept of the blockbuster and with the development of computer technologies. I argue that the characteristic feature of time-space compression, occurring in the process of the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, clearly reflects that of compression of multi-layered time and space, generated in the development process from analog visual effects, such as trick, rear and front projection, to the digital effects, such as rotoscoping and CGI animation. While the aesthetics of analog visual effects, without computing, can be compared to a Fordist production system, digital effects, which hugely rely on CGI manipulation, are examples of flexible accumulation. As a case study of the local resistance or alternative of Hollywood today, I examine the effects-oriented Korean nationalist blockbuster. The Korean nationalist blockbuster films have sought large-scale filmmaking and presentation of spectacular scenes, including heavy dependence on the use of special effects, which is frequently considered a Hollywood style. This paradoxical combination of peculiar Korean subjects and Hollywood style can be viewed as a form of cultural jujitsu, taking advantage of the force of the dominant culture in order to resist and subvert it

THE REALISM OF ALGORITHMIC HUMAN FIGURES A Study of Selected Examples 1964 to 2001

It is more than forty years since the first wireframe images of the Boeing Man revealed a stylized hu-man pilot in a simulated pilot's cabin. Since then, it has almost become standard to include scenes in Hollywood movies which incorporate virtual human actors. A trait particularly recognizable in the games industry world-wide is the eagerness to render athletic muscular young men, and young women with hour-glass body-shapes, to traverse dangerous cyberworlds as invincible heroic figures. Tremendous efforts in algorithmic modeling, animation and rendering are spent to produce a realistic and believable appearance of these algorithmic humans. This thesis develops two main strands of research by the interpreting a selection of examples. Firstly, in the computer graphics context, over the forty years, it documents the development of the creation of the naturalistic appearance of images (usually called photorealism ). In particular, it de-scribes and reviews the impact of key algorithms in the course of the journey of the algorithmic human figures towards realism . Secondly, taking a historical perspective, this work provides an analysis of computer graphics in relation to the concept of realism. A comparison of realistic images of human figures throughout history with their algorithmically-generated counterparts allows us to see that computer graphics has both learned from previous and contemporary art movements such as photorealism but also taken out-of-context elements, symbols and properties from these art movements with a questionable naivety. Therefore, this work also offers a critique of the justification of the use of their typical conceptualization in computer graphics. Although the astounding technical achievements in the field of algorithmically-generated human figures are paralleled by an equally astounding disregard for the history of visual culture, from the beginning 1964 till the breakthrough 2001, in the period of the digital information processing machine, a new approach has emerged to meet the apparently incessant desire of humans to create artificial counterparts of themselves. Conversely, the theories of traditional realism have to be extended to include new problems that those active algorithmic human figures present

Automated robotic inspection system for electronic manufacturing

An automated robotic inspection system for electronic manufacturing has been developed to identify pin defects of IC packages mounted on printed circuit boards using surface mount technology. The automated robotic inspection system consists of two robots, a computer, a CCD camera with frame gabber for image acquisition, and a customized windows program using neural network for on-line defect identification. Gray scale images of the pins on IC packages are acquired using ambient light. The images are filtered and formatted to appropriate size, so that Matlab neural network tool could be used. The images are used to train neural networks using Matlab\u27s Bayesian Regularization module. Optimal network was found to be a single-layer network with three outputs for each IC investigated. The weights and biases of each of the ICs investigated and the matrices of gray scale values for the IC images are saved as text files. A customized windows program uses these text files for on-line defect identification. The defect identification for the networks was found to be 100 percent for the two ICs investigated. The analysis and integration of an automated robotic inspection system for on-line monitoring of electronic manufacturing using neural networks is presented in this work

Distinct Inter-Joint Coordination during Fast Alternate Keystrokes in Pianists with Superior Skill

Musical performance requires motor skills to coordinate the movements of multiple joints in the hand and arm over a wide range of tempi. However, it is unclear whether the coordination of movement across joints would differ for musicians with different skill levels and how inter-joint coordination would vary in relation to music tempo. The present study addresses these issues by examining the kinematics and muscular activity of the hand and arm movements of professional and amateur pianists who strike two keys alternately with the thumb and little finger at various tempi. The professionals produced a smaller flexion velocity at the thumb and little finger and greater elbow pronation and supination velocity than did the amateurs. The experts also showed smaller extension angles at the metacarpo-phalangeal joint of the index and middle fingers, which were not being used to strike the keys. Furthermore, muscular activity in the extrinsic finger muscles was smaller for the experts than for the amateurs. These findings indicate that pianists with superior skill reduce the finger muscle load during keystrokes by taking advantage of differences in proximal joint motion and hand postural configuration. With an increase in tempo, the experts showed larger and smaller increases in elbow velocity and finger muscle co-activation, respectively, compared to the amateurs, highlighting skill level-dependent differences in movement strategies for tempo adjustment. Finally, when striking as fast as possible, individual differences in the striking tempo among players were explained by their elbow velocities but not by their digit velocities. These findings suggest that pianists who are capable of faster keystrokes benefit more from proximal joint motion than do pianists who are not capable of faster keystrokes. The distinct movement strategy for tempo adjustment in pianists with superior skill would therefore ensure a wider range of musical expression