Animation with CINEMA

The Semiotic Review of Books, 2008

Animatic apparatus; animatic; animation; the graphic; writing/drawing; cinema studies; animation studies; film philosophy; Emile Reynaud; Théâtre Optique; Jacques Derrida; Tom Gunning

2002

There is an increasing interest in the computer animation. The most of the current animation software tools are described by Richard Parent in . The driving ideas behind animation in general and computer animation in particular are presented in . More and more animations are available in various places on the Internet. The increasing availability of potentially interesting materials makes the search extremely difficult especially when the search is by the animation contents. This work is devoted to analyzing the syntax contents of the animations. In the paper we present the ANIMATION system -a system for animation scene and contents creation, retrieval and display. The system is based on MPEG-4 standard . MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC standard developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). These standard makes interactive video on CD-ROM and Digital Television possible.

2002

There is an increasing interest in the computer animation. The most of the current animation software tools are described by Richard Parent in [5]. The driving ideas behind animation in general and computer animation in particular are presented in [6]. More and more animations are available in various places on the Internet. The increasing availability of potentially interesting materials makes the search extremely difficult especially when the search is by the animation contents. This work is devoted to analyzing the syntax contents of the animations. In the paper we present the ANIMATION system-a system for animation scene and contents creation, retrieval and display. The system is based on MPEG-4 standard [3, 4]. MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC standard developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). These standard makes interactive video on CD-ROM and Digital Television possible.

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2004

This paper presents the MPEG-4 Animation Framework eXtension (AFX) standard, ISO/IEC 14496-16. Initiated by the MPEG Synthetic/Natural Hybrid Coding group in 2000, MPEG-4 AFX proposes an advanced framework for interactive multimedia applications using both natural and synthetic objects. Following this model, new synthetic objects have been specified, increasing content realism over existing MPEG-4 synthetic objects. The general overview of MPEG-4 AFX is provided on top of the review of MPEG-4 standards to explain the relationship between MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 AFX. Then we give a bird's-eye view of new tools available in this standard.

MUAN is a Stop Motion Animation System for Education. The MUAN system allows animation movie production offering an integrated kit of hardware and software. It consists of a computer with Linux, a digital video camera and support over necessary acessories for interconnection. The software was developed under Linux by the team of VISGRAF Laboratory, in cooperation with ANIMA MUNDI and IBM Brazil, and consists of programs to create, edit, manipulate and visualize animations.

Software, Animation and the Moving Image brings a unique perspective to the study of computer-generated animation by placing interviews undertaken with animators alongside an analysis of the user interface of animation software. Locating software at the centre allows Wood to develop a novel framework for considering computer-generated images in visual effects, animations, games and data visualizations. The idea of software can be intimidating, but approaching computer-generated animation via software need not rely on prior knowledge about programming or any particular animation software. The methodology developed in this book takes the user interface of software to be meaningful because it is culturally legible. The primary case study of this project is the computer animation software, Autodesk Maya. Interviews with animators provide a tangible way into software, and throughout these are allied with Wood's analysis of the spatial organizations of the user interface. Informed by the digital contours of software protocols, this study brings greater definition to something that remains implicit in many discussions of CG animation: more-than-representational space that reveals an origin in digital rather than physical space.

Japan Forum, 2002

Hume] created the rst great logic of relations, showing in it that all relations (not only 'matters of fact' but also relations among ideas) are external to their terms. As a result, he constituted a multifarious world of experience. (Deleuze 1991) There has, in recent years, been a lot of discussion about how digital animation or computer graphics imaging (CGI) is transforming the relation between cinema and animation. Especially in the past year, a spate of lms has spurred more massmedia interest in questions about the impact of new technologies on cinema: one has only to think of the digitally generated characters in Shrek and Final Fantasy, the high-tech rotoscoping that turned digital footage into animation in Waking Life, the digitally retouched backgrounds in Amélie Poulin and the interaction of computer-generated 3-D backgrounds with 2-D cel-animation characters in Metropolis and Atlantis. Such lms have contributed to the general sense of a major mutation in lm, which involves a profound transformation in the relations between animation and cinema. On the one hand, one often reads that cel animation has become old hat, that the future of animation lies in digital animation. This is the argument propounded by Jensen and Daly in Entertainment Weekly (2001). Their remarks come largely in response to the astonishing box-of ce success of digital features (Shrek, Toy Story 2, etc.) in comparison to the relative failure of high-budget, cel-animation lms (Atlantis, Tarzan, etc.). Yet, in addition to simple box-of ce criteria, Jensen and Daly draw some attention to the materiality of digital animation. They write about how traditional cel animation slowly began to use 3-D digital to increase the reality effect of its otherwise 2-D world-and how this, in turn, opened the way for digital animation to supplant cel animation. Their remarks follow from the ways in which Shrek thematizes the superiority of digital animation over cel animation. Against the shallow prettiness of Disney's fairy stories, Shrek shows the ugly, gooey, oozy, dirty and apparently more realistic, deeper side of the same

A catalogue essay for the 'Animated Painting' exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art, 2007. Nowhere do the languages of art and film intersect and merge more completely than at the fulcrum of animation filmmaking. Although artists who make animation films remain artists in the view of curators, art dealers, and audiences, animators are not often perceived as artists per se except within a small but robust network that includes art historians, film festival curators, and some gallerists. The Animated Painting exhibition is proof that, as a moving-image form, animation is becoming increasingly pervasive in other types of creative practice, in part because of its interdisciplinary affinities with other artists’ media. This essay explores the discrepancy between the art world’s relatively quiet and limited reception of and engagement with animation is somewhat puzzling considering the form’s fine arts–based production methods and its often exquisite and powerful artistic qualities. Taking cues from the exhibition, and with a focus on the creative process rather than the finished result as well as notions of introducing temporality into static art forms, I explore three techniques in particular: painting, self-reflexivity, and collage. Using examples both by animators throughout the history of animation and by artists in the current exhibition, I weave a modest tapestry that reveals how the techniques, styles, and languages of animation and the arts have evolved and the implications this may have on considering animation as an art form. I conclude with observations about the potential of recent curatorial practice to embed animation within a stronger artistic context and to soften the high/low arts divide that it has been subject to.

1995

Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority of viewers and critics equate cinema with storytelling, digital media is understood as something which will let cinema tell its stories in a new way. Yet as exciting as the ideas of a viewer participating in a story, choosing different paths through the narrative space and interacting with characters may be, they only address one aspect of cinema which is neither unique nor, as many will argue, essential to it: narrative. The challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative. Digital media redefines the very identity of cinema. In a symposium which took place in Hollywood in the Spring of 1996, one of the participants provocatively referred to movies as "flatties" and to human actors as "organics" and "soft fuzzies."[2] As these terms accurately suggest, what used to be cinema's defining characteristics have become just the default options, with many others available. When one can "enter" a virtual three-dimensional space, to view flat images projected on the screen is hardly the only option. When, given enough time and money, almost everything can be simulated in a computer, to film physical reality is just one possibility. But what happens to cinema's indexical identity if it is now possible to generate photorealistic scenes entirely in a computer using 3-D computer animation; to modify individual frames or whole scenes with the help a digital paint program; to cut, bend, stretch and stitch digitized film images into something which has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed? This essay will address the meaning of these changes in the filmmaking process from the point of view of the larger cultural history of the moving image. Seen in this context, the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming the commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting.