Video Response: "Tracer & Pose Design 101"

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    Pose design in animation is everything. Just one simple pose can show someone who a character is, what they like, what they do, and how they act. In this video, Dan, a professional animator, explains just how important poses can be and the controversy regarding Overwatch (a video game)'s character, Tracer, and her initial pose.

    Before discussing Tracer's original pose, Dan goes on to talk about the basics of posing. Even a character without hands, a face, or even a human-like body (such as the magic carpet from Aladdin) can be posed in such a way to convey different emotions. In any animation you see, you'll find that the characters are always moving from one pose to the next, whether it be dramatic poses or simple ones. But what is it that makes a good pose? A good pose is clear, instantly readable, has proper physicality, is visually interesting, has a strong line of action, and conveys character.

    In Tracer's case, she's known to be friendly, silly, heroic, and caring. Most heroic characters like her are given poses to show what they would look like after winning a battle, as most of the characters did in this game. However, the pose she was given was her standing backwards, looking over her shoulder, with her butt clearly being the main focus. Most people argued that this was "out of character" for her, and that she shouldn't be sexualized like that. Blizzard, the creators of Overwatch, looked at the pose again, and agreed, designing a brand new pose for her. Now she looks more in-character, and although her butt is still rather standout-ish, it's a much better pose than before.

    Over-sexualizing characters in animations and especially video games, has always been an issue, more for female characters than males. Most fighting games where girl characters are involved, they're usually given outfits or armor that shows way too much skin or is clearly overly sexualized. There's nothing wrong with making attractive characters, but having them wearing near to nothing in a fighting game is just not realistic. If a woman is to go into battle, and this applies to anyone really, you wouldn't want any skin to be showing because, in reality, you would be injured much easier! While on the other hand, male characters are shown in full armor, and usually aren't given any super attractive features besides huge muscles.

    This has always bothered me, even though I'm not a huge gamer or animation buff, I don't believe it's right that female characters are more sexualized than males, or are sexualized at all. I'm here to play a game or watch a movie, not watch some girl fight someone else with hardly any clothes on. Truthfully, I learned a lot from watching this video, and I'm thankful that the characters in Overwatch aren't as sexualized as most, and that Blizzard took the time to change Tracer's initial pose.

Video Response: "How Does an Editor Think and Feel?"

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    When to cut. It's something that most film editors don't really think about or even consider, as we usually just go by what our emotions and brains tell us. In order to make a brilliant cut, you need to make it seem almost invisible, in a way that the audience doesn't even notice it or think about it afterwards. Where maybe even you, as the editor, don't even notice it after watching it through.

    At the beginning of this video, Tony explains how someone had asked him what his editing techniques are and how he knows when to cut. I thought about this myself, as editors, we really just don't know how to answer that question. Our brains automatically tell us how we want the video or film to flow. If an actor is throwing a rock into a lake, we could show a clip of them actually throwing it, and then most likely cut to a clip of where the rock splashes into the water. It all has to do with emotions and common sense.

    The first aspect of editing Tony discusses is the actor's eyes, "the eyes tell you the emotion of the scene". As you're editing, you usually wait for a change in the actors eyes before cutting a clip, as the audience automatically understands what an actor is thinking just by looking at their eyes. Also, another important factor, is the time in which you give the audience to see the actor's emotions. Just four seconds can make a huge difference. For example, if an actor is supposed to be sad, then lowers their eyebrows and gets angry, and then you cut to them knocking something off of a table, you wouldn't cut the shot before they lower their eyebrows. You would need to show the audience that they're switching from being sad to getting mad at whatever situation they're in. (Though, I really liked the comparison between the clip of Luke Skywalker and the clip of Ant-Man in the video.)

    You can utilize cutting in films to convey certain emotions as well. Like if an actor is stressing out about something, you show them walking around or moving quickly, with quick, jarring cuts. Or making the audience uncomfortable, with close up shots that go on just a bit too long.

    Gosh, I really loved watching this video, as it's something that I've never considered before! I've always just cut clips based on instincts and put scenes together based on how they flow and how nice they would look while watching them. The psychology of watching films, and now editing them, is so fascinating to me.

Weekly Comments #16: Final Project

    Final weekly comments? Aw. :(

    Of course, for my final project, I chose to have the most difficult locations to film at, such as an operating room. How the heck am I going to find a fake operating room, with fake tools and stuff? Why did I do this to myself. Because so far, the video is turning out amazing, and I don't want the very last scene to look terrible! Ugh. This is stressing me out so much.

    Anyway, there's really not much to say about this week, besides we did a lot of critiques! I'm really going to miss this class and watching everyones' videos. I've learned a lot just by doing critiques this year.

    I've recently been accepted into Canisius College! I'm officially a Griffin. I really can't wait to go there. We just went there about a week ago to tour the place, and it's so cool because they have these "underground tunnels" - which don't actually look like, well, tunnels, they just look like hallways - that connect every building together so you never have to go outside (especially in the winter)! Haha, I love it. I'm going to be dorming there, which I'm not sure how I feel about that, honestly! One perk of not having any siblings is that you don't have to share a room with anyone. I'm going to have to adjust to that. Hopefully they'll tell us ahead of time who we'll be dorming with so I can get to know them!

    Super short blog post this week, sorry! Link of interest: The Colors of Motion. I recently found this website as I was doing research regarding colors in films and how they effect the audience's emotions. It has screenshots of a ton of different films, each film mashed up into one photo to show the color differences in certain scenes. For example, Fight Club is mostly green/blues, while a movie like The Lion King has bright colors since it's a children's film.

Video Response: "The Science of Rendering Photorealistic CGI"

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    Computers are made to be able to calculate equations instantaneously. The question was, how could we create art, images, and 3D worlds in a machine that’s mainly for calculating? Computer experts back in the day began to realize that math and science can both be used to do this. Math - specifically geometry, 3D coordinates, vectors, and matrices - can help with generating photorealistic imagery, along with computer science and programming, which involves rather advanced codes that the machine can understand. The study and understanding of these codes and commands can be difficult to break down, especially if you’re first starting out with the math and science involved (which is why there is such a great need for computer programmers and coding experts in jobs today). Fortunately, this video describes the use of computer codes in layman’s terms, for those who aren’t experts in this field.

Rasterization is taking a vector image (such as a simple triangle) and converting it into pixels and dots to display in a video, on paper after printing, or storing in a bitmap file format. Projections, which correspond with rasterization, is the presentation of an image on a screen. The computer can calculate a 3D object and it’s “light rays” that are sent towards an imaginary camera, aka the movie screen. This is how we can see the 3D object. On the other hand, ray casting (also called ray tracing) presents 3D images on a 2D display, by tracing the light paths through pixels on an image plane. This basically means that the light rays would be coming out from the imaginary camera to hit the objects, instead of the objects creating rays themselves. It’s an alternative process to rasterizing, and many game designers and programmers question if rasterizing will ever fully be replaced by ray casting. The problem is, ray casting is a lot more complicated than rasterizing, and usually takes a longer time to render objects completely.

The three major issues with rasterization was how to create shadows, reflections, and refractions. Fortunately, thanks to Turner Whitted, he designed a technique called “recursive ray tracing”, which makes primary rays come out of the camera, hitting the surfaces of the objects, which then turn into secondary rays. Shadow rays come into play by drawing a secondary ray into the lights (such as a light bulb or sun) that are in the 3D space. For reflections and transparent objects, we can simply draw a reflection ray, which can land onto other objects and reflect off of these objects onto others, and so on. This probably sounds incredibly complicated, but it’s actually quite simple if you understand how each ray can affect an object.

    Even though the creation of shadows, reflections, and refractions in 3D space made an object look more real, we needed illumination to truly make it photorealistic. There are two kinds of illumination, direct and indirect. Direct illumination is when the light directly hits and is reflected by an object. Though, in the real world, if you were to hold a bright blue ball in your hand, you would see that the color would reflect onto your hand. This was difficult to show in 3D space, as ray tracing only focuses on the main source of light, instead of the light bouncing off of other objects and lighting up a 3D room. Indirect illumination added more realistic lighting into the 3D scene, and a man named James Kajiya built on the basics of ray tracing and created a mathematical equation based on the law of conservation of energy. This helped to bounce light off of more than one object. The trade off was that just because it didn’t handle transmission and sub surface scattering well, it was still a much better representation of light in reality.

Compared to the CGI of the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and so on, today, I’m sure we can all agree, we now create beautiful and breathtaking images with CGI, but how are we able to accomplish this today? Moore’s Law explains how CGI has gotten much easier and faster to render over the past 20-30 years: “The number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every to years.” To balance out this law, Blinn’s Law was created, which states: “As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.” This basically means that the more technology improves, the more we throw at it, the more we ask it to render.

CGI, in my opinion, is very different from other kind of art forms, as it can take an extremely long time to master and understand the specifics, and it’s also the most complex and technical. Although other art forms can include the use of science and math, CGI really delves into the subjects, using advanced calculations that most people would never understand (like myself). Though, just like every form of art, it’s improving every day. People are finding new ways to create characters and worlds in 3D space, just like, for instance, pop music has changed immensely over the past 10 years, and artists have found more ways to be creative when it comes to their art. In conclusion, I believe it’s an amazing tool to use when it comes to storytelling and entertainment.