Structuralism and Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of everything that can be used for communication: words, images, traffic signs, flowers, music, medical symptoms, and much more.
Structuralism stresses that each element within a cultural system derives its meaning from its relationship to every other element in the system: there are no independent meanings, but rather many meanings produced by their difference from other elements in the system.
During the lecture, Ivan gave us the example of a CG rat and a 2-D rat. Both signify to the rat created by nature, but the CG one is far better than the 2-D one. He also showed us the difference between the low poly and high poly Lara Croft in Tomb Raider(awesome movie and game!)

Coming on to the Denotation, connotation and myth!
Denotation- what the sign is, at the most basic level of understanding – what it denotes literally

Connotation: what it suggests, a more subtle culturally determined reading – what it connotes

Myth: the ‘world-view’ it contains or implies – the ideological or political meaning of the thing – not ‘myth’ as in not true, fictitious, misleading (although it may be all three of these things)

denotation- 3d character, thin, pale, old, looks like a housemaid, big ears,poor, bald

connotation- helpful,wizard, alien, Not socially outcast

Myth- wizard, helps people out with his wizardy.

So every single character that we create either in 3-D or naturally signifies a lot of things through his basic emotions, facial expressions and the way in which his body is built.

Treat no.2 for VFXer's- An insight on Sorcerer's Apprentice

For The Sorcerer's Apprentice, visual effects supervisor John Nelson oversaw more than 1200 shots featuring plasma ball fights, a Chinese dragon, car chases, magical creatures and the re-creation of the famous Disney Fantasia sequence. We take a look at some of the key work by the two lead facilities, Asylum and Double Negative.

The film tells the story of sorcerer Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage) who recruits unlikely physics student Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel) as his apprentice. Together they help defend New York against the evil Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina) who is trying to release other sorcerers from the Grimhold, a magical prison similar to a nesting doll. To conjure up the visual effects for the film, director John Turtletaub looked to John Nelson to consider that both magic and science can sometimes be indistinguishable. "One of the things we wanted to develop is that magic is physics and physics is magic," said Nelson. "Physics is basically magic that has been quantified and explained specifically, but there's many things in magic that are waiting to be discovered." Nelson split the work between Asylum, Double Negative, Method Studios, Rising Sun Pictures, Company 3 and an in-house team.

This effect in which hundreds of thousands of streaming cockroaches are forming into a human mass, Asylum handled the cockroach transformation as a large behaviour simulation. Other effects included an animated dragon ring, a remote sword fight between Barthazar and Horvath and particle simulation shots of the two being sucked into an urn

 Asylum augmented the wolves to make them more vicious. A traditional Chinese parade version on the street was turned into a living, breathing monster, a transition created by Asylum.

A car chase sequence through New York featuring morphing vehicles and a magical Hungarian mirror was also handled by Asylum. After a small accident on the first night of location shooting, production could only drive the cars up to 25 miles per hour. Along with constant rain, this meant Asylum had to add more CG shots and create speed ramps for the chase.

For a scene in which Dave plays music to Becky via large Tesla coils in his lab, Double Negative created the necessary lightning effects. They designed a system where they could choose particular frames where the bolts connected and that would be the hero frame.

Using the actual bronze bull as reference, Double Negative obtained a 3D scan and built a model using Zbrush, Mudbox and Maya. Initially they tried to match it with the original satue but ultimately they made a few changes to make it a bit more intimidating, like sharpening the horns. There was a balance to be struck between having realistic muscles and skin sliding, and trying to give it a more rigid feel to reflect the metallic nature of the bull. The lighting was primarily image based. They had great access on set to acquire HDRI light probe images and the bronze material of the bull leant itself to this kind of lighting. They were also re-projecting the scans onto rough geometry of the location and ray-tracing against that to get realistic ground reflections.

The Making of Inception- A treat for VFXers!

I came through this awesome article on twitter about the various CG effects in Inception. Most of the CG stuff was done by double negative (they are awesome!). The movie is directed by Christopher Nolan who previously gave a lot of successful films like The Dark Knight, Batman Begins. Great person with an even greater mind.

The Paris street, limbo city with the crumbling cliff face of architecture. The art department and our own concept artists couldn't come up an image Chris was happy with. Well we had this idea it was like a glacier, crumbling into the sea, with architectural icebergs floating off. But the concept images always ended up looking like icebergs with buildings embedded in them, or a frozen city. They were too fantastical, too science fiction. Chris wanted something that was recognizable. So the dneg team had the idea - take a glacier and fill it up with buildings. They had to write software to do this, to build it up like a Lego-type glacier. They ended up with a crazy mutating city set of cliffs, but when you get closer you see all the buildings. 

This Paris street scene, where it folds up into a cube was extra tough for the vfx team to achieve. They went to cities like California, New York,London, Paris etc and took millions of pics just to get to that level of perfection. To make those building overlap exactly, they had to work with a lot of precision. 
I'm not quite sure about what type of special effects the movie had, but I read the interview of the movies VFX supervisor Paul Franklin in which he said that the big rotating corridor was introduced to give that zero gravity effect. It was really a marvellous job by the SFXers too!!

Rough Magic: an Introduction to the module- media histories and culture

This was supposed to be our very first lecture! I really have a bad perception of theories(especially histories) in my mind, but still looking at how actually Ivan went with the lecture today, it might change!
Media- We take media in forms of newspapers, radio, TV, the internet, and so on. Media are generally understood as technical processes and or devices involved in acts of communication. It has been a very powerful tool , linking an individual with the rest of the world. For me, presently the biggest form of media is internet. I guess there's nothing left in the world that internet has not soaked! We can get any piece of information from anywhere around the world, keep ourselves in touch with friends and family, shop, learn and many more. 


Histories- I literally get goosebumps hearing this word, but still I guess we will keep ourselves limited to the histories of media only! Movies and all the animated stuff that we watch everyday took years to evolve and hence have leave a big history behind. Talking about the several studios like Disney, Warner Bros., MGM etc. , they did hell loads of work in the field of media and its just because of these major entrepreneurs that we are able to witness all those spectacular movies! 


Culture- What I interpret of this notion is that culture is something that we all accept socially and tend to work according to it. Talking about the culture in media, its like the latest technology in making those several forms of media, the latest techniques and practices used by the directors and creative team , the latest trends in movie making etc. 


Coming on to seminar with Phillipa, it was pretty nice to her everybody views on animation. For some its like drifting away from the rules of nature and create their own little world and for others, its the curiosity to bring out their imagination in all the types of media.

 

Bambi and Totoro!

This week's lecture was quite fun. Got to see two very beautiful and historic cartoons: Bambi and Totoro!
Lets first talk about Bambi. The scene that Bill showed us was when Bambi and his friends were taught some wicked adult stuff by the owl! All of them, after carefully listening to the owl went out with the pride that they will never fall in love. But each one of them, in succession, was easily deceived by there female counterparts. What I really liked about the scene was how nicely the animation was done. All the expressions and basic love emotions were beautifully shown. This gives quite a nice example of how Disney artists always pushed the bars of animation to produce those stunning effects!

Now coming on to Totoro. That was a really awesome clip that Bill showed us. Japanese animation is breath taking too! I guess they infused great deal of details to produce movies like Totoro. The part that I loved the most was when they were turning the seeds into full grown tree. And the part when they flew all the way on a top( looked like a beyblade to me!) Beautiful animation done by the Japanese people!

Binary Opposition

So this time we got Binary Opposition! Far better than the other terms!! Well I really loved the fact that Philip gave us:  Good/ Evil,, God/Devil,, Go(o)d/ (D)evil!! Interesting and very deep meaning!!

During the seminar Danny gave us the examples of The Dark Knight, Aliens, and Contact. Well I couldn’t actually relate the example of contact with binary opposition, but surely I could interpret a nice example from dark Knight!

This coin that Harvey Dent used all the time to make some of his very important decisions! He had two options to choose from, one totally opposite to the other! Like in this shot he is threatening the joker that if he gets this side of coin, he’ll live and if it’s the other side he’ll die! Two completely opposite situations!!

Now coming on cyborgs!! Danny showed us a clip from Aliens 2, when Sigourney Weaver, Ripley tried to kill the mother alien with that man-controlled machine! Well it can act as a Cyborg thing but in a positive way!! We can see the fight between humans and some sort of alien species! Two totally different forms of life.

History of animation and sneak-peak to Contemporary Animation

Animation has a long history, of its rise and falls, the major developments and how several production houses and studios contributed to achieve this beautiful and prosperous era of digital animation. 

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used sequential photographs to analyze animal and human movement. Many devices such as thaumatrope, praxinoscope and zoetrope were invented in the early 19^th century to create illusion of motion by making still images appear to move. Many new inventions took place after that and then animation jumped to a new phase- cartoon drawings.

In the 1930’s when animators such as J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay in the U.S. and Emile Cohl in France were making animated films composed entirely of drawings.

Around 1923 , Walt and Roy Disney founded Disney studios which would dominate the animation industry till date. They produced mind boggling cartoons like Willie the steamboat, Mickey mouse, Snow white and the seven dwarfs etc. . Disney studios paved the way for most animated features in the beginning by always striving to find new ways to push the technology and budgets in order to make a richer and more appealing animated film. It was also around this period that Warner Bros. and MGM (founded by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising respectively) joined this flourishing industry. Not only did the artists in these animation houses produce finely drawn films, but they emphasized unique, specific characters and movement that revealed the characters' personalities. Unlike live-action filmmakers, these animators ignored the rules of physics and created fantastic worlds. Throughout these years, artists tried to develop a realistic, naturalist style of animation in the early 1930s.  Most of these cartoons were constantly distorted beyond all rationality, defying every law of physics for comedic effect.

In the 1990’s popular cartoons such as Batman, superman were produced, and the animators infused the series with a distinct visual style caombined with the deep characterizations and strong stories.

Since the 1970’s and 1980’s, animation was profusely used in creation some of the major blockbuster Hollywood movies like Aliens, Star wars, Batman, Superman and the list goes on. Also watching the business done by each movie, immence effort was made to develop the technique of animation which led to creation of a major breakthrough- 3D. Disney/Pixar produced its first fully CGI movie- Toy Story

Which bagged huge number of awards and served the new revolution in this field. Several movies were subsequently created which had immense amount of CG involved in them.

But most of the accolades were won basically by the leader of these studios and the artists who actually were behind the spectacular drawings and animation never enjoyed the limelight.  Had Disney animators Vladimir Tytla and Freddie Moore been alive during the renaissance their names might well have been numbered among Da Vinci and Michelangelo. For all their accomplishments, however, they remain totally eclipsed by the titanic figure of Walt Disney. "Animation should be an art...what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade....not an art, but a trade....bad luck.” These were the words of Winsor McCay, father of the animated cartoon. His prophecy did come true as these studios were bagging huge amounts of money and hence more and more cartoons were produced (which included daily TV cartoons too) , poorer in quality and animation. And now in the present day, thousands of movies are being made which use CG and bag millions of money! Animation has taken a total shift from 2D to 3D, with very rare mount of movies being made using the 2D technique.