Friday, January 28, 2011

Going Live

As part of the Going Live module The Mill have come up from London and we were given a presentation of their work yesterday which was pretty awesome and today we were set our brief for the project. It is a reinterpretation  of an advert that they have produced incorporating CG and live action elements. Can't really go into any more detail about the project on here as all of the documentation and progress will be kept on a super secret private blog.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Motion Capture Meeting

Following on from the Motion Capture demonstration last Friday, today I had a meeting with Vijay John and Manuel Trucco about a possible collaboration using their system. As their system is a marker-less one they talked me through the details of how the system works and possible limitations. I won't go into the details here but I find it quite interesting that the system uses silhouettes as part of the process of recognising a persons motion.

In terms of what they are looking for from me is to be able to take their captured data and visualise it in a clearer and prettier way than they can at the moment. This means that I must be able to effectively work with motion capture data, be able to apply this motion to other skeletons and models and be able to visualise this in an aesthetically pleasing way.
The first part of this process will be to learn how to use Motion Builder as a way of importing and working with the captured data for clean-up, organisation and application to other skeletons. I will also need to develop a good pipeline for dealing with the data in relation to working with both Motion Builder and Maya. Digital Tutors has some info on working with motion capture data so I will start there first. Vijay has also given me a link to the
Carnegie Mellon University Motion Capture Database. This is an extensive data set that covers a huge range of movements and will be a good place to get data to be able to practice with.

Also in on the meeting was Tricia Anderson who I will collaborate with when on the main project using the motion capture system. Tricia is a choreographer and is very interested in the relationship between dance and animation. Using the motion capture system as a bridge between a dancers real life performance and the animators ability to enhance motion capture data together we should be able to create something quite exciting.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Motion Capture Demonstration

Well, it's the end of the first week of Semester 2 and today we had a pretty interesting demonstration of a marker-less motion capture system that is being developed by Vijay John and Manuel Trucco at the School of Computing. Although today was just a brief demo of the system and the process behind it I am quite interested in working with motion capture data and have set up a meeting with both Manuel and Vijay for next Wednesday  to discuss possible collaboration.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Fourteen Actors Acting

Over the Christmas break I came across this great piece of performance work on the New York Times online magazine.  'Fourteen Actors Acting: A Video Gallery of Classic Screen Types' it has 14 actors portraying a wide range of different screen persona each one giving a unique performance.

I love how much can be conveyed just through body language and subtle gesture. I like how it uses only music to heighten the drama with no dialogue and also that it is in black and white. I really like that aesthetic choice and how it evokes that of silent cinema.



Fourteen Actors Acting
Background Article
Image Gallery