August 29, 2012
Dancing about Architecture
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
(Martin Mull)
Two very different but equally hypnotic uses of motion-tracking technology to "dance about architecture":
Forms - Memo Akten and Quayola
"Forms is an ongoing collaboration between visual artists Memo Akten and Quayola, a series of studies on human motion, and its reverberations through space and time. ... The project investigates athletes... from an exclusively mechanical and aesthetic point of view; concentrating on the invisible forces generated by and influencing the movement."
Forms was commissioned for the exhibition In The Blink of an Eye, part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme. See Memo's website for still images and a version of the video without the source imagery.
Phadroid - Android Jones and Phaedra Ana
This video is from a recent collaboration with William Close and the Earth Harp.
This video makes the motion-tracking influence a bit clearer:
(Hat tips to Vanessa Shaver and Aaron McLean!)
August 27, 2012
Vocal Mocap
"TIFF Nexus is an exciting new initiative designed to equip Ontario storytellers with the network, skills and partners they need to succeed in the rapidly evolving digital media landscape. TIFF Nexus will support Canada’s film, game, digital and new media communities as well as foster integrations between academics, industry members and enthusiasts."
As an X-Men geek from tweenhood, I was thrilled to learn TIFF is hosting an exhibition of the work of X-Men Master: Gordon Smith. At the opening I met Nick Pagee, Programmer for TIFF Nexus, and had a fun conversation about importing digital effects from blockbusterpopcornland to the rarefied and respectable world of "legit" theatre.
Nick followed up the next day with an email turning me on to the work of Golan Levin, an artist and educator at Carnegie Mellon University, and director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, an interdisciplinary arts-research center.
Messa di Voce (Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, Jaap Blonk, and Joan La Barbara) augments the speech, shouts and songs produced by two virtuoso vocalists with real-time interactive visualizations. Messa di Voce exists in both performance and installation versions; more information on the installation version can be found at the official Messa di Voce web site. Excerpts from five of the 14 Messa di Voce scenes performed at the ICA, London in 2003:
Footfalls (2006), an outgrowth of the "Bubbles" module from Messa di Voce, is an interactive audiovisual installation in which the stomping of the visitors' feet creates cascading avalanches of bouncy virtual forms.
August 25, 2012
Ultrasound, Ultrasight
This TED Talk by Alexander Tsiaras features some extraordinary visualizations (from 2:03 to 5:55) created by his company Anatomical Travelogue:
"Alexander Tsiaras is an artist and technologist whose work explores the unseen human body, developing scientific visualization software to enable him to "paint" the human anatomy using volume data. He's the author of Body Voyage and co-author of Information Architects. Most recently, he is the author of From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds and The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman: The Marvel of the Human Body, Revealed. His latest project is The Visual MD, an online compendium of health visualizations."
August 24, 2012
Show and Tell: Responses
Following yesterday's show-and-tell, production prof John Mayberry shared this trailer for Ghost River Theatre's multimedia production The Highest Step in the World:
And design prof Shawn Kerwin sent this video of a talk by Matt Gorbet on the ways that technology makes art come alive (and vice versa!):
August 23, 2012
Show and Tell
Many thanks to the core design and production team and faculty who came out to York's Faire Fecan Theatre today for our first, small show-and-tell of some of the interactive tech we're exploring for the Dream. There will be more showing-and-telling for the wider cast and crew once everyone's back in town in the fall term, but meanwhile, I've collected some of the videos I excerpted from this blog, along with related material, for those who may wish to explore in more detail.
Thanks to Don Sinclair and Vanessa Shaver for sharing the stage, their expertise and their creativity; to Garth Laidlaw, Laurel Dalgleish and Pascal Langlois for pulling together demo materials on a tight deadline; to Digital Media students Alex, Asaf and George for providing invaluable support with the digitally mediated side of things; and especially to Victor, Simon, Amber and Amanda for making us feel so welcome and well-cared-for during our two days exploring the theatre's impressive capabilities.
Game Design: Journey, Flower and Flow
Created by thatgamecompany for the Sony PlayStation 3
Flower: review by Wired
Flower: official trailer
Journey Collectors' Edition (Journey, Flower, Flow and behind the scenes)
Journey: official trailer
Journey: review by IGN (3:38)
Flow (0:58)
Motion Capture in Live Performance
Chunky Move: Mortal Engine (see especially segments starting 0:55, 1:45, 2:55, 3:50), and this blog post.
Traditional 2D Animation
Froglight by Laurel Dalgleish
Mobile by Caleb Wood
Kinect Motion Capture
3D Environment Modelling
Seneca Game Art and Animation program: The Wastes (0:00 to 2:00)
Facial Capture
Dynamixyz: Previz Teaser (1:27)
And see this blog post for more on actor and convergence consultant Pascal Langlois of Motives in Movement.
August 21, 2012
Ch-ch-ch-ch Changelings
"For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king.
She never had so sweet a changeling."
(Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I.ii)
"His mother was a votaress of my order,
And in the spicèd Indian air by night
Full often hath she gossiped by my side...
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die.
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him."
(Titania, II.i)
So here's a perspective shift. In Puck's account of how Titania got her changeling boy, the child was "stolen from an Indian king." But several scenes later, Titania refuses Oberon's demand that she give him the boy, citing an obligation to his late mother, and leaving his father out of the picture entirely.
In Titania's mind, the fact that the child still has one living parent seems irrelevant. Maybe, like some people in our culture to this day, she believes that children need a mother (even a fairy godmother) more than they need a father. Maybe she longs for a child of her own, but is unable to have one. Or maybe she just thought the kid was cute, and exercised her magical powers to grab what she wanted. She certainly does so later in the play after falling in love with Bottom: "Out of this wood do not desire to go. Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no." And Puck's line, "She never had so sweet a changeling," suggests that this isn't her first baby-snatching rodeo, so who knows if her tale of the votaress mother is even true, or simply a cover story?
It's up to the production to flesh out the changeling's backstory, since Shakespeare's text doesn't tell us how old he is, or even require that the character appear onstage. And what happens to the boy after Oberon wins the battle, after the end of the play? Again, it's left to our imagination.
I'm most intrigued by the fact that nobody seems to care how the Indian king feels about losing his son, not even fellow king "jealous Oberon", who "would have the child knight of his train, to trace the forests wild." The sense seems to be that either Titania is right to take in a motherless child, or that she was right but now the boy is of an age where he should leave the maternal realm and join Oberon and the boy-fairy camp, or else that morality is irrelevant, because fairy royalty are capricious and all-powerful, and are known for simply taking what they want whether it's right or not.
Wikipedia explains the term "changeling" as:
"the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf or other legendary creature that has been secretly left in the place of a human child. Sometimes the term is also used to refer to the child who was taken. The apparent changeling could also be a stock or fetch, an enchanted piece of wood that would soon appear to grow sick and die. The theme of the swapped child is common among medieval literature and reflects concern over infants afflicted by as-then unknown diseases, disorders, or mental retardation."
In Shakespeare's play, there's no mention of a fairy or "stock" having been left in the changeling boy's place when he was abducted, though that is certainly possible.
D. L. Ashliman wrote a fascinating essay on changelings that elaborates on the practical benefits of this folk belief:
"Changeling folklore not only explained why some children fail to grow and develop normally and helped to justify the extreme actions that may have been taken (whether in fact or only in fantasy) to free the parents or society from the burden of caring for handicapped children, it also provided protective measures against demonic exchange."The most frequently mentioned preventative practice, and one that undoubtedly evolved because of its positive consequences, was the insistence that the newborn infant be watched very carefully until certain danger periods had passed. 'Women who have recently been delivered may not go to sleep until someone is watching over the child. Mothers who are overcome by sleep often have changelings laid in their cradles,' recorded Jacob Grimm in his German Mythology.... The fact that the mother (or her substitute) was expected to keep the baby close at hand for at least six weeks helped to protect it from environmental dangers, aided the child's psychological development, and contributed significantly to family cohesiveness.
"An added benefit of the six weeks of close watching was the relief thus granted to the mother from some of her most strenuous duties, thus aiding her recovery from pregnancy and delivery."
On the downside, Carole G. Silver's Strange and Secret Peoples "cites a sickeningly long list of crimes related to claims that the victim was believed to be a changeling." Ostensibly, the fairies will not want one of their kind to suffer, and will replace the changeling with the original. Whether fairies ever actually saved a "changeling" child left out in the woods, or held on a shovel over a fire, has not been scientifically verified.
Another, unrelated, crime the changeling story evokes is the modern phenomenon of adoption of international "orphans" who turn out to have parents after all. The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University hosts a website on serious irregularities in international adoption ("The Lie We Love", "The Baby Business"), with pages on specific countries such as India.
David M. Smolin of the Cumberland Law School at Samford University has written numerous articles on the subject after he and his wife adopted two girls from India who subsequently turned out not to have been orphans at all. His writings
"have focused particularly on baby-buying, childstealing, and similar abuses within the intercountry adoption system, under the rubric of 'child laundering.' Child laundering involves obtaining children illicitly through force, fraud, or financial inducement; providing false paperwork which identifies such illicitly obtained children as legally abandoned or relinquished 'orphans'; and offering or placing these so-called 'orphans' for adoption. The motivation for child laundering is usually financial, although for some there is a significant ideological component based on an overriding desire to save children."
According to Smolin,
"India’s creation of a Hague [Convention]-like system even before the creation of the treaty creates a test case for the hope that the Convention will succeed in its stated objective to 'prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children.' Unfortunately, intercountry adoption from India presents a cautionary tale. Significant adoption scandals in Andhra Pradesh, India, have led to the shutdown of adoption from that Indian state since 2001...."Receiving nations seem to only seriously investigate the unusual cases where their own nationals were knowingly involved in intentional misconduct. Thus, the most common situations, where the institutions and agencies in receiving nations are merely negligent, while the intentional misconduct is done by foreign facilitators, intermediaries, and orphanages, often escape real investigation by receiving nations. Further, even when investigations occur, receiving nations sometimes have a tendency to simply accept on faith the sometimes faulty assurances of authorities in sending nations. Sadly, in most child laundering cases the affected persons, including the original families, children, and adoptive parents, are left to largely fend for themselves...."
To my mind, the changeling boy's father is as important a part of this play as the child himself.
Game Art, Game Engine
Two Seneca College Game Art and Animation Program thesis projects created at the Seneca@York campus, just across the street from York's Centre for Film and Theatre:
The Wastes
"Created from concept to UDK deployment by five post-grad Seneca students, The Wastes evokes a survivalist shelter in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Gritty details such as rifle parts laid out on a concrete table, a collapsed highway overpass, and the clutter of found objects suggest the hard-boiled man who lives there.
Assets are created in 3DS Max and zBrush, textured in Photoshop and nDo2, and placed into the UDK engine for realtime environment. We designed this showcase game environment within five weeks for pre-production pipeline arrangements and conceptual schematics, five weeks for production, and a week for post-production and cinematics.
Credits
Blake Withers - Art Director, Environment Modeller - blake.withers.ca/
Tanya Kan - Producer, Environment Modeller - tanyacreative.com/
Kolin "KC" Warren - World Builder, Environment Modeller - kolinwarren.com/
King Mugabi - Environment Modeller - 3dmugabi.blogspot.ca/
Minh Nguyen - Environment Modeller - hellominh.blogspot.ca/
Wastes Game Mod cinematic from Tanya Kan on Vimeo.
Sky Raiders
UDK Mod Project, Seneca College Game Art and Animation Winter Class 2012:
Sky Raiders UDK Mod Project from Lauren Bamlett on Vimeo.
UDK, or Unreal Development Kit, is set of tools for modifying ("modding") a game engine originally developed by Epic Games for the 1998 game Unreal, which was released free to the general public in 2009. Wikipedia describes the term game engine thus:
"a software framework that developers use to create games for video game consoles and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine ('renderer') for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response)... sound... [and] animation. The process of game development is often economized, in large part, by reusing/adapting the same game engine to create different games."
Game engines are also useful for anyone who wants to create real-time animation for previsualization... or, say, live theatre....
(Hat tip to Seneca character and environment modeling and texturing instructor, Verold product manager & designer and lead 3D artist, and all-round renaissance man Aaron McLean.)
August 17, 2012
Digital Acting
"Capture is approaching the power of film in its ability to record a performance."
(Pascal Langlois)
"I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation," said Spielberg, who used James Cameron's Avatar performance capture technology in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. "It's basically the actual performance of the actual actor, and what you're simply experiencing is makeup."
(Steven Spielberg)
Toronto-based actor and convergence consultant Pascal Langlois of Motives in Movement originally trained at RADA, and continues to perform in traditional forms, but also collaborates with cutting-edge facial software providers and performance capture companies. Here he demonstrates Performer, some very cool new video-based markerless facial tracking software from Dynamixyz, in a demo created in collaboration with Morro Images and the late George Orwell:
In his article "Acting in a Helmet: New tech means more to play with", Langlois describes some of the challenges that face a capture actor, including "physical discomfort, the challenge of imagining entire environments, the broken up nature of the shoot itself... [and] performing for a different morphology." (And a donkey's head is even further from human morphology than, say, Gollum or King Kong.)
"I’m interested in anything that improves the quality of actor-based animated performances, and the likelihood of an actor’s subtle behaviors and idiosyncracies making it to the screen. Everything from dramatic dialogue, to basic ranged movements (repeated behaviours – walking, crouching etc.) can benefit from actors that understand the medium they are working in, as much as they would film or theatre. It’s the small behavioral chaos that actors bring to a subjective experience of a narrative that brings nuanced drama and engagement, and it is here we’ll prove to deserve our place to be respected in the medium." ("Capturing Actors: The Future of Acting in Capture-Based Animation")
August 13, 2012
Behind the Scenes Goes Front and Centre
"When you get rid of the masking, then even though the mechanics are apparent, the whole effect is more magical. And this is where theatre has a power over film and television. This is absolutely where its magic works. It's not because it's an illusion and we don't know how it's done. It's because we know exactly how it's done."
-- Julie Taymor
The principle applies beyond puppets. Showing "how" also becomes part of the "what" in director Katie Mitchell's multimedia productions of Waves and ...some trace of her at the UK's National Theatre, with video design by Leo Warner:
This interview with Mitchell explores how she came to this unusual staging for ...some trace of her, an adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel The Idiot:
The National Theatre's website also has an interesting video on designing animation for the stage.
August 11, 2012
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage...
Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries.
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.
(Theseus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I.i)
I assistant directed on Carey Perloff's production of Racine's Phèdre at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the American Conservatory Theater a couple of years back, and wrote a blog (not unlike this one) collecting random thoughts and research discoveries along the way.
My favourite post was "Farouche: Phedre and the Half-Blood Prince". It was a tangent inspired by the coincidence that A Midsummer Night's Dream was also playing that summer, alongside a dozen other shows in Stratford's impressive repertory system.
In the opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, is about to get hitched to Theseus, "Duke" of Athens, despite the violent backstory briefly mentioned in the above quote. I got curious. Sure, Shakespeare was writing a comedy, so it wasn't surprising he glossed over the more disturbing bits of the myth. And the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta is only the first of four story threads, setting up the love-and-marriage theme that culminates in Oberon's final benediction: "To the best bride-bed will we, / Which by us shall blessed be; / And the issue there create / ever shall be fortunate." (Ironically, he's talking about the baby Hippolytus, of whom more in a moment.) All very lovey-dovey, no? But I couldn't help rewinding to the whole "wooed thee with my sword" thing. What was up with that?
Phèdre tells the story of Phaedra (English spelling), wife to King Theseus, who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. Not technically incest, but not technically a good idea, either. Hippolytus' mother Hippolyta doesn't appear in either the French tragedy or its source, Hippolytus by Euripides (which coincidentally got a Theatre@York production just last year). It's as if, her reproductive function fulfilled, "the horse-loving Amazon" held no more interest for the myth-makers, the playwrights, or even, perhaps, Theseus himself. Sure, the whole point of this story is the relationship (or lack thereof) between a young man and his stepmother, so a biological mom would be a narrative nuisance. But where did Hippolyta go? An Amazon queen is a rather large item to misplace.
Check out "Farouche: Phedre and the Half-Blood Prince" for some slightly meandering answers, with a bit of French-Canadian history thrown in for good measure.
I've also assembled a Pinterest board of images of Amazons from ancient Greek art on up. In the vase paintings they always seem to wear these odd striped leggings, that somehow remind me of the patterns on striated muscle -- hence the other images on the board.
August 10, 2012
Heart of Stars II
A few months back, I posted the official one-minute trailer for Heart of Stars, but today Vanessa Shaver, Creative Producer on A Midsummer Night's Dream, showed me a longer "Rough demo of Heart of Stars as a performance":
Here's how the CFC Media Lab describes the project: "Using the groundbreaking technology of the Microsoft Kinect and building on the innovation of the Kinect open source community, Heart of Stars is a playspace where users become 3d avatars made of points of light. Created as an exploratory installation, this prototype seeds future iterations as a commercial game or practical tool."
August 08, 2012
Mobile
A hauntingly beautiful animated short, created in one week by Caleb Wood. "All hand drawn in photoshop - composited in after effects. (some crayon scribbs for texture). Kalimba and garageband for sound, frogs recorded in backyard."
Something about it evokes the visual research I've been doing on neurons...