Animation

We present algorithms and systems for interactive boundary computation of Boolean combinations of sculptured solids. The algorithm is applicable to all spline solids and computes an accurate boundary representation. To speed up the computation, the algorithm exploits parallelism at all stages. It has been implemented on a multi-processor SGI and takes one second on average per boolean operation to compute the boundary of high degree primitives. The system has also been integrated with an immersive design and manipulation environment. The resulting system is able to interactively evaluate boundaries of the models, display them for model validation and place them at appropriate position using collision detection algorithms. ¥ 16. Furthermore, algorithms for interactive collision detection and object placement need an exact description of the boundary 18. Other applications of boundary representation (B-rep) include computation of solid's mass properties. Main Contribution: We present fast, parallel algorithms and systems for computing the boundary of boolean combinations of sculptured solids. The resulting boundary is represented in terms of trimmed Bézier patches. Given two primc

This article focuses on Pili, a popular Taiwanese transmedia puppetry that features martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences through CGI (computer-generated image) animation, and examines relations mediated between puppetry, camera, and animation. Pili productions use the traditional performing art of puppetry and add novel elements-combining craft techniques with filming technologies-to create a new transmedia genre. This new genre is not easily classified based on traditional puppetry forms, such as the conventional ideas of a puppet show, "puppet animation," or digital puppetry, as it is something in-between. Through exploring unfolding relations between puppeteering and filming, puppetry and animation, and old and new media forms, this study explicates how the transformation of traditional puppetry responds to the affordances of new media. Animation, camera movements, and digital editing collectively expand the possibilities of traditional puppetry craft and performance. The new form of puppetry rearranges disciplines, genres, and aesthetics. This analysis sheds light on Pili puppetry through animation and transmedia thinking to contextualize how animation's life-giving potential transgresses screen and genre categories.

The theme of spectatorship is central in this essay that reviews and critiques a number of approaches to animation spectatorship. Its basic premise is that the phenomenal and the noumenal 'worlds' animation confronts us have an uneasy relationship with notions of 'reality' and representation.

Using a framework of phenomenological concepts that reviews other authors' approaches to animation spectatorship, the essay explores the viewer's experience of the 'worlds' of animation film in screening, particularly investigating the relationship between the images on screen and their tangible, extant counterparts in the real world outside the diegesis. With a focus on puppet animation exemplified by the Quay Brothers Street of Crocodiles, the essay posits a number of propositions as to how animation as a form addresses and engages its audience. If aims to articulate the difference between a world, created with the animation technique, and the world, the phenomenal world we negotiate in our daily lives.

The book is available at:
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Historically, the role of drawing in traditional animation was unequivocal. How has this role been affected or changed by the advent of computer animation, and the increasingly widespread use of digital tools in animation? Can the contemporary animator work exclusively with these digital tools and forego the use of drawing, or are these tools an extension of traditional drawing utensils?

One of the most important tropes for the fantastic is the ghost, a quasi-universal figure that juxtaposes concepts of the real and the unreal, and a very important component of fantastic narrative. Chin Wan (陳雲) notes the way different attitudes towards ghosts in Sinophone culture were shaped by colonialism and public policy: “Influenced by the colonialism of Western culture, Mainland China banned folk customs during the period when modernization was promoted. Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican Party had the (short-lived) ‘New Life Movement,’ while Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China had ‘Destroy the Four Olds’ and the Cultural Revolution. Only Hong Kong has undergone modernization for one hundred fifty years without doing away with folk customs”[中國大陸受西洋之文化殖民影響，推行現代化期間，都禁制民間風俗，國府之蔣介石有「新生活運動」（為時不長），中共之毛澤東有「破四舊」與文化大革命。唯獨香港現代化一百五十年，不損民間風俗].  Chin’s comments obliquely refer to anti-superstition campaigns that were central to cultural policy from the early modern to the revolutionary period. I return to these campaigns below . . .

This paper is a discussion of the fantastic genre in literature and film. I employ the term genre in this paper in two ways. First, I attempt to define the fantastic as a genre of writing through the emblematic form of the zhiguai. Second, I link this genre of writing to fantastic film, a category of genre film that has dominated the market in China recently. One of the earliest forms of fiction in Chinese literature, zhiguai were often contrasted to textually verifiable historic writing. First, I contrast discussions of zhiguai to modern conceptions of the fantastic and Enlightenment and revolutionary conceptions of narrative and history. The zhiguai share some features with fantastic storytelling in Europe, notably the Gothic tale that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Second, I draw links between state intervention in religion and superstition and the early modern classification of fantastic literature and film. State anti-superstition campaigns in the early twentieth century would frame fantastic films as superstitious (shenguai dianying). Third, I discuss how the fantastic has been framed in the contemporary China. The modern and contemporary fantastic in China is a combination of Chinese and Western categories of the real and the supernatural.

This is a book primarily for professionals and lovers of animation, but it can also be employed as a textbook for other fields of audiovisual media. Pikkov is a director of animated films who, in addition to creating animated films, teaches in the Department of Animation of the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Animasophy analyses the interrelations of the history, theoretical essence and practical expression of the animated film.

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Home on the Range (Will Finn and John Sanford, 2004) concluded what had been, for Disney, a stylistically progressive sequence of theatrically released features defined in this article as the Neo-Disney period that broke with the hyperrealist conventions most commonly associated with the studio's output. It is this critically neglected sequence of films, comprising Fantasia 2000 (James Algar et al., 1999), The Emperor's New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 2001), Lilo and Stitch (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2002), Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2002), Brother Bear (Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, 2003) and Home on the Range, which provide the focus of this article. By analysing the artistic and narratological composition of these films, this article seeks to demonstrate that the studio's feature animation is more heterogeneous and progressive than received notions of Disney allow for.

Using a neoformalist approach to the study of film and television, this paper analyzes the American Animated Cartoon, arguing that it shows particular traits and narrative strategies; and thus it can be considered a genre that deals with specific cultural dilemmas.

In recent debates on empathy in various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, cognitive sciences, neurophysiology, the discussion has focused on empathic experiences within the intersubjective context, either between two individuals or among groups. But this is only one side of the coin. Since ancient times, subject-object and even object-object relationships were described in a way that cultural anthropology has defined as “animation”, that rhetorics has named “personification”, and that we would today call “empathic”. The chapter aims at exploring these objectual implications of empathy. Pinotti particularly criticizes the projective “hydraulic” model of communicating vessels–from subject to object–which builds the hermeneutical mainstream paradigm of any theorization of such relationships. With recourse to alternative theoretical perspectives, such as Gestalt theory of expression, “realistic” phenomenology, and theory of symbolic forms, the author proposes a newfound characterological approach that engages with acknowledging the originary expressive and pathemic character of things in themselves, and therefore in defending the fundamentum in re of objectual empathy.

The authors are producing two-dimensional animated human faces with lip motion synchronized to a given speech sound file. The process is called lip synchronization. We assume the only input is the sound file; no text is used to disambiguate mouth shapes. We restrict our discussion to voiced input. (Figures and the Table are at the end of the text.)

The Intertwining Line explores early and contemporary animation and its intertwined relationship with contemporary drawing. The exhibition at Cornerhouse, Manchester features work by nine artists, including internationally acclaimed artists Dan Perjovschi and Margaret Harrison, a new generation of British artists, such as Melanie Jackson, Rachel Goodyearm and Naomi Kashiwagi, alongside screenings of Czech animations and films selected from the Tricky Women festival. Animation is often considered to be childlike entertainment, however the radical potential of the medium has a long history-whether this is the implicit social criticism that is hidden within early Czech animation, or the use of humor to create powerful social commentary in modern artists' animations. Drawing also has this potential and this can be through meticulously crafted images that merely hint at social unease or speedily drawn sketches which carry a powerful charge of immediacy to create political statements.

Recent high dynamic range (HDR) display devices provide significantly greater output brightness and dynamic range compared to conventional display technology. A possible concern for the extended use of HDR displays is the potential to cause visual fatigue. Furthermore, ambient illumination has a significant effect on the perception of the imagery displayed, and its impact on user preferences for brightness and contrast must be understood.

In this paper an operational model for the automatic generation of lifelike gestures of an anthropomorphic virtual agent is described. The biologically motivated approach to controlling the movements of a highly articulated figure provides a transformation of spatiotemporal gesture specifications into an analog representation of the movement from which the animations are directly rendered. To this end, knowledge-based computer animation techniques are combined with appropriate methods for trajectory formation and articulated figure animation.

We examine how people perceive visual properties of new concepts for the design of animated vehicle instrument clusters, with emphasis on aesthetic aspects. The project is placed in the context of animations for eco-conscious driving. It consists of two stages: Creating animations and studying drivers' reactions to them. Two studies were conducted which provide various insights regarding tradeoff in the design process and drivers' preferences. The second study also serves as a first step towards the study of people's aesthetic perceptions of in-vehicle animations.

Exploring unknown models or scenes is a highly interactive and dynamic process. Systems for automatic presentation of models or scenes either require cinematographic rules, direct human interaction, framesets, or precalculation of paths to a known goal. In this paper we present a system which can deal with rapidly changing user interest in objects of a scene or model as well as with dynamic models and changes of the camera position introduced interactively by the user or through cuts. We describe CubicalPath, a new potential field-based camera control system that helps with the exploration of virtual environments.

Multiple view 3D video reconstruction of actor performance captures a level-of-detail for body and clothing movement which is time-consuming to produce using existing animation tools. In this paper we present a framework for concatenative synthesis from multiple 3D video sequences according to user constraints on movement, position and timing. Multiple 3D video sequences of an actor performing different movements are automatically constructed into a surface motion graph which represents the possible transitions with similar shape and motion between sequences without unnatural movement artefacts. Shape similarity over an adaptive temporal window is used to identify transitions between 3D video sequences. Novel 3D video sequences are synthesized by finding the optimal path in the surface motion graph between user specified key-frames for control of movement, location and timing. The optimal path which satisfies the user constraints whilst minimizing the total transition cost between 3D video sequences is found using integer linear programming. Results demonstrate that this framework allows flexible production of novel 3D video sequences which preserve the detailed dynamics of the captured movement for actress with loose clothing and long hair without visible artefacts.

The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social, and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle these challenges and help to make sense of Ireland’s altered position in a globalised world. Among the films discussed are some of the most critically acclaimed Irish films of recent years, including Once (2006), Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and The Secret of Kells (2009), as well as the work of Oscar-winning director and writer Neil Jordan. The volume is completed by an extensive interview with award-winning director Lenny Abrahamson, and his collaborator, screenwriter and actor Mark O’Halloran.

Computer visualizations are all around us. In this paper we describe a design process in which we explore the development of a new visualization to aid managerial decision making. The ultimate goal of our design effort is to develop a visualization that allows for presenting most of the critical financial ratios used to describe a firm's activity on a single computer display and dynamically. In doing so, we hope to enable managers to develop holistic and intuitive appreciations of such matters as how a business changes ...

Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was in fact a misnomer as the area was often in blazing color. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the forties, this chapter discusses Times Square/Broadway’s colorful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to color in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’  were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked color, glass and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.

We advocate the use of point sets to represent shapes. We provide a definition of a smooth manifold surface from a set of points close to the original surface. The definition is based on local maps from differential geometry, which are approximated by the method of moving least squares (MLS). The computation of points on the surface is local, which results in an out-of-core technique that can handle any point set. We show that the approximation error is bounded and present tools to increase or decrease the density of the points, thus allowing an adjustment of the spacing among the points to control the error. To display the point set surface, we introduce a novel point rendering technique. The idea is to evaluate the local maps according to the image resolution. This results in high quality shading effects and smooth silhouettes at interactive frame rates.

We are presenting techniques for simulating the motion and the deformation of cloth, fabrics or, more generally, deformable surfaces. Our main goal is to be able to simulate any kind of surface without imposing restrictions on shape or geometrical environment. In particular, we are considering difficult situations with respect to deformations and collisions, like wrinkled fabric falling on the ground. Thus, we have enhanced existing algorithms in order to cope with any possible situation. A mechanical model has been implemented to deal with any irregular triangular meshes, handle high deformations despite rough discretisation, and cope with complex interacting collisions. Thus, it should deal efficiently with situations where nonlinearities and discontinuities are really non marginal. Collision detection has also been improved to efficiently detect self-collisions, and also to correctly consider collision orientations despite the lack of surface orientation information from preset geometrical contexts, using consistency checking and correction. We illustrate these features through simulation examples.

Character rigging is a process of endowing a character with a set of custom manipulators and controls making it easy to animate by the animators. These controls consist of simple joints, handles, or even separate character selection windows.This research paper present an automated rigging system for quadruped characters with custom controls and manipulators for animation.The full character rigging mechanism is procedurally driven based on various principles and requirements used by the riggers and animators. The automation is achieved initially by creating widgets according to the character type. These widgets then can be customized by the rigger according to the character shape, height and proportion. Then joint locations for each body parts are calculated and widgets are replaced programmatically.Finally a complete and fully operational procedurally generated character control rig is created and attached with the underlying skeletal joints. The functionality and feasibility of the rig was analyzed from various source of actual character motion and a requirements criterion was met. The final rigged character provides an efficient and easy to manipulate control rig with no lagging and at high frame rate.

Online learning is becoming more prevalent throughout the years. At the same time, learners are using various technological devices to learn via the internet. One of the common ways of online learning is by watching videos from streaming sites such as YouTube. Some educational videos that are available online are presented in a form of instructional or expository animations. With the rise of instructional animations use for learning, it is essential to identify design characteristics of such animations. Hence, this paper focuses on the visual hermeneutic study of design characteristics of instructional and expository animations available on online streaming sites. Animation samples of the study are selected from established educational animation content creators on YouTube using several criterions. Aspects such as design characteristics and visual representations will be analysed and discussed in relation to the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning principles and a characterisati...

JQRSS Qualitative Researcher Awards
Congratulations to the following researchers who have been recognised by the JQRSS Editorial Board for their outstanding research activities, scholarly conduct and valuable contribution to the journal.
Rachael Lear: Volume 1, Issue 1, (2007)
Lear, R. and Palmer, C. (2007) Is there life after playing football? Investigating the perspectives of football coaches at a club in the North West of England. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 1, 1, 19-32.
Paul Gow: Volume 2, Issue 1, (2008)
Gow, P. and Rookwood, J. (2008) Doing it for the team - examining the causes of contemporary English football hooliganism. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 2, 1, 71-82.
Keith McGregor: Volume 3, Issue 1, (2009)
McGregor, K. and Palmer, C. (2009) It’s not the falling I’m worried about it’s hitting the ground - investigating the fear of falling, comfort zones and camaraderie between extreme grade rock climbers. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 3, 1, 127-146.
Chris Hughes: Volume 4, Issue 1, (2010)
Hughes, C. and Palmer, C. (2010) Examining a coaching philosophy through ethnographic principles – Winter with Woolton. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 4, 1, 23-48.
Beki Price: Volume 5, Issue 1, (2011)
Price, B. and Varrall, S. (2011) Doing and representing qualitative research: a human perspective (Part 1: visual). Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 5, 1, 59-86.
Price, B. and Gilbourne, D. (2011) Doing and representing qualitative research: a human perspective (Part 2: textual). Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 5, 1, 87-100.
Sarah Nickless: Volume 6, Issue 1, (2012)
Nickless, S. and Palmer, C. (2012) Crawling through experience. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 6, 1, 1-12.
Joseph Pryle: Volume 7, Issue 1, (2013)
Pryle, J. and Palmer, C. (2013) Cricket provision in schools – is the system flawed? An ethnographic investigation. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 7, 1, 27-86.
Nicola Hamilton: Volume 8, Issue 1, (2014)
Hamilton, N. and Palmer, C. (2014) Learning to ride a bike-a qualitative study of cycling and the Bikeability programme. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 8, 1, 17-88.
Sheri Treadwell: Volume 9, Issue 1, (2015)
Sheri Treadwell and Jim Stiehl (2015) Advocating for change in rural Physical Education: a middle school perspective through Photovoice and student SHOWeD analysis. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 9, 1, 107-162.
James Edwards: Volume 10, Issue 1, (2016)
Edwards, J. and Palmer, C. (2016) Getting home. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 10, 1, 127-156.
David Grecic: Volume 11, Issue 1, (2017)
Grecic, D. (2017) Making sense of skill – a personal narrative of becoming more skilled at skill. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 11, 1, 33-48.
Carmen Byrne: Volume 12, Issue 1, (2018)
Byrne, C. and Palmer, C. (2018) Hero, heroine or outcast? A quest for understanding through critical dialogue: the Research Goddess and me. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 12, 1, 1-34.
Maksim Berdnikov: Volume 13, Issue 1, (2019)
Berdnikov, M. and Krieger, J. (2019) Education facilitators at youth mega-events: practical and methodological considerations. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 13, 1, 111-126.
Hazel Isaacs: Volume 14, Issue 1, (2020)
Isaacs, H. and Palmer, C. (2020) Let’s waste some time: an autoethnographic study of procrastination. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 14, 1, 1-48.
Susan Thomas: Volume 15, Issue 1, (2021)
Thomas, S. and Palmer, C. (2021) When nature and tech connect – a case for using Augmented Reality in the Outdoors. Journal of Qualitative Research in Sports Studies, 15, 1, 1-28.

This paper focuses on the computational creation of animated data visualization used to communicate urban analysis and design in a video. The goal is to combine abstract analysis information with concrete qualitative impressions of a location in the case study area of Zurich. Different urban analysis methods are used to procedurally create an animation with the open source software Blender that facilitates also the compositing process of animation with video. The resulting videos are created during an elective course at ETH Zurich. Anticipating the advent of augmented and mixed reality applications for daily life, we elaborate on their usability for urban design, education and collaborative planning with relatively easy to learn video effect methods. Not only different levels of abstraction are visualized but also -inherent to the medium of video -the relation to time.

Since 1990 the DRA Speech Research Unit has conducted research into applications of speech recognition technology to speech and language development for young children. This has been done in collaboration wirh Hereford and Worcester County Council Education ...

As defined by Paul Taberham (2019, 17-18), “the basic premises of experimental animation hark back to the early twentieth century avant-garde”. This form of animation “typically offers formal challenges to the spectator” akin to the aims of independent filmmaking and non-commercial artistry. For those who are unfamiliar with the broadest applications of experimental animation, popular music video may initially seem like an unlikely object for examining this form. However, recent studies into the origins and transformation of music video have cast light on the inspiration that some music video directors glean from the avant-garde as an antecedent to music video (Korsgaard, 2017; Perrott, 2015; Richardson, 2010). Such inspiration is manifest in the employment of avant-garde compositional strategies and experimental practices, and in the production of challenging new forms that traverse media and straddle disparate approaches to art and culture.

After first outlining the historical and cultural context in which animated music video has developed, this presentation focuses on music video’s incorporation of surrealist compositional strategies alongside experimental animation techniques such as pixilation, puppetisation and stop-motion animation. Drawing on analyses of music videos by Chris Hopewell, Michel Gondry, Floria Sigismondi, Stephen Johnson, the Brothers Quay and others, this presentation will show how surrealist strategies such as estrangement, concrete irrationality and analogical composition operate alongside experimental animation techniques, thus serving to subvert the normalcy and commercialism associated with popular music video.

We describe a method for the visual interactive simulation of wires contacting with rigid multibodies. The physical model used is a hybrid combining lumped elements and massless quasistatic representations. The latter is based on a kinematic constraint preserving the total length of the wire along a segmented path which can involve multiple bodies simultaneously and dry frictional contact nodes used for roping, lassoing and fastening. These nodes provide stick and slide friction along edges of the contacting geometries. The lumped element resolution is adapted dynamically based on local stability criteria, becoming coarser as the tension increases, and up to the purely kinematic representation. Kinematic segments and contact nodes are added and deleted and propagated based on contact geometries and dry friction configurations. The method gives dramatic increase on both performance and robustness because it quickly decimates superfluous nodes without loosing stability, yet adapts to complex configurations with many contacts and high curvature, keeping a fixed, large integration time step. Numerical results demonstrating the performance and stability of the adaptive multiresolution scheme are presented along with an array of representative simulation examples illustrating the versatility of the frictional contact model.

The educational impact of visualization depends not only on how well students learn when they use it, but also on how widely it is used by instructors. Instructors believe that visualization helps students learn. The integration of visualization techniques in classroom instruction, however, has fallen far short of its potential. This paper considers this disconnect, identifying its cause in a failure to understand the needs of a key member in the hierarchy of stakeholders, namely the instructor. We describe these needs and offer guidelines for both the effective deployment of visualizations and the evaluation of instructor satisfaction. We then consider different forms of evaluation and the impact of student learning styles on learner outcomes.

this paper we introduce ourinteractive movie system by focusing on how weachieved an integration of narrative-based and spontaneousinteractions. Also, there is the important question:what is the objective of creating interactive animatedagents? Although the technological aspects ofsuch agents have been studied and discussed in detail,this critical question has rarely been discussed. In thelatter part of this paper, we will discuss what

To develop a model that relates the purpose of the communication to the nature of the animation, we surveyed existing user interfaces that use animation, analyzed these uses with respect to type of animation and communicative function, and considered ambiguous or otherwise difficult cases. From this analysis, we constructed a matrix with appropriateness/inappropriateness values for all combinations of communicative functions and animation types covered by our survey. To illustrate how the model could be applied to graphical user interfaces and to assess the model's plausibility, we used the model to develop two versions of a user interface for an MP3 player.