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Thesis Proposal

Week 13: Sources

Bryson, V. (1992) Feminist Political Theory. London: Macmillan Education UK. doi: 10.1007/978-1-349-22284-1.

Furniss, M. (1998) ‘Issues of representation’, in Art in Motion, Revised Edition. John Libbey Publishing, pp. 229–248. doi: 10.2307/j.ctt2005zgm.15.

Koroleva, T. A. (2013) ‘Women’s Movement: Genesis and Evolution’, Bulletin of Tomsk State University, 368, pp. 44–50.

Smelik, A. (2007) ‘Feminist Film Theory’, in The Cinema Book. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. doi: 10.5040/9781838710484.0065.

Smith, S. L. et al. (2019) Inclusion in the Director’s Chair: Gender, Race/Ethnicity, & Age of Directors Across the Top Films From 2007-2018. Available at: https://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-directors-chair-2019.pdf.

Thompson, K. (2014) ‘“Quick-Like a Bunny!” The Ink and Paint Machine, Female Labour and Color Production’, Animation Studies, 9. Available at: https://journal.animationstudies.org/kirsten-thompson-quick-like-a-bunny/.

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Advanced and Experimental 3DCA Techniques Project 2

Week 13: Blocking Plus

Blocking plus is even more extending the blocking by adding more poses in between the key ones. These poses are breakdown poses and their purpose is to better show the movement.

To simplify, the concept has to look like KEY – BREAKDOWN – KEY.

Last week we also received a feedback on our first blocking attempt. After the feedback I had to work more on the poses for falling:

This feedback helped me to develop my blocking:

Animated Artefact

I decided to start by animating scene 9 first, as I could try out animating a fly that will be present in more scenes as well as I will not need to focus on the lower part of the body of the character.

Previs:

First version of animation:

I did a render to see how well the character works with the world and how fast will render a render farm located in the university. The answers: the character works perfectly with the environment and rendering is very fast, comparing to my computer. The only thing is that the eyebrows were rendered wrong in a few frames.

As for the other character in this animation and the scene specifically – a firefly, I have found a rigged model of a regular fly online and have changed it a bit so it looks a bit less as a regular fly. In the future I will need to add a glow affect on the body.

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Thesis Proposal

Week 12: Research Methodology

Research Methods

Research methods are the strategies, processes or techniques utilized in the collection of data or evidence for analysis in order to uncover new information or create better understanding of a topic

Types of Research

  • Qualitative Research gathers data about lived experiences, emotions or behaviours, and the meanings individuals attach to them. It assists in enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of complex concepts, social interactions or cultural phenomena. This type of research is useful in the exploration of how or why things have occurred, interpreting events and describing actions.
  • Quantitative Research  gathers numerical data which can be ranked, measured or categorised through statistical analysis. It assists with uncovering patterns or relationships, and for making generalisations. This type of research is useful for finding out how many, how much, how often, or to what extent.
  • Mixed Method Research  integrates both Qualitative and Quantitative Research. It provides a holistic approach combining and analysing the statistical data with deeper contextualised insights. Using Mixed Methods also enables Triangulation, or verification, of the data from two or more sources.

My research will combine both qualitative and quantitative types. However, the principal component will be a quantitative analysis of the percentage of women working on films correlated with data showing female representation on screen. To support these statistics, literature will be analysed to extract data collected by other researchers.

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Advanced and Experimental 3DCA Techniques Project 2

Week 12: Blocking

Blocking is essentially the skeleton of the body!

 © George Toombes

Blocking is a very important second step of the animation (right after creating the reference). It helps to see what are the key poses, how the story is going to be told and to better understand timing between the main poses. In general, it helps to see how the animation is going to develop further.

George also shared with us a very useful video on how to approach blocking:

Here is my first attempt on blocking:

Animated Artefact

For my artefact I decided to develop an idea I had last term – a story about a firefly. I have already created a previs:

The next step is to put a character into the scenes and animate it.

The character that Im going to use is a model ‘Artemis’ by Ramon Arango:

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Thesis Proposal

Week 11: Thesis Proposal Structure

Thesis Proposal Structure:

•         Research title or question

•         Draft Introduction

•         Key words searched

•         General outline of each chapter

•         Draft literature review

•         A draft chapter

•         Indicative bibliography

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Advanced and Experimental 3DCA Techniques Project 2

Week 11: Advanced Body Mechanics

This week we had to come up with an idea for the body mechanics shot.

I got an idea to animate a mannequin falling and getting scared of its own reflection.

Before planning the shot in Maya I made a few references that would help me to understand the movement:

After a few attempts, we came up with a good reference:

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Collaborative Unit

Week 13:

This week we had the last meeting before the submission.

On the meeting I saw my animation in the Unity and the look of it with the “ghost” effect:

Meanwhile I have continued working on the perfecting this memory as well as working on the memory of the scanning machine.

I also had an idea to place cockroaches in the building to create some movement of the real objects among the ghosts.

I animated it running and ask VR members to place it into the project.

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Collaborative Unit

Week 12:

This week I have continued working on a “Toy memory”. The main difficulty for me was to work with the rigs. Since we got only mesh models for the characters, we had to rig them ourselves. By using mixamo rigs software I was able to add rigs to the characters, however they didn’t work properly. I spent a lot of time trying to fix the issues and in the end decided to work with what I have. This issue have made the animation process much more complicated. Despite it, I was able to show my first version of the animation on this group meeting.

Although the animation did receive a good feedback especially on the emotional side of it, I had to do lots of cleaning.

On the meeting we have also discussed models for the “scanning machine memory”. After the discussion I was told to use the same grandmother model for two people.

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Collaborative Unit

Week 11:

This week we had another online meeting with our group members.

We have talked about how to change the scanning machine memory since the models had to be full sized. Our partners suggested not to use a parent and a child models since there already are quite a big amount of kids in the scene and they didn’t want the scene to give a wrong impression.

We have discussed to use other models such as a grandmother in a wheelchair and a man. This could show that there are different aged characters and we are not focusing only on young and middle aged people.

I dived into searching for suitable models for this “memory”. The main issue was that the character has to be rigged for the better animation and it has to be suitable for the VR so it has to have a low polygon amount.

I have found a few models and waited for the opinion of other group members:

While I waited for the response of others, I have started to work on another “memory” – a kid is playing with the toy while their mother grabs them and walks away.

At first I had to rig the characters and after I have created some references to better understand the movement:

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Collaborative Unit

Week 10:

This week’s meeting was concentrated on the sound design for the project.

We created an asset list will all the sounds we will possibly need for our animations. From my side I specifically paid attention to the scanning machine animation as it will need lots of digital sounds as well as voices on the hands owners and environmental background noise.

We have also discussed this animation and I showed the current version. Although I got a great feedback on the animation itself, I have been told that it has to be done again. The main issue is that the models have to have full bodies so the player can see them fully. The models I have received before didn’t include other parts rather than the hands. It means that I will need to start this animation from the beginning.