Esme Duncan – Page 6 – Esme’s Blog

Week 3: Critical Review of literature or gathering of evidence

My literature review will span across these various different categories in regards to the animated documentary: Enactment and re-enactment, interview and its relationship to animated documentary and empathetic engagement. Scanning and assessing these works should assist in the exploration of animated documentaries’ viewer engagement.

Enactment and Re-enactment

The most essential and key authors’ work which will engage this are the works of Honess Roe and Bill Nichols’s expansion on the ‘Fantasmatic’ subject when discussing documentary. He regards this with a case study about Mighty Times: The Children’s March (Houston, 2004) which arose controversial opinions due to its near imperceptible recreated live-action footage with historically archived footage (2008). This can be similarly contrasted with Honess Roe’s account of using Chicago 10 (Morgern, 2007), use of motion capture to create contradistinction between the archival footage and the motion-captured, computer-generated imagery used in the recreation.

Interview

An essential part of gaining perspective on the subjective documentary will be the investigation of the animated interview. This may perhaps be one of the most important sections to consider for my thesis. Key author for this section will include Judith Krieger, Paul Ward, Paul Wells, Honess Roe and Nea Ehrlich as they investigate various different cases of animated interview and issues surrounding them. A key example of this is the comparison of Its Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group, 2003) to Slaves (2008) in their utilization of childrens audio with different aesthetic choices. There is also the aspect of criminal anonymity found in both Going Equipped (Lord, 1990) and Some Protection (Rimminen, 1987) as they potentially are more effective in animated form as they create a confessional aspect for the interviewees.

Empathetic Engagement

Assessing the relevant neuroscientific papers such as Patrick Powers ‘Character Animation and the Embodied Mind—Brain’ will help ground an understanding of how humans perceive animated bodies on an empathetic level and gain an insight into areas such as the ‘mirror neuron system’. This will be essential to ultimately analyse my survey findings later on at the end process of my thesis.

Bibliography Regarding the Literature Review

Ehrlich, N (2013) Animated Documentaries: Aesthetics, Politics and Viewer Engagement in: Buchan, S., eds. Pervasive animation. New York [etc.]: Routledge, pp.248-268.

Grierson, J. (1933) ‘The Documentary Producer,’ Cinema Quarterly, Vol 2. No. 1, Pp. 7–9.

Honess Roe, A. (2013). Animated Documentary. Palgrave Macmillan: BasingStoke, UK.

Kriger, J. (2012). Animated Realism: A Behind-the-scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre. Focal Press: Oxford, UK.

Lamm,C, Meltzoff, A. N and Decety, . (2010). ‘How Do We Empathise with Someone Who is Not Like Us’. In Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol 22. No. 2, Pp 362-376.

Nichols, B. (1991), ‘Representing Reality: issues and Concepts in Documentary’. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Nichols, B. (2016).’Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject : in Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. University of California: Oakland California.

Power, P. (2008) ‘Character Animation and the Embodied Mind—Brain’, Qualitative Health Research, 3(1), pp. 1518–1533. doi: 10.1177/10497323211012384.

Ward, P. (2007). ‘Animated Interactions: Animation Aesthetics and the World of the ‘Interactive’ Documentary’. In: Buchan, S.(ed.) Animated’ Worlds’. New Barnet: John Libbey & Company, Limited.

Week 2: Premise Project Research and Preparation

Associating with Bill Nichols’s expansion on the treatment of ‘Performative’ Documentary, I aim to try and expand the documentary idea to be more than simply facial performance. Considering this, this leaves the potential for aesthetic inspiration in a multitude of areas of films created previously.

Film Noir Inspirtaion

Due to film Noirs association with crime and detective stories, I thought it might be a good idea to play into this and create a scene that is inspired by film noir. A name vital to the film noir scene is Louis Feudillade, whose “Crime films in the silent era are a productive venue to explore as the genre’s predecessor” (Pettey and Palmer, 2014, pp.16). Looking at the below episode of ‘Les Vampires’ (1915), there are many cuts to black screens to showcase the spoken word, and letters that showcase the plot visually. As Pettey and Palmer state in reference to Allan Sekula how “the photographic image has ling been at the centre of the crisis of bourgeois culture, which simultaneously claims that the world is a collection of visible, ‘knowable and possessable’ objects'”, which in their eyes “transform the alienating machine of science/ rationality and its economic handmaiden, capitalism” (2014, pp. 17). By acknowledging this and that imagery is associated with the middle class in film-noir history, it extends itself to a particular aesthetic. This includes particular associations with men in suits and heavy detective coats and hats which indicate wealth.

Considering this for my documentary, I would take aspects of the film noir culture, such as lighting, the faded look of real film and lower quality of voice recording, but transport it into the modern world. What I enjoy aesthetically about these films is due to the dated technology there is an ambiguity created by the overall black and white tonality which is still present in the genre today.

1980’s ‘Tone Poem” Documentary Films

An interesting documentary film that uses referential techniques and imagery to convey the effects of modern technology on the earth is Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio, 1982). It uses juxtaposing and contrasting imagery o create and set its tone that documents the world’s demise with only the use of a soundtrack. It provides an excellent example of Bill Nichols’s performative documentary’ in the way it “stresses subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse” (1994, pp.95). It is described as a visual tone poem that as it utilises moving images and sound to create the language of poetry in a visual format.

Aspects of this interpretation of representation I have considered for my own documentary are questioning people on various key objects that were vital to their experiences in lockdown and recreating and rendering these in a way that accentuates them over direct mimetic performance.

In a similar light, the documentary ‘Night Mail 2′ makes reference to the original “Night Mail” (1936) but with updated technological influences such as trains and planes. It appears to utilise music and sound in a similar way to Koyaanisquatsi (1982), in which it directly times with the imagery presented. This documentary behaves in a way that references the “expository documentary” (Nichols, 1994, pp. 95), however, utlising some artistic impression with the inclusion of Blake Morrisons’ poetry. This documentary is reminiscent of the works of Grierson in its focus on working-class society, who has important historical influence over the documentary movement within the UK (Hardy, 1946).

Considering this, it makes me think about which group of people should be highlighted within my film, as the different social classes and ethnicity will change the perspective and experience of lockdown. This coincides with the overall Bourgeois of film noir as its overall aesthetic creates a particularly visual implication of class standing.

References

Nichols, b. (1994). Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Hardy, f. (eds) (1946) Grierson on Documentary. London: Collins

Pettey, H. B. and Palmer, R. B. (eds) (2014) Film Noir. Edinburgh University Press.

Week 12: Asset and Environment Modelling

Character Model Issues

When cleaning up and structuring my character model I found several issues that could occur when I begin the rigging process. Firstly, the rotation of the feet and the toes were distorting when grouped together, Which I realised may have been due to mesh-related history issues. After separating the group and deleting the history on each join, and regrouping them again afterwards, i was able to resolve this issue rather quickly and efficiently.

Scaling

An essential consideration going forward into the environmental modelling stage of the production will the the scaling in relation to that character and that of its placement. While i wish for the stage to appear ‘grandiose’ I also do not want the character to feel swallowed up in an environment that is more detailed and large that draws viewer attention away from the performance. Due to this, I have decided to strip back my former ideas of French inspired luxury stage theatrics and decided to create a very minimal stage that will match and accentuate the visual choices of my skeleton model.

Stage and Environment Modelling

Looking at how theatre curtains hang will help me understand how I can apply and model these in 3D space, I tried to model my stage and curtains with a similar drapery. Initially I modelled the curtains without utilising N cloth to keep the scene file from crashing and to get a general idea of the mesh and where it will be placed environmentally. From there this allowed me to go forward doing N cloth passive animation tests to ensure a more realistic result.

Initial Scene Test

Here is my Initial scene mockup, It makes clear to me where my next steps are in terms of modelling, lighting and general rendering improvements. Due to the stark contrast, I wish to create with spotlights to accentuate audience focus, I think it will be important to understand how the Arnold lighting setups work as they do not seem to render the traditional Maya spotlight in the same way as Hardware 2.0 does. Below I have attached a link which should help me improve and expand on how these lighting setups will work alongside some youtube tutorials.

Modelling intentions and improvements for next week

Clean up and improve detail quality of curtains and ropes
Finish wood panelling detail
Add theatre seats (less urgent)
Consider and explore texturing aspects

Post Editing Test

Exploring different noise and lighting effects in Photoshop, I wanted to see if I could create a mock-up version of what the final output could potentially look like regarding aesthetics. Since I was trying to achieve an ‘old film’ look, I intentionally pushed the level of noise, however, I feel this may not be the most effective method as it appears more like an ineffective render. I think in pursuing this further, the moving noise could make it more apparent it is aiming to be a replicator of the old film rather than portraying inexperience through computer-generated rendering.

Friday Workshop Week 2: Skin Weights

In this week’s workshop, we started expanding on the rigging from last week and began to skin weight joints to the mesh.

The first step was to block the skin weighting to key sections of the mesh and use a flooding technique to feather out the weight at the edges in a way that is controlled, particularly by the vertices you select.

The fingers were the most tricky area to flood, because of the sheer amount of vertices and the distance between each other. The important aspect of this selecting the influence of the correct joint and then using this flooding technique (ensuring that the influence is low) to create a somewhat seamless crease between the different parts of the finger.

One of the issues I encountered with this process early on was during the skin bind, I selected the hierarchy of the mesh in the incorrect order, which led to the following issues. In order to fix this, I deleted the skin binding history and started again selecting everything correctly.

Issues with Hierarchy selected in Skin Bind

Starting again, I decided to tackle the skin weighting within the fingers, as this proved to be the most ‘fiddly’ and vertex dense area to consider. The main thing that helped during this process was flooding the weighting 100% to their respective joint, and then selecting the vertices in the mesh that were added with the design of deformation. This is highlighted in our own hands in the areas where lines appear between the skeletal joints of our hands and fingers. By adding a slight percentage of flooding, the two areas blend into one another, creating less mesh collision. However it its a careful process as too little weight consideration can lead to volume inconsistencies upon rotation.

One of the trickier areas of skin weighting was the centre of the body, as the if the skin weigh is not somewhat evenly distributed between the different spinal joints, the deformation would appear blocky and entirely inaccurate to human anatomy.

As seen below, I was initially having a few issues getting the chest/ armpit and stomach areas to rotate side to side without mesh collisions, and using the same technique as the fingers I was eventually able to create an even spread between the different joints, getting a more accurate skin weight than by painting it unevenly myself.

Week 2: Methodology Structure and Research Considerations

Broadening my research into methodology techniques and concepts, I aim and intend to use a mix of both qualitative and quantitative methods to engage with both conceptual and historical ideas surrounding animated documentary creation, performance and engagement as well as current and direct audience responses from animated works I Intend to create myself.

Issue problem and Investigation

The key findings of this paper are to look into how viewers engage with animated documentaries in re-enacted states and how these findings can benefit or deny the essential argument of animated documentaries’ overall genre validity.

Key authors, Books and Writings and Structure of Arguments

Initial my key and most essential authors going forward will be Annabelle Honess Roe, Cristina Formenti, Bill Nichols, Brian Winston and Paul Ward. Historically and contextually looking at background information on the works of Grierson will be vital as his writings play a pivotal point in the formation of the documentary as we know it today. These particularly highlight books such as “Animated Documentary” by Anabelle Honess Roe, and “the Classical Animated Documentary” by Cristina Formenti as they expand upon both contemporary and historical documentary issues and information when regarding the animated documentary. Looking at the different documentary modes will be reliant on research from Bill Nichols’s “Blurred Boundaries” and Paul Wells’s “The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A consideration of Documentary Aesthetics” which cover and explain the theory behind documentary modes between live-action and animated documentary.

Survey Creation and Structure

My survey aims to look at the viewer engagement with several different styles of animated documentary and compare several factors such as overall engagement and understanding of the piece, Stylistic preference, lip sync and facial expression engagement, movement engagement and its overall ability to convince and express factual accounts. This will include live-action and animation comparative elements that will consider different accounts of factual retelling. I think a key part of the survey considerations will be the quality of animation as well as aspects such as lighting and rendering. So when choosing footage I will be intentional to compare specific videos against each other. For example: using two non-rendered pieces of animation together to even out the generalized audiences engagement.

Data Analysis Process

Regarding the Gender, Age, Preferences, Engagement and overall impact the different elements had on different survey takers will be taken into consideration and applied to a graph which will summarize the other all objective and subjective elements of the animation enjoyment. Looking at this and contextually applying the different areas of this thesis research such as aesthetic design, animation methods, empathetic engagement and relationship to interview.

Resources, Materials and Tools

My survey itself will involve using the most random mix of people that are of different, ages, backgrounds, Identities and nationalities as I can involve. I feel in order to get a sense of documentary engagement however, it will be important to involve both academic and non-academic people who appreciate and understand animation in a different way to the general public. This also considers the idea of younger audiences versus older audiences.

Week 2: Animation Workshop

Rigging Corrections

Following on from last week’s rigging session, in the lesson, Toby went over some rigs and gave constructive feedback which proved very useful in understanding the full implications of how the advanced skeleton plugin works. Some issues that arose when completing the rigging assignment were rotation axis issues in the fingers, so understanding that the rotation axis can be visualised to help directional alignment helped massively when achieving a more realistically moving advanced skeleton.

Animation Assignment: Pose to Pose Blocking

Starting this week’s assignment of creating a pose to pose block out between two key poses, I began to use plug-ins I was not previously hugely familiar with such as the tween machine. The Tween machine takes the key poses and creates an in-between that can be central or more influenced by either the latter or the former pose depending on the level selected.

Using Tween Machine to Pose the Character

A key element of the workshop that toby focused on was creating strong silhouettes in which the pose is clear with a good amount and well-controlled negative space. Taking this into consideration I wanted to ensure my beginning and end pose had clear and strong silhouettes in which the gun props were clearly outlined. This process helped me determine the strength of my poses going throughout the shot.

Another key element Toby mentioned was using editable motion trails to clearly track how clean and smooth your motion arcs are. Using these trails helped me understand and process how smooth my overall splined animation may appear. These motion trails can be reminiscent of the golden ratio in art theory that highlights a smooth perfect ‘shell’ shape that draws the viewer’s attention to a certain point. In some aspects, I attempted to recreate this ideal with the left hand and the gun to draw the viewer’s attention to it and the punisher rigs face towards the end of the shot.

See the source image — Golden Ratio Example

Finished Blocking

The overall blocking I feel has some good examples of arcs in the arms and upper body, however, may not have the same effect in the lower body. I also feel it could be retimed as it feels a bit slow and the weight distribution seems a bit off in certain areas. Receiving feedback for next Thursday’s session will help me understand exactly which improvements I could make and expand the shot in quality and overall movement.

Research: Classical Animated Documentary and its Contemporary Evolution Talk and Discussion

After attending a discussion on Monday that discussed the new writings of animation academic Cristina Formenti, I discovered several pieces of information that may prove very vital in my own thesis research. One of the key elements of this speech was the categorisation of the animated documentaries genre fitting into a third and more loosely formed category of ‘docudrama’ which allows space for more re-enacted and fictional standpoints within this field.

A key point Formenti brings to attention is the lack of scholarly writings about the historical roots of the animated documentary, as there seems to be arising conceptions that it is purely a contemporary form of factional representation. She went on to discuss how her book help categorises the different ’ages’ in which a variety of animated documentaries can be placed, and expands on a more International view of animated documentaries that branches outside of purely just The United States and Great Britain in which a lot of focus has been placed within the animation field. Another more ethically driven point she argues within her work is the lack of focus on the female leads within the animated documentary field that are potentially overshadowed by features such as “Waltz with Bashir” (2008, Folman) and also expresses that too much literature is conceived on the basis of that particular film creating a wall between newer and older works that are deserving of attention.

The talk overall has left me with various thoughts and considerations to expand on my own thesis writings, and that is largely the inclusion and consideration of different categoric elements and international standpoints when writing about viewer engagement with animated documentaries.

References

Formenti, Cristina. The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6904339.

Friday Workshop Week 1: Manual Rigging Task

Taking on applications involved in manual rigging, the importance of locators to allow for joint placement accuracy and rotation orientation is stressed. During the Process, locators are placed at key and central points of the rig so that when the joint placement takes place, the rotation is easier to aline in a cleaner and more efficient manner.

When placing all of the locators in areas such as the hand, it is important that the rotation is accurate throughout all the hands and individual fingers so that it is clear which locator group is which and how the joint will align with the locator later on.

Once creating the joints it is important to line the joints up and rotate from the highest point in the joint hierarchy so that there is not any messy translation and rotation information that can cause containing and skin weighting issues later on in the rigging process.

After carefully placing each of the joints at the different locators on one half of the leg and upper body, it was important that the bend of the leg and the spine were considered, easily for IK placement in the leg later on so that it has a clear directional pivot.

Rotating and placing each of the skeletal joins into place in the fingers proved to be the trickiest part of this process as the hierarchal rotational alignment caused a lot of adjustment to get everything in order on each finger.

After completing the arm and the hand, I duplicated this on the YZ axis so that it would copy exactly to the left side of the body. While utilising the mirror joint options, I also changed the name of the copied joints to have L_ at the beginning of each join to distinguish the separate copy and keep the outliner clean and concise.

Initially, during duplication, I had an issue that would not allow me to safely mirror the copy over due to “too many arguments”, which after some research on the Autodesk website, clarified to me that there are too many selected joints to perform the mirror joint action. This meant that I had to select the beginning of the joint hierarchy, the clavicle, rather than each individual joint in the arm.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-animation-and-rigging/mirror-joint-options-too-many-arguments-error/td-p/9623864

After completing that issue I had a character with a fully formed skeleton ready to be rigged for next weeks skin binding class.

Week 1: Premise Project Idea and Execution

Generating Ideas for my Final major project I have decided to commit and develop an interview-style documentary which I will use in support of my thesis to track viewer engagement with re-enacted personal experience. For this premise project, I would like to develop my facial/ body performance and lip-sync animation to a higher level and truly begin to understand the building blocks of creating an effective animation. For this week I have taken interviews from a variety of my friends with different lifestyles and asked how they spent their time in lockdown and how this had affected their overall life experiences.

In order to aid my thesis survey, I have taken these interviews with varying qualities of camera equipment. Different lighting and times of the day to see which a viewer would engage with more, and compare this to a developed performance I will adapt in differing styles of animation. For the next 10 weeks, I intend to adapt 2-3 different audios of these interviews to explore different stylistic approaches to how I will create my final major project next term.

Tasks for Next week

Expanding on these interviews, I will start to consider how I will adapt these into animation aesthetically and theoretically.

Research into documentary forms
Research into aesthetic Styles
Concept works

Thesis Proposal Task 1

Consider the following questions and try to provide brief answers on your blog for next week.

On graduation which area or environment of production do you wish to focus upon and why?

Upon graduating with this master’s degree I wish to go into character animation or previsualization however I have a deep interest in independently created films that expand and differentiate themselves from mainstream productions.

What skills will you need to attain the standards required for vocational practice?

My primary focus intends to be on studying character animation, by also the stylisation and adaptability of character animation aesthetics are used in various contexts.

How will you showcase your FMP practice for the final shows?

I intend to explore various different visual styles and types of animated methods and compare these to the final completed work in a showreel to show progression within this body of this work and the thought processes in order to reach it.

Is it important to directly connect the thesis research to your practical work?

I think, with my intended goal, it will be important to utilise my thesis research to understand which areas and styles of animated work engage a viewer the most. This should aid and help my overall product’s consumer validity while simultaneously (and hopefully) pushing boundaries on visual mainstream acceptance.

Do you have an area of research you wish to conduct that is unrelated to the practical elements?

I am very interested in narrative and story developments, and also how these can ve applied in various contexts. For example when re-creating a factual depiction with narrative elements in a documentary setting, it explores a line between fact and fiction that creates emotional stimulus.