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Fundamental understandings of what animation actually is have been changing in the face of material changes to production and distribution methods brought about by the introduction of digital technology. Increasing artistic and academic interest in the field has also contributed to this re-conceptualisation and re-imagining of animation, such as th...
Citations
... For instance, when working with PeCap, actors are often requested by the PeCap technicians to participate in a preparatory phase before acting begins. This phase involves a preliminary capture of some basic facial shapes and expressions, including FACS shapes, phonemes, and possibly some of the actor's dialogue from the script and/or a range 54 Among the examples cited in this thesis include doctoral theses by Hosea (2012) and Delbridge (2014). Also, the article "Behind the Scenes: A Study of Autodesk Maya" (2014) by Aylish Wood provides numerous accounts of 3D animators discussing their direct experience of (and frustration with) working with 3D animation software. ...
This research deepens our understanding, as animators, actors, audiences, and academics, of how we see the practice of acting in performance capture (PeCap). While exploring the intersections between acting and animation, a central question emerges: what does acting become when the product of acting starts as data and finishes as computer-generated images that preserve the source-actor’s “original” performance to varying degrees? This primary question is interrogated through a practice-led inquiry in the form of 3D animation experiments that seek to clarify the following sub-questions:
• What is the nature of acting within the contexts of animation and performance capture?
• What is the potential for a knowledge of acting to have on the practice of animating, and for a knowledge of animation to have on the practice of acting?
• What is the role of the animator in interpreting an actor’s performance data and how does this affect our understanding of the authorship of a given performance?
This thesis is interdisciplinary and sits at the intersection between theories of acting,
animation, film, and psychology. Additionally, this thesis engages with phenomenology and auto-ethnography to explore acting in performance capture from the perspective of a single individual as the actor, PeCap artist, and animator. This type of first-person experience-based insight is often missing from purely theoretical discussions about acting in performance capture and animation, and helps to provide a clearer understanding of the contributions of each creative role to the final PeCap result. This research provides a strong basis for the necessity of a paradigm revision for how acting is produced within a PeCap context.
... On the other hand, why use animation at all and not just mocap? Artist and researcher Brigitta Hosea defines animation as an artificial construct that could not be created in real-time (Hosea 2012). ...
... Since the advent of the computer, this sense of change and fundamental, ontological uncertainty has been apparent in the field of animation. 50 At the crossroads of many artforms, traditional techniques and rapidly evolving technical processes, animation is an ideal candidate to be considered as a liquid artform. ...
The mobility paradigm in urban geography and sociology proposes that cities and society can be studied in terms of travel rather than stasis – through the movement of peoples, resources, data, finance – in order to understand the formation of identity, ideology, power and society. In accord with these ideas about mobility, rather than considering landscape as a static entity, this chapter focuses on animations that move between locations and are concerned with trajectory and locomotion. After noting the connections between early cinema and the train, it will examine a body of works that are all thematically linked through their association with animated train journeys, although the individual pieces of work may take different forms – from the pre-‐filmic phantom rides, to Ivor the Engine, Thomas the Tank Engine, Madame Tutli~Putli, Polar Express, transport information films and post-‐filmic subway zoetropes and railway simulation games. To conclude, it is argued that the animated railway journey can be read as a metaphor for the transience and flux at the root of contemporary society that Zygmunt Bauman has termed liquid modernity.
Review of: Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 , Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall (2020)
London, New York and Dublin: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 264 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-7883-1384-1, h/bk, £85.00
While an actor’s performance in a stage play may be seen as a continuous and unmediated form of acting, an actor’s performance in a film is constructed through shot framing, editing, effects work, and other cinematic apparatuses. With the advent of digital filmmaking, constructed performances have become more complex and nuanced, especially through the use of motion capture (MoCap). This research explores how we frame acting within a motion capture context – and specifically, how this affects our larger understanding of what is acting and how acting can be constructed. What does acting become when the product of acting starts as data and finishes as computer-generated images that preserve the source-actor’s ‘original’ performance to varying degrees? Is the source actor solely responsible for the MoCap performance we see on screen, or should other people within the production pipeline receive credit for their creative contributions to the finished acting result? What is at stake in differentiating film acting in MoCap from profilmic performances? Through consolidating and linking theoretical and practical considerations of screen acting in motion capture, this paper proposes a number of ways to conceive of acting and presence within a virtual acting context.
Although the technologies used in contemporary expanded animation are digital, this kind of work builds upon expanded cinema’s legacy of avant-garde practice. This chapter draws upon one strand of expanded cinema - paracinema - as defined by film theorist Jonathan Walley, who uses the term in the sense of the dematerialization of film into idea. Based on archival research and unpublished materials by VALIE EXPORT and Anthony McCall, examples of their expanded practice in paracinema are presented where film becomes live event and, thus, questions the institution of cinema, its strategies of voyeurism and perception. Extending this idea and building upon animation theorist Alan Cholodenko's notion of animation as concept, the animated performance and installation work of contemporary artists Tingting Lu and Birgitta Hosea is proposed as a form of para-animation. Working at the interface of live experience and recorded media, these works dematerialize animation and investigate the inscription of movement over time as concept rather than purely technique.
