The Race

Cast

This project involved the creation and animation of two characters: a marshmallow and a potato head.

Jr. Marshmallow (from Group-1)

Jr. Marshmallow is a young, energetic character often like to take challenges with the seniors. In this scene, he takes a challenge for race with a senior fellow 'Mr. Potato Head'.

Jr. Marshmallow is a very sincere person and obeys the 'Laws of Physics' exactly during his hops. He mastered several laws, such as gravitational force, velocity profile, randomness, path fitting, etc. He is still too young to learn the laws about mass, friction, etc., and he is sure will learn them in the near future. Jr. Marsh secretly hides a 'plug-in' in is pocket (sshh... don't tell to any one)  to remember all the laws he learned so far.

For those who don't know the 'Laws of Humor', the above paragraph can also be read as "Jr. Marshmallow's profile of the hop is controlled by laws of motion, which includes gravitational force, velocity, time, randomness etc. But the laws of friction, mass etc. are not included in the motion yet. Jr. Marsh follows the specified path in general but hops slightly erratically (excitedly!), missing its landing spots a little bit each time".

Character: Mr. Potato Head (from Group-2)

Mr. Potato Head is a character meant for attaching facial features and/or accessories. The geometry that features are added to is simple with the stress being on the features. Each feature will be controlled by a plug-in or set of plug-ins. The animator will control emotions of the character through the plug-ins.

While the 'real' Mr. Potato Head has hundreds of features to implement, for the purposes of getting something done, we have focused on the animation of the eyes of the character.

The eyes are modelled as a pair of eyeballs, each with a pupil. The intent is to provide a control to focus the gaze of the pupils at a 'look at' target. Combine that with random noise over the animation path of the pupil, and the eyes jitter while they are tracking a target in the scene.

Producers

Group 1:
Group 2:

Script

The producers of the movie wanted to raise a number of ethical and philosophical issues; thus, they decided to portray an everyday scene, and came up with the idea of a race between Jr. Marshmallow and the potato head.

The race takes place in a futuristic high-tech scenery, where our characters compete for fame and glory (the tree and UFO models that were used in the scene appear courtesy of http://www.3dcafe.com). Although the original intent was that each character should be animated with the plug-in provided by the creating team, the producers decided to intermix the plug-ins for each character. More specifically:

  • the hop plug-in was used to drive the motion of both characters.
  • the eyes plug-in was used to control the gaze of the characters.
  • the random noise plug-in was used to make the pupils of Mr. Potato Head jitter and to give a random rotation to Jr. Marshmallow when it hopped.

Media Coverage

The movie will be released any time soon. In the meantime, the producers have prepared a short animation sequence and a number of high resolution stills, just to give a short preview of the final masterpiece.

Technical Details

The movie was the result of several man months of high quality technical work. Below we have compiled a short list of selected publications that were produced during the makings of the movie.
  • V. Ercegovac and A. Polyzotis, "Hacking the 3D model of Mr. Potato Head - It Works Mate!", in 27th Monty Python workshop on 3D modelling (submitted).
  • R. Arangarasan and J. Masanz, "The Physics of Hopping", in 12th International Symposium on the Kinematics of Marshmallows (to appear).
  • R. Arangarasan, V. Ercegovac, J. Masanz and Alkis Polyzotis, "The psychology of a race: a case study on potatoes and marshmallows", in Journal of Psychological Studies on Potatoes and Marshmallows, March 2000.
 
Last modified: Wed Mar 8 15:23:53 CST 2000