The Filmmaking Assignment

The Motion Graphs Assignment

There are 3 papers on motion graphs that appeared together:

Kovar, Gleicher, Pighin. Motion Graphs.
Arikan, Forsyth. Interactive Motion Generation from Examples
Lee, et. al. Interactive Control of Avatars Animated with Human Motion Data

Add to this the Snap-Together Motion paper and you have 4 papers that pretty much do the same thing: take a database of motions and build a graph structure to synthesize motion.

Examining these 4 papers together is interesting not just to compare the actual methods themselves, but also to see 4 papers that are written in different styles (yet on similar topics).

For this assignment, you are to read all four papers and compare and contrast them in writing. I'm guessing this will be 2-3 pages of typed text. You must email what you have to the instructor before the end of the day on Monday March 29th.

The ART Assignment

The goal of the art assignment is to get you to learn a little bit about Maya, to think about the principles of animation, and to appreciate how hard it is to create good motion!

Keep the goals in mind as you do the assignment. Don't get carried away.
(unless you want to - no one will stop you from creating a great work of art, but try to learn what the assignment is trying to teach you first)

You must work with a partner. All of your work on this assignment should be done with your partner - no two people doing things independently and putting them together in the end.

There are two phases to the assignment. I won't check that you finish phase 1 first, but I recommend you spend some time doing phase 1 before moving on to phase 2.

Phase 1 - Make a Picture: Fire up Maya and make at least one picture. Try using lighting and textures. The pictures should be rendered nicely
Phase 2 - Make an Animation: Make a simple, SHORT animation that involves some character showing some emotions through its movement alone. (or you can have multiple characters each showing multiple emotions). Try to use the principles of animation to make your movements expressive.

Your animation need not be rendered. Playblasting it is OK. In fact, for the critique, you can just play the animation from within Maya.

Simple is good. Try to use the movements of the character to convey the emotions and intents.Very simple characters can be very expressive. A bouncing ball, or a walking triangle, or ... I really want you to think about the movements, not making things look nice.

The deadline:

On Monday, February 9th, in class (2:30-3:45) class will meet down in the B240 lab for a "critique." Everyone must show their animations to everyone else. During this time, you should discuss how each animation uses the principles of animation to be expressive.

What you'll turn in:

On Wednesday, February 11th (in class), each person must turn in their notes from the critique. For every animation (including your own!) you must comment on the the movements were trying to express, and how they used the principles of animation to express it. I will collect pieces of paper in class. It's OK if your notes are handwritten, providing I can read them.

On Friday, February 13th (before class), each pair must turn in their animation as an AVI file (preferably compressed with MPEG-4) and their still images as a JPEG.