Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Vertical time

I wanted to try to embed a video. I've no idea why that never occurred to me before.

Who knew that Time runs vertically?


11 comments:

Hannah said...

Very cool. :) The embedding and the video itself.

Alex said...

All those times I've read SciFi, and they are entering a warp gate, infinite improbability field. This film finally shows what I tried to imagine. Muybridge look out, your animal locomotion studies may soon be replaced.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I thought the girl got the invisibility powers, not the super-elasticity? Or did the Silver Surfer swap the Fantastic Four's powers?

Mom? What's the lady doing with her body? It's weird!

Anonymous said...

Muybridge look out, your animal locomotion studies may soon be replaced.

WTF?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Eadweard Muybridge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muybridge

Alex said...

Do people still use Muybridge? Any documentary you see about animation, they always show people with mirrors.

Disney hired a real live stripper for the "shy little dear" scene, and worked from real footage.

Now with motion capture for CG and live anime looking back at Muybridges original obsessive studies must surely be a thing of the past.

With so much film existing probably everything that is possible has been filmed, so a set of carefully presented time lapse photos are not worth what they were.

Now we are looking at messing with time delays within frames of a film. Sure, this example looks like a just because, I found a neat algorithm to run, but elsewhere you see modelling of approaching lightspeed, or crossing an event horizon, entering a blackhole and such, all based on the laws of physics and relativity as understood today.

We have reached such a level of sophistication in our knowledge of how to present motion, for some reason it took this film to make me recognize how far we've come since the magic lantern and zoetrope.

Anonymous said...

Alex,
Give us links, man. These films you mention sound like a geek's ultimate dream.
Um... not that I am geeky or anything, it's... for a friend of mine, whose name I'm forgetting!

Alex said...

Hmmm? Oh, the Disney film is an old toon of collected wildlife, all a bit silly. One is a "shy little deer" who suddenly stands up and starts dancing provocatively. The white underbelly looking like a one piece swim suit. You'll find that on a Disney compilation DVD, but not on the web.

As for the black hole movie I was thinking of, I saw that at the local digital planetarium, in the Chabot Space and Science center. You have to see it in a plantearium, and not just one with a star projector. The one we have here (actually the Ask Jeeves Planetarium) has a dozen synchronized digital projectors, and they show wonderful movies. http://www.chabotspace.org/visit/shows.aspx?v=p#Black%20Holes

Hope that link is okay.

As for the making of animation, any Aardman movie (Wallace & Grommit - from EO's part of the world), Peter Jacksons documentary about the original King Kong and Appleseed's second disc, also any studio Ghibli film.

Muybridge? The only time I've seen his footage used in film was in a Peter Greenaway film. Can't even remember which one. I think it was Prospero's Books, which is the most impressive Shakespear film I have seen (even better than Romeo + Juliet).

I regret not buying the Muybridge book when I saw it in our local museum (Oakland http://www.museumca.org/). They have a great amount of photography there, that's where I first encountered Sally Rands Nude Ranch. If anyone can find footage of that I'd like to see it.

Am I waffling again?

Cliff Prince said...

I wonder what ever happened to that "real" stripper that Disney hired. Sure she couldn't get a job at the amusement park, not with that on her resume.

I am quite familiar with Muybridge. His work is still the watershed. Proved horses clear the ground, for example -- imagine living in a world where you didn't actually "know" whether or not all four of a horse's feet were at some point off of the ground!

I don't quite get what the spiraling woman in the video is about. It's "cool" (though not embedded -- when I click it a new window opens up, rather than it playing "in" your blog) but it's not really anything other than animation, right? And it's computer-generated, in teh "wrong" way, too.

Example. In the second trick, she walks across the screen from stage left to stage right. First her feet slink to the right, then the rest of her elastically follows. But if you watch someone walking, you'll see that their KNEES go toward the direction they're going first. How and why did the animator get her FEET to lead? Something about the computer algorithm screws it up; makes it look more freaky, but also less plausible and less "informative." Kind of like the animation in the Matrix movies: great eye-candy, but SINCE nobody can ever ACTUALLY see a man fly over buildings and stop bullets in mid-air, we would never know if the animation is very accurate and believable or just slick. Whereas the animation in Lord of the Rings impresses me much more: it has to have plausibility, and therefore has an imagined standard to which viewers compare it. Much harder to make a giant elephant that MIGHT exist, than a rubber face that might not.

Alex said...

The upper scan lines are delayed, so the bottom of the screen is temporally ahead of the top.

see what you're saying, it would be neat if the first thing to move got ahead, exponentially scaling (is that a valid term) the displacement based relative first move time. Give every moving point greater acceleration (+ve and -ve) but the same travel time. I think that's what FinID is looking for.

Cliff Prince said...

Yeah, I'm looking for animation that gives new meaning to the experience of watching someone move. This animation gives new meaning to parsing some OBJECT from top to bottom -- THAT'S the aspect of the human that it plays with. I don't really find altitude an eloquent characteristic. The animators haven't really told me much about looking, because they picked altitude.