Creating Stereoscopic 3D Images

 Red/Cyan Images

Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

Original Image

My Renders

Building a Scene in Maya

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were 91 and 92; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline for the Third Term Paper

Introduction:

-My main focus: Water flows through small tunnels.

-Compare between life action TV show and CGI in game play.

-Water sluicing in life-action could look fake while CGI water sluicing can be realistic and intence.

Body

A: An example from an old TV drama A Journey to the West（1986）

  -Method used to create rapid water flow.

  -What works: Look like real water

  -What doesn’t work: not rapid enough.

B: Example in Capcom’s Game Resident Evil 6 (2012).

  -Method: CGI

  -What work: Convincing and rapid enough to make impact.

  -What doesn’t work: Not realistic enough

Conclusion:

It is hard to recreate rapid water flow to indicate danger.

It is either hard to make it realistic or have big impact.  

Stop-Motion Character Animation

    Basically I used my cousin's toy bears to shoot this stop motion animation. I did some story boardings before I took pictures so that I had a clear plan to shoot. My cousin Sarah helped me to hold the camera while I was managing the position of the two characters. And I use Photoshop to get rid of my hands in the scenes.  It was pretty fun and challenging to make a stop motion animation.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

Films can be representations of real life stories, or it can be completely fictional. Yet, sometime it can be really tricky to distinguish what is science fact and what is make-believe. When a film wants to be both believable and magnificent, the filmmaker will try to trick the audience’s eyes by bending the laws of physics without being noticed. One of the most important components of films is the character. If the characters merely do the things that normal creatures are capable, then not a lot of people are going to care about their stories. Therefore, the filmmakers will give them super powers to break the physics rules of the reality. And the audiences will feel like: ”Oh, this scene look like it can happen around me.” As a result, the audiences are wiling to accept whatever happens in the films and like the characters. One of the most popular laws of physics that the filmmakers like to play with is the Isaac Newton’s Third Law. As the filmmakers want to show the difference among the characters, the effects of actions and reactions between the two characters will be manipulated away from reality. Base on what I have been observed, there are three popular ways to play with the law of action/reaction. They are the recoils of actions, resulting accelerations and magnitudes of supporting forces. 

       Kung Fu in all kinds of films almost always breaks the law of action/reaction. For example, one of Kung Fu’s functions is to eliminate the recoils of actions. In Kung Fu related films, as a character punch or kick, his or her enemies will fly away with the Kung Fu master stay in the same spot. It looks like the Kung Fu masters don’t need to endure any forces or any pain when they punch. That’s not true. 

Let’s look at an example from Kung Fu Panda episodes-Secret Of The Furious Five. In the story of Master Mantis’s past, Master Mantis kicks two bugs away and maintains the same position on the air for a while, with a confident smile on his face. That’s incredible and impossible! According to Isaac Newton’s Third Law, When object A exerts a force on object B, the object B simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the object A. 

Therefore, Master Mantis is experiencing the same magnitude of force of his fabulous kick as well. Even though the speed of his body does decrease to indicate that he has some recoil of his own action, it still doesn’t look like it is the same magnitude of his kick. But this manipulation of recoil present how well the Master Mantis’s Kung Fu is. It shows that his slender body can endure huge force without being blown away.   

There is another way to show interesting relationships between two characters bending Newton’s Third Law. That is playing with timing and resulting accelerations of an action. Let’s look at an example from Chuck Jones’s Tom and Jerry-Ice Skating, which is my favorite animation when I was little. As Jerry and his nephew Nibbles enjoying their skating indoor, Tom silently holds on to Nibbles tail. The problem is that neither Nibbles nor Jerry notices it. 

Their skating doesn’t even slow down a bit. It look like they don’t feel Tom’s action because there is only one force that the mice dragging Tom. That is incorrect! Base on Newton’s Third Law, there is a force exerting on Nibbles and Jerry from Tom. This force should slow them down. What’s more, Jerry and Nibbles are far lighter than Tom; they should slow down significantly. I remember that when I was watching this when I was little, I didn’t know it is wrong at all. All I think is like “Wow, Tom is so smart!” or “Oh no, Jerry and Nibbles are going to be in troubles!” Even though that might mislead me about physics, what I felt from the scene was what the filmmakers want kids to think. The purpose of this film is to entertain kids, not teaching the kids about the correct laws of physics. However, as an adult, we should recognize what’s wrong with it. Yet as an animator, we need to know how to trick out audience’s eyes without being noticed. 

Not only animated movie can play around with Newton’s Third Law, live action can do it too. Here is about Kung Fu again, which is mean to break the law of Action/Reaction. In Kung Fu Hustle, directed by Stephen Chow, as the strongest villain punches the landlady and her husband, he doesn’t step back to use one leg to support his body. 

This scene looks incredibly unrealistic because the lack of supporting force for the villain. When the villain exerts a huge force on the two people, he needs a same magnitude of force from the opposite direction acting on him to keep his body stand still. In the scene, the only force to support him from the opposite direction of his action would be the friction from the ground, since he stands straight up. The magnitude of friction depends on the fiction factor of the contact surface and the object’s mass. Since the villain is a normal size adult wearing a pair of sandals, there is definitely not enough friction for villain to stand still. However, the villain punches without a supporting force does scare me a lot because it tells me how strong he is. His straight-up standing distinguishes him from all the other bad or good characters, telling us that the main character will have a extremely hard time with this villain. I believe that is what the filmmaker wants the audience to feel. Breaking the law of physic is not because the filmmaker doesn’t understand the laws of physics, but because it is a way to tell story, to bring out points.   

It is very easy for both animators and live action filmmakers to make completely science fact production, but the films can be really boring. So they bend the laws of physics to tell the stories that we cannot experience in real life. The characters that we can’t see in real life are very attractive to us. One of the ways to show how special they are is to break Newton’s Third Law as they doing an action. They can have as little recoil as they want to; they can have different resulting acceleration and they can beat up people without reasonable supporting forces. They are not real, but they are fun to watch.