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Table of Contents

Thesis Introduction

Thesis Conclusion

Chap 1. The Uncanny Valley

History of the Valley

The Uncanny Valley Chart

The Uncanny Valley and Film/Animation

The Uncanny Valley and Video Games

The Uncanny Valley and the Soul

Crossing the Uncanny Valley

Chap 2. Character Design

Character Design/Character Sheet

Character Archetypes

Talk with Tony Chance

Interview with Stan Winston

Practical Interruption

Chap 3. Character Animation

Character Biped & Quadped

Character Gesture and the brain

Character Motion Systems

Image Metrics Animation

Practical Interruption

Chap 4. Conclusion

Thesis Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 2.3

Talk with Tony Chance

http://www.tonychance.net

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0151243

I met Tony during a talk in the Arts Institute at Bournemouth on a cold Monday morning but soon after getting a brief introduction of his past and current projects I was quickly warmed up with excitement that I would get to pick his brain.

Tony has been working in the industry for over 20 years and has a lot of big budget credits for some of the films that I have enjoyed and been inspired by. It wasn't just a “sit-down and listen” talk, we actually got to make some sketches and he went into detail about how the art departments process and create characters.

A point I picked up during his analysis of Sam Mendes “ Road to Perdition” was how the use of the narrative and the character's progression throughout the storyboarding process reapplied itself to the character and scenes. This ensured that the story was progressing in each scene, therefore ruling out any dead air or static shots that lead nowhere and just bored the viewer.

I asked Tony, is the key to creating an emotional connection with your audience, in fact placed within the writers, storyboard artists and directors of photography and not in fact with the delivery of the characters' portrayal by the actor for example, in the film 10,000 BC where there were long scenes with no speaking and the movie was mainly gesture driven? And I asked the same question in terms of animation with the animator and the character for example in the film 101 Dalmatians where animation was chosen for the dogs' characters in a lot of scenes instead of a live dog?

His answer relating to animation versus the real actor was predictable: that a real dog couldn't perform a lot of the scenes therefore an animated character was substituted and this decision had nothing to do with the character connecting with the viewer. This is the case in a lot of films using CGI characters over actors, and for 10,000 BC the choice of using long gesture driven scenes stems back to my earlier research into McLuhan who argues that low resolution images invite greater participation from the viewer as they have to cognitively build upon the low-res image by imagining the images' completion.

Although this is related to live action and not necessarily to the use of CGI or 3D animation, I still think that this process should be carried through to all productions of story telling. Therefore I created a flow chart that shows the process of creating a CG character, taking into account the story, the environment, the modeling and all the composition needed.

See Below

 

 

 

Continue to Chapter 2.4 - Interview with Stan Winston