Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie

Brown, William

doi:10.1177/1746847709104645

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Recently, live-action films have received ample theorization in relation to their inclusion of tropes and motifs of animation and gaming (Brown, 2009; Crawford, 2013; Galloway, 2006; Geiger and Littau, 2013; Gurevitch, 2010; Lowood, 2006, 2009; Ng, 2013; Niedenthal, 2007). This is what Geiger and Littau (2013: 2–3) call the ‘trace’ of one media’s intermedial currency to another.…”

Section: The Animated Codescapementioning

confidence: 99%

The 3-D Animated Codescape: Imperfection and Digital Labor Zones in Wall-E (2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Wagner

Jang

2016

Animation

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Live-action film and video games share a presence and convergence in each media's visuality and narrative storytelling; this is especially apparent over the last four decades-from Tron (1982) to Run Lola Run (1998) to The Beach (2000) and now 'machinima' as new computational genre cinema via Minecraft (2014). To complicate matters, only recently are cinema and video games now tropes in 3-D computer animation, with films such as Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012) absorbing these cultural relations. In this article, the authors explicate on two interwoven yet separable themes in the Walt Disney/Pixar films. First, they theorize aspects of the 'imperfect aesthetic' as connected to an audience and industry's desire to aesthetically 'deskill'-as explained in John Roberts's article 'Art after deskilling' (2010)-the image of its characters, in the process making the characters more vulnerable and thus more endearing. This imperfect aesthetic is typically associated with avant-garde animation or animated shorts, yet to link imperfection to 3-D computer animation illustrates a new visual tendency since the 2000s. Second, they draw on the scholarship of Maurizio Lazzarato to relate immaterial labor to what each character does in their animated worlds, what they call 'digital labor zones': the Wall-E robot is prone to affective labor while in Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph, the goofy villain, begins to question the reasons for his rampaging behavior and the labor behind such actions.

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Section: The Animated Codescapementioning

confidence: 99%

The 3-D Animated Codescape: Imperfection and Digital Labor Zones in Wall-E (2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Wagner

Jang

2016

Animation

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“…Hardware devices that capture the movement of the sensor on the space are used to generate a record of the animation of the actor [1,27]. Many movies were acted by virtual actors whose animations were captured using motion capture systems, such as ''Titanic'' (1997), ''The Lord of the Rings'' (2001), ''Beowulf'' (2007), and ''Rise of the Planet of the Apes'' (2011) [1,28,29]. Stoll et al [30] used eight synchronized highresolution cameras with 40 frames per second to capture the performance of a real actor in loose apparel.…”

Section: Virtual Body Animationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Blend shapes techniques that are based on the scanned faces were used. Facial animation was performed using motion capture systems in ''Beowulf'' movie (2007) [28]. Contour TM system by Movar Ò presents a facial system using a phosphoric makeup.…”

Section: Virtual Facial Animationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Low-cost System for Generating Near-realistic Virtual Actors

Afifi

Hussain

Ibrahim

et al. 2015

3D Res

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Generating virtual actors is one of the most challenging fields in computer graphics. The reconstruction of a realistic virtual actor has been paid attention by the academic research and the film industry to generate human-like virtual actors. Many movies were acted by human-like virtual actors, where the audience cannot distinguish between real and virtual actors. The synthesis of realistic virtual actors is considered a complex process. Many techniques are used to generate a realistic virtual actor; however they usually require expensive hardware equipment. In this paper, a low-cost system that generates near-realistic virtual actors is presented. The facial features of the real actor are blended with a virtual head that is attached to the actor's body. Comparing with other techniques that generate virtual actors, the proposed system is considered a low-cost system that requires only one camera that records the scene without using any expensive hardware equipment. The results of our system show that the system generates good nearrealistic virtual actors that can be used on many applications.

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“… 7. Scholars who have applied the Uncanny Valley to computer-animated film include Bestor (2016), Bode (2006), Brown (2009), Butler and Joschko (2009), Kunz (2015), and Matrix (2006). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Carefully Constructed Yet Curiously Real: How Major American Animation Studios Generate Empathy Through a Shared Style of Character Design

Rooij¹

2019

Animation

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Contemporary computer-animated films by the major American animation studios Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks are often described as evoking (extremely) emotional responses from their ever-growing audiences. Following Murray Smith’s assertion that characters are central to comprehending audiences’ engagement with narratives in Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (1995), this article points to a specific style of characterization as a possible reason for the overwhelming emotional response to and great success of these films, exemplified in contemporary examples including Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, 2015), Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014) and How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, 2010). Drawing on a variety of scholarly work including Stephen Prince’s ‘perceptual realism’, Scott McCloud’s model of ‘amplification through simplification’ and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory, this article will argue how a shared style of character design – defined as a paradoxical combination of lifelikeness and abstraction – plays a significant role in the empathetic potential of these films. This will result in the proposition of a new and reverse phenomenon to Mori’s Uncanny Valley, dubbed the Pixar Peak, where, as opposed to a steep drop, audiences reach a climactic height in empathy levels when presented with this specific type of characterization.

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Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie

Cited by 11 publications

References 15 publications

The 3-D Animated Codescape: Imperfection and Digital Labor Zones in Wall-E (2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

The 3-D Animated Codescape: Imperfection and Digital Labor Zones in Wall-E (2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

A Low-cost System for Generating Near-realistic Virtual Actors

Carefully Constructed Yet Curiously Real: How Major American Animation Studios Generate Empathy Through a Shared Style of Character Design

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