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Animation of hand‐drawn sketches is an adorable art. It allows the animator to generate animations with expressive freedom and requires significant expertise. In this work, we introduce a novel sketch animation framework designed to address inherent challenges, such as motion extraction, motion transfer, and occlusion. The framework takes an exemplar video input featuring a moving object and utilizes a robust motion transfer technique to animate the input sketch. We show comparative evaluations that demonstrate the superior performance of our method over existing sketch animation techniques. Notably, our approach exhibits a higher level of user accessibility in contrast to conventional sketch‐based animation systems, positioning it as a promising contributor to the field of sketch animation. https://graphics-research-group.github.io/SketchAnim/ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of learning‐based motion in‐betweening techniques offers animators a more efficient way to animate characters. However, existing non‐generative methods either struggle to support long transition generation or produce results that lack diversity. Meanwhile, diffusion models have shown promising results in synthesizing diverse and high‐quality motions driven by text and keyframes. However, in these methods, keyframes often serve as a guide rather than a strict constraint and can sometimes be ignored when keyframes are sparse. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight yet effective diffusion‐based motion in‐betweening framework that generates animations conforming to keyframe constraints. We incorporate keyframe constraints into the training phase to enhance robustness in handling various constraint densities. Moreover, we employ relative positional encoding to improve the model's generalization on long range in‐betweening tasks. This approach enables the model to learn from short animations while generating realistic in‐betweening motions spanning thousands of frames. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our framework using the newly proposed metrics K‐FID, K‐Diversity, and K‐Error, designed to evaluate generative in‐betweening methods. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing diffusion‐based methods across various lengths and keyframe densities. We also show that our method can be applied to text‐driven motion synthesis, offering fine‐grained control over the generated results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the months following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty in all sectors of higher education scrambled to find solutions for teaching and learning safely. This article examines a pedagogical partnership between acting and animation professors who devised a series of collaborative classroom projects for their students. The two faculty reflect on the outcomes of the project, which unfolded in three different iterations over two semesters and brought undergraduate and graduate students together in collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams. An aspirational vision for future collaborations sets out how this pedagogical partnership might be further developed to enhance students' training and learning in both the visual and performing arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating facial animations using 3D computer graphics represents a very laborious and time-consuming task. Among the numberless approaches for animating faces, the use of blendshapes remains the most common solution because of their simplicity and the ability to produce high-quality results. This approach, however, is also characterized by important drawbacks. With the traditional animation suites, to select the blendshapes to be activated animators are generally requested to memorize the mapping between the blendshapes and the influenced mesh vertices; alternatively, they need to adopt a trial-and-error search within the whole library of available blendshapes. Moreover, the level of expressiveness that can be reached may be lower than expected; this is due to the fact that the possibility to apply transformations to vertices different than just linear translations and mechanisms for adding, e.g., exaggerations, are typically not integrated into the same animation environment. To tackle these issues, this article proposes an immersive virtual reality-based interface that leverages sketches for the direct manipulation of blendshapes. Animators can draw both linear and curved strokes, which are used to automatically extract information about the blendshape to be activated and its weight, the trajectories that associated vertices have to follow, as well as the timing of the overall animation. A user study was carried out with the aim of evaluating the proposed approach on several representative animations tasks. Both objective and subjective measurements were collected. Experimental results showed the benefits of the devised interface in terms of task completion time, animation accuracy, and usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue addresses the historical invisibility of women and genderqueer animators. It is part of several continued efforts to document their contributions, raise awareness about their animated work, and centre the voices of female and genderqueer animators in the academic discourse of animation. The editorial provides brief overviews of each article, making emphasis on their shared themes and connections. In this issue we can find a wide range of critical perspectives, that examine how these animators face conventional representations. The authors analyse independent filmmaking and animated documentaries that break conventional animation practices, using feminist approaches and defying dominant narratives. Furthermore, our articles offer a wide range of points of view, including feminist critiques on the construction of iconic Disney princesses and the impact of gender-inclusive writing in contemporary animated series. We aim to contribute to a more inclusive appreciation and wider understanding of the present and future of animation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce an interactive tool to intuitively make inbetween charts for cutout character movements (i.e., transitioning from one image to another), inspired by cartoon animators' techniques. Given several keyframes, this system constructs trajectory-guided sliders that enable users to directly adjust inbetween values on a screen. In addition, these sliders can visualize simple inbetween timings to provide guidance on cartoon-like motions, such as animating "on twos" and "slow-in/out" in the background of the slider. Thus, the users can intuitively explore inbetween charts until they are satisfied. This method is simple enough to easily implement in existing animation-authoring tools. We conduct a user study with novice and amateur users and confirm that the proposed slider (including the guidance function) is effective for manually constructing the inbetween charts envisioned by the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying and implementing equitable participatory planning processes is challenging for city planners. Through a qualitative analysis of the Families and Educators for Safe Cycling Project (FESC), an active school travel (AST) project in Toronto (Canada), we identify a potential new path to increase the range of voices heard by planners and decision makers. Specifically, we present community animation and animators as an effective approach for community engagement in AST planning through analyzing 27 semistructured interviews, reviewing key project documents, and coding key themes. We showcase how community animation can play a key role in the meaningful engagement of school communities by deepening and enriching the participatory planning process. We conclude by suggesting that community animators can foster more equitable participatory planning processes by working to include historically marginalized communities within urban planning. Specific groups of people, such as school communities, continue to be excluded from participatory planning processes. By providing insights into the value of community animators, this research allows planners to understand, conceptualize, and apply more equitable participatory planning processes during infrastructure development. Though the case is based on a specific program related to AST in Toronto, the results can assist planners in other communities in enriching their local engagement processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetic group Cántico developed its work mainly between the 40s and 50s of the last century in Córdoba (Spain). Until 2011, the interest aroused in Hispanic literary historiography focused on the eccentric poetic space they occupied in post-civil war literature. The publication of the Diario by Juan Bernier, the main animator of the group, surprised and overwhelmed by the exhaustiveness and crudeness with which he reconstructs his homosexual pederastic practices, those of his companions and the repressive environment against dissent, specially through the mechanism of social shame. The comparison of two autobiographical texts, Bernier's Diario and that of his groupmate, Ricardo Molina, allows us to discover the essential influence of André Gide's pederastic ethical proposal. Studying this intellectual and literary ascendancy as a tolerated device for negotiating desire towards ephebes is an essential chapter of the contemporary homosexual archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the Manchukuo Film Association (Manying) has largely attended to documentaries, newsreels, and live-action films featuring Li Xianglan, neglecting animation. This article examines the animated film-making activities of the North China Film Company, a branch of Manying located in wartime Peking, by focusing on Chinese animator Liang Jin and a few Japanese animators such as Asada Isamu and Onozawa Wataru. With an animated filmmaking philosophy of territorialization and localization, Manying nonetheless created a de-territorialized world that enabled it to live multiple afterlives in socialist cinema, despite the institutional efforts to erase it from the history of Chinese cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Computer Sciences Institute is the property of Lublin University of Technology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diálogo com a Economia Criativa is the property of Dialogo com a Economia Criativa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Working in the animation industry today typically necessitates using digital tools, occupying seats on a software subscription service provided by the studio, but not all animators employ these tools exclusively. Analyzing interviews with animators who fell in love with drawing or sculpture before finding a career in animation, this study explores how and why they persist in an industry that seems to alienate as much as it enchants. While many find digital tools vital to their own work, the pressure to keep up with a diversifying array of software is made all the more difficult by myriad abstract interfaces composed of windows, icons, and pointers. The dominant strategy in the development of these digital tools remains oriented around optical interfaces, but animators improvise tactile tactics around and within the studio’s systems. The tactility of traditional tools enables creative processes, and demonstrating mastery is vital for cultivating a reputation as a creative. On the other hand, demonstrating technical and professional expertise with digital tools is critical. In a career where contracts tend to be short-term and moving between studios is frequent, animators must mobilize their education, portfolio, and reputation to demonstrate both professionalism and creativity. Analyzing interviews with thirty animators based in Atlanta, Georgia, this study argues animators enjoy the autonomy to incorporate the traditional and tactile into the otherwise purely digital pipeline and do so in surprising ways, suggesting that these skills have adapted to the cultural expectations of what it means to be a creative professional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Industrial Relations / Relations Industrielles is the property of Universite Laval, Department of Industrial Relations and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the arrival of Godzilla (1954), the science-fiction genre of tokusatsu started booming its monsters by adapting different DIY techniques. The post-war period defined a collaborative effort between artists who worked within limited creative conditions due to economic restraints. They experimented with unusual materials for making monsters and image techniques to create visual effects on the filmed screen. Sculptors, art students, freelance workers and animators started collaborating to discover ways to produce suitmation and strategies to make the monster seem alive. Specifically, in Toho Studios, the Special Effects Department, directed by Tsuburaya Eiji, helped create a generation of monster-making specialists that spread to other studios. Along with Iizuka Sadao, they produced special effects using the animation stand and animation-related techniques, such as optical composition, to create the monster zigzag gleaming rays that became the staple of tokusatsu monsters. The analogue era of monster-making only starts to change from the Heisei Gamera series (1995–2006), where analogue and digital intertwine and culminate in Shin Godzilla (2016). This article investigates the possibilities of monster creation and adaptation and how this challenge created a space for hybrid images in the contemporary Japanese media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

the objective of this article is to understand, from below, the practices of a profession focused on others which is still little studied: socio-cultural animation. From data collected by direct observation during a field survey, the text examines a particular case by its mode of organization set up within a vacation stay: a pedagogy of freedom. It discusses the disruption to the core of socio-cultural animators' profession, which relies on face-to-face pedagogical situations, before describing the construction of a relationship of contiguity with child-initiated commitments. Thus, it addresses another relational configuration which reinterprets the animation professionals' educational relationship to the children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the modern challenges facing society is finding ways to counteract hypodynamia. This article discusses the ability of educational institutions to enrich the forms and means of extracurricular physical activity through sports-animation practice, in order to stimulate the active participation of adolescents and increase the volume of their motor activity. Presented is the regulatory conditioning for the formation of professional-pedagogical competence for the realization of sports-animation activity. The authors justify the fact that maximising the engagement of the free time of the younger generation will regressively affect its activities with negative health dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the "Animation Council of the Philippines (ACPI)" joined forces with the "Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA)" and "Iloilo Science and Technology University", formerly "Western Visayas College of Science and Technology (WVCT)", to promote technical and vocational (Tech-Voc) education after the 2007 introduction of the 2D Assistant animation program, five batches of applicants totalling more than 100 people, were recruited. What happened to them now that they had completed the animation program? Now, where are they? Do they now work in the targeted animation sector or hold another position? Setting up this tracer aims to track animators' whereabouts, career paths, and employment in a given sector. The data from this study will help technical schools and tertiary institutions improve their curricula and skills in pursuing nationally and internationally competitive and high-quality graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kanada Yoshinori is considered one of the most important animators in anime history. He turned the constraints imposed by anime’s “limited animation” techniques on their head thanks to his unique approach to drawing and timing on works such as Invincible Super Man Zambot 3 (Muteki Chôjin Zambot 3, 1977) or Galaxy Express 999 (Ginga Tetsudô 999, 1979). This paper aims to consider Kanada’s place and importance in anime history by reevaluating the role of animated movement in aesthetic and media analysis. Tom Gunning’s concept of “potential movement” serves as a basis to understand how animation works—how it is created and how it functions—and two of its central parameters, “rhythm” and “tension.” These are then used to explain the appeal of Kanada’s animation in aesthetic terms and its transmedia success in the environment of the “anime boom” of the 1970s and 1980s. Aesthetic and technical parameters can then become tools to explain the success and spreadability of certain trends and styles over anime history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII, Historia del Arte is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many disciplines have adopted component-based principles to avail themselves of the many advantages they bring, especially component reusability. In a short time, the component-based architecture became a renown branch in the IT world and the center of interest of many researchers. Much work has been conducted in this context for the verification of component-based applications (CBAs). However, the main focus has been on the structural aspect of such compositions, while the behavioral aspect has seldom been dealt with. In this paper, our goal is to close this gap and propose a formal approach to verify the behavioral correctness of CBAs. We first define a set of requirements to be satisfied by the structure and the behavior of a CBA, represented by a set of interactions that may occur between their components. Then, we build a formal Event-B model to represent these requirements in a rigorous and non-ambiguous way. The use of the Event-B refinement technique allows us to master the complexity of CBAs by introducing their elements in an incremental manner. The correctness of the development is ensured by establishing a set of proof obligations, under the Rodin platform, and also by animating it with the ProB animator/model checker. The approach is illustrated by a running example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The animation sector is becoming increasingly vital to India’s economic development, where attracting and retaining talent has become a top priority for studios operating in India. The animation industry operates on the same old capitalist premise—cut production costs by recruiting fewer regular and more irregular employees. Animators often move to wherever they find work, adding to the feeling of displacement and resentment. This paper reviews how the compensation practices in the animation industry in India impact the retention of artists and offers suggestions for improving workforce retention, which is currently at 25.6% for animators and 22.3% for 3D artists, with the turnover rates more than double the global average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of Augusta Ghidiglia Quintavalle, the art historian who played such an important role in the study, valorisation, conservation and protection of Emilian works of art between the early 1950s and the 1970s, has still been investigated too marginally in the current state of studies. A superintendency official, superintendent, and ordinator of public galleries such as the Estense in Modena or the Nazionale in Parma, Ghidiglia Quintavalle was, starting from those same years, the animator and promoter of numerous restorations and conservation actions, specifically regarding the immense and precious heritage of mural paintings that she had the privilege of governing for several decades. Sites that favoured the discovery of unpublished works and the staging of temporary exhibitions that, critically, were part of what is referred to in restoration history manuals as the "season of the detachments" and the "hunt" for sinopie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatio-temporal coherency is a major challenge in synthesizing high quality videos, particularly in synthesizing human videos that contain rich global and local deformations. To resolve this challenge, previous approaches have resorted to different features in the generation process aimed at representing appearance and motion. However, in the absence of strict mechanisms to guarantee such disentanglement, a separation of motion from appearance has remained challenging, resulting in spatial distortions and temporal jittering that break the spatio-temporal coherency. Motivated by this, we here propose LEO, a novel framework for human video synthesis, placing emphasis on spatio-temporal coherency. Our key idea is to represent motion as a sequence of flow maps in the generation process, which inherently isolate motion from appearance. We implement this idea via a flow-based image animator and a Latent Motion Diffusion Model (LMDM). The former bridges a space of motion codes with the space of flow maps, and synthesizes video frames in a warp-and-inpaint manner. LMDM learns to capture motion prior in the training data by synthesizing sequences of motion codes. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis suggests that LEO significantly improves coherent synthesis of human videos over previous methods on the datasets TaichiHD, FaceForensics and CelebV-HQ. In addition, the effective disentanglement of appearance and motion in LEO allows for two additional tasks, namely infinite-length human video synthesis, as well as content-preserving video editing. Project page: https://wyhsirius.github.io/LEO-project/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of cinema history have long identified the variety-theater tradition of lightning artistry among the most crucial influences upon the emergence of motion-picture animation. This article looks specifically at the work of the prominent illustrator and animator Winsor McCay, and examines his popular vaudeville routine entitled "The Seven Ages of Man", first performed in June 1906, both as an innovative lightning-sketch routine and as a proving ground for his trailblazing techniques of motion-picture animation. The article surveys the history of the lightning-sketch performance mode prior to McCay, then considers what can be gleaned about McCay's own theatrical career as a lightning artist from written descriptions of his vaudeville appearances, and concludes with a discussion of how McCay's years of frequent lightning-sketch performances may have influenced his approach to cinematic animation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clinical learning activities involving Indigenous patient actors that specifically address the development of culturally safe care skills among medical students are important in order to improve health care for Indigenous people. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to strict physical distancing regulations and regional lockdowns that made the in-person delivery of Simulated Cultural Communication Scenarios (SCCS) with Indigenous patient actors impossible due to the disproportionate risk that public health emergencies pose for Indigenous communities. As the pandemic continued in 2021, we co-created a Virtual Visit approach to SCCS for the education of culturally safe care to pre-clerkship medical students. We report on student and tutor evaluation of these virtual sessions and contextualize our findings with our previous results delivering In-Person SCCSs. We found that Virtual Visit SCCS were highly effective in providing authentic exposure to and feedback from Indigenous patients. However, students rated their learning outcomes with Virtual Visit lower than the In-person approach to SCCS. We recommend formal training on interacting with patients in virtual care scenarios prior to Virtual Visit SCCS. We also found that exposure to SCCS with Indigenous animators has the potential to conjure up a diverse spectrum of sometimes unresolved negative feelings related to colonialism among students and tutors including discomfort, embarrassment, and anxiety. Our findings underscore the importance of resolving these sentiments within the safe environment of a classroom. To prepare Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous students and tutors adequately, it is important to acknowledge and critically deconstruct the embodiment of colonialism and Indigenous-settler relations when teaching physicians, as well as future physicians, preparedness for culturally safe care of Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authoress presents the history of creation and individual departments of the Kalisz Lan District Museum in Kalisz, with particular emphasis on their oldest parts, i.e. artefacts collected in the pre-war Kalisz Land Museum. She proves that the basis of the institution’s collection is the old (pre-war) legacy – lost, but partially recovered after World War II. The researcher presents the topic on examples, outlining possible directions for provenance research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gramsci's work has had important applications in the Latin American political philosophy. Instead, the development of the concepts of hegemony and folklore in the social sciences and cultural studies in Latin America is rather less known to the international public. The anthropologist Alberto M. Cirese was the main animator of Gramsci's prolific season dedicated to popular culture. The initial center of ramification of that was Mexico City, which from 1979 to 1982 saw him as the protagonist of intense workshops and discussions between anthropologists, sociologists of culture, communication scientists. The author reconstructs the intellectual, political, and cultural context within which the unprecedent figure of the "Mexican Cirese" lies. This research reveals, to some extent, a divergent image of the intellectual, usually portraited as the 'normalizer' of Gramscian folklore, signaling the innovative outcomes for overseas sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a case study focused on the development of LOVOT, a consumer home robot that went on sale in 2019. Since its unveiling in 2018, approximately 20,000 people have visited the LOVOT demonstration event as of the end of July 2019. In practical terms, LOVOT lives at home with the user long-term, similar to a companion animal; LOVOT performs continuous natural motion for user comfort. We applied movements using professional animator techniques based on the principles of traditional animation to LOVOT. We have identified specific practical techniques in home robot animation through iterative prototyping in our synergetic development of character animation techniques and tools. In this paper, we introduce our practical methods to develop many behaviors in a single robotic agent and is the collaborative efforts of a group of people with diverse professional backgrounds. Furthermore, we summarize how traditional techniques of character animation were applied, and new techniques were required from the perspective of professional animators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue des Sciences de l'Education is the property of Revue des Sciences de l'Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the development of an entrepreneurial community focused on civic wealth creation. This case study identifies how a team of community entrepreneurs successfully leveraged their relationships to develop a shared vision and invest complementary assets to re-build a defunct cotton mill and form an entrepreneurial community around it to create civic wealth through the creation of opportunities of others and curation of the space. Building on the case, the paper explicates the process through which the entrepreneurial community is formed with the intent to create civic wealth, elaborates on the challenges of maintaining dual roles of animator and entrepreneur and highlights the importance of the maintenance of relationships in entrepreneurial communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common formal methods workflow consists of formalising a model followed by applying model checking and proof techniques. Once an appropriate level of certainty is reached, code generators are used in order to gain executable code. In this paper, we propose a different approach: instead of generating code from formal models, it is also possible to embed a model checker or animator into applications in order to use the formal models themselves at runtime. We present a Java API to the ProB animator and model checker. We describe several case studies that use this API as enabling technology to interact with a formal specification at runtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research provides an initial investigation into strategies for creating reference performances for animation. The term reference performance has various meanings in animation production; in this article, I use it to refer to a recording of a person performing physical and emotional cues, from which performance elements of an animated character may be derived. Beginning with Max Fleischer's invention of the rotoscope process in 1915, animation studios began to record actors as a means to inject greater believability into the movements and expressions of animated characters. Throughout this article, I reference Pallant's understanding of 'believability' as a '[reconciliation of] realism within the animated form'. While various methods exist today to capture reference performances, it remains axiomatic that the utility of the reference is only as good as a performer's ability to produce the desired performance. While seasoned actors would seem ideally suited to the task, large-scale animation studios frequently require animators to film their own reference performances, even though the animators may have limited (or non-existent) acting experience. By comparison, smaller studios and independent productions may not have the time or ability for each animator to self-produce reference; instead, they may opt for an animation director/supervisor to record reference for every character, to work from clips available through online video sites (e.g. YouTube) or to forgo video reference altogether. This research examines the potential for acting experience to enhance reference performances and specifically explores three different preconditions of experience when producing animation reference: an actor with no animation experience, an animator with no acting experience and an academic with both acting and animation experience. As an additional site of inquiry, this research explores the use of head-mounted cameras in the production of animation reference as a means to more fully and reliably capture the research participants' expressive range. This research engages with ethnographic and autoethnographic research models to compare the creative choices of each participant and their ability to produce meaningful expressions, gestures and body movements as reference performance for a short, auteur 3D animated film in a predominantly realistic style. From these analyses, the maximal performance utility of each participant is gauged. By extension, this limited data provides an initial suggestion that acting experience is an essential precondition when producing useful reference performances for the type and style of animation explored in this study. Furthermore, this article relates the acting strategies of its participants to the acting theory of Ivana Chubbuck (2004) and the theory of emotional effector patterns as described by Bloch et al. (1987). This research suggests that these practice-informed performance theories may prove useful to animator when producing their own reference, regardless of performance experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex deformable face-rigs have many independent parameters that control the shape of the object. A human face has upwards of 50 parameters (FACS Action Units), making conventional UI controls hard to find and operate. Animators address this problem by tediously hand-crafting in-situ layouts of UI controls that serve as visual deformation proxies, and facilitate rapid shape exploration. We propose the automatic creation of such in-situ UI control layouts. We distill the design choices made by animators into mathematical objectives that we optimize as the solution to an integer quadratic programming problem. Our evaluation is three-fold: we show the impact of our design principles on the resulting layouts; we show automated UI layouts for complex and diverse face rigs, comparable to animator handcrafted layouts; and we conduct a user study showing our UI layout to be an effective approach to face-rig manipulation, preferable to a baseline slider interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about autobiographical works and life of Carlo Rim, a French screenwriter, by its animators such Marius Richard, socialist militant, journalist at the Petit Provençal , father of two children including Jean-Marius. Topics include multiple facets of Rim shed light on his double gift for admiration and friendship of a recognized Parisian figure; and bookish portrait of the actor, who is editor-in-chief of two publications of high quality by model and their contributors.

Copyright of SituArte is the property of Universidad del Zulia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Taking the example of early films by Bob Clampett, one of the most important animators of Classical Hollywood cinema, the paper explores the dichotomy between the so-called artistic animation and animation as a product of the Hollywood assembly lines and mass production system. While the former is seen as a proper art form and has a venerable treatment in animation studies, the latter is underappreciated, neglected and often dealt with in a patronizing way. This dichotomy is the main reason why the field of animation studies is very often elitist and full of biased and unbalanced approaches, wherein modernist works are seriously analysed, while the lighter, entertainment-oriented Hollywood fare is dismissed with condescension. However, as also argued by Fawell, the light touch and elegance of these films today makes them among the most significant works to come out of Hollywood. Bob Clampett directed 87 films in his career and the present paper deals with his early phase, namely the 40 Looney Tunes, which were all made in black-and-white and starred Porky. Although his later phase is beyond doubt more important and considered today among the most intriguing contributions to Hollywood animation, many of his early works also brim with energy and a feeling of vitality. Clampett’s early phase has so far been inadequately explored, but is also of immense importance for any serious analysis of the development of his style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to examine the interface potentially holding between footing and the speech acts performed in the main Qurʼanic dialogue of Allah and Iblīs (Q15:32-43). The study utilizes a synthetic approach that combines two theoretical strands: (i) Erving Goffman’s (1979, 1981) interaction model of footing as orchestrated by the speaker roles of animator, author, and principal; (ii) Searle’s (1976) classification scheme of illocutionary acts and their felicity conditions. Crucially, the pragmatically enhanced footing analysis of the Qurʼanic speech event that binds Allah and Iblīs has demonstrated how the two participants perform illocutionary acts that determine their theologically felicitous speaker roles as animator, author, and/or principal. Five categories of illocutionary acts have been identified in the overall participation framework of the dialogue: expressives, directives, declarations, representatives, and commissives. Based on these categories, both Allah and Iblīs have performed acts as authors, whose utterances are animated via the reportorial style of the Qurʼanic text; further, the perlocutions of certain acts have manifested the discursive positions of each participant in a way that reflects his manipulating speaker role in the speech event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A motion retargeting process is necessary as the body size and proportion of the actors are generally different from those of the target characters. However, the original spatial relationship between the multiple characters and the environment is easily broken when using previous motion retargeting methods, which are generally performed for each character independently. Therefore, time‐consuming manual adjustments by animators are usually required to obtain satisfactory results. To address these issues, we present a novel multicharacter motion retargeting method that preserves various types of spatial relationships between characters and environments. We establish a unified deformation‐based framework for the motion retargeting of multiple characters (more than two) or nonhuman characters with complex interactions. Also, an interactive motion editing interface with immediate feedback to the user is provided. We experimentally show that our method achieves a speedup when compared with previous motion retargeting methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoring an appealing animation for a virtual character is a challenging task. In computer‐aided keyframe animation artists define the key poses of a character by manipulating its underlying skeletons. To look plausible, a character pose must respect many ill‐defined constraints, and so the resulting realism greatly depends on the animator's skill and knowledge. Animation software provide tools to help in this matter, relying on various algorithms to automatically enforce some of these constraints. The increasing availability of motion capture data has raised interest in data‐driven approaches to pose design, with the potential of shifting more of the task of assessing realism from the artist to the computer, and to provide easier access to nonexperts. In this article, we propose such a method, relying on neural networks to automatically learn the constraints from the data. We describe an efficient tool for pose design, allowing Naïve users to intuitively manipulate a pose to create character animations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daisy Yan Du's edited collection I Chinese Animation and Socialism i , the first English-language book on the subject, brings together Chinese animators' behind-the-scenes accounts of their art and industry. I Chinese Animation and Socialism i consists of chapters written by animation practitioners from diverse professional backgrounds, including animators, a photographer, a composer, an animation voice actress and a screenwriter, and it also incorporates interviews conducted by Du. The book comes out of an animators' roundtable forum, "Chinese Animation and (Post)Socialism", which Du organized at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in April 2017. [Extracted from the article]

Entering the new era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0, we have grown used to the technology in education and, in particular, learning languages. The study aimed to explore and describe the use of Cartoon Story Maker, a digital comic software, in writing practice. It focuses on comparing the difficulties students experience in writing using Cartoon Story Maker and without the media. Besides, students’ responses were also investigated. The methods used included observation, planning, implementation, analysis, and data presentation. Data were obtained from the compositions and questionnaires of 30 students of STMIK STIKOM Indonesia. The findings showed that some problems did not occur repeatedly. Moreover, the students gave positive responses on the use of the software in writing practice because they could relate the writing experience to their real life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sanctuary on Marian Hill in Levoča is undoubtedly one of the most important Marian Shrines in Slovakia. Especially in the last four decades, it has received more attention not only in Slovakia, but also in Europe and Worldwide. In 1984 it was declared as Basilica Minor, in 1995 it was visited by Pope John Paul II, in 2005 it was included in the European Marian Network association and in 2019 it hosted members of the European Marian Network on the occasion of their seventeenth regular session. The European Marian Network links twenty Marian Shrines the same as the number of decades in the Rosary. The best known Sanctuary of almost each European country was chosen - also The Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Visitation in Levoča. The Sanctuary Rectors and Animators meet each year at regular sessions to know each other better and to understand better the needs of the millions of pilgrims or visitors. In the sketched context, the article presents the Marian Hill in Levoča focusing on its active presence among twenty most important Marian Shrines in Europe in 2005 - 2019 (presents its latest and rather global history). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this study is to find out TEYL students’ perception and experience in using Cartoon Story Maker and Comic Life in creating short story for young learners and to identify their obstacles and problems in using those applications. This qualitative study has been conducted in a TEYL class in one English Department in West Java. The sample of the study consisted of thirty students. Questionnaires and interviews were used as data collection techniques in this study. The questionnaires were used to collect evidence from students about their experience and perception towards the use of CSM and Comic Life in creating short story for young learners. The questionnaires used in this study focus on exploring students’ experience and perception toward the use CSM and Comic Life in creating short story for young learners, whereas interview was used to explored more the data about obstacles faced by the students in using CSM and Comic Life. The data collected from the respondents were gathered together to be analyzed using qualitative analysis of interactive models. The results of this study are TEYL students have positive perception toward the use of CSM and Comic Life in creating short story for young learners, CSM is easier and more suitable to use than Comic Life in creating story for young learners, and the obstacles faced by students are choosing appropriate template for young learners, writing text in text tool or bubble, and record the voice in audio bubble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Background: Building on partnerships with Indigenous communities and with the support of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, faculty created groundbreaking, authentic cultural immersion curriculum designed to foster culturally safe interpersonal skills and cultural understanding. However, structural barriers to the teaching of clinical communication skills for culturally safe care to Indigenous patients persisted. To address this challenge, faculty collaborated with Indigenous animators on the co-creation of a new teaching modality of Simulated Cultural Communication Scenarios. We evaluated student learning experience, the faculty teaching experience, the attainment of teaching goals, benefits, and areas for improvement for this approach. Methods: We piloted 9 Simulated Cultural Communication Scenarios with 64 medical students and 17 tutors. We collected quantitative and qualitative data regarding their experiences and perceptions of the new curriculum. The quantitative data was statistically summarized, and the qualitative data was coded and thematically analyzed. Results: The emergent themes indicate that co-created Simulated Cultural Communication Scenarios support the acquisition of culturally safe clinical skills because the modality fosters authentic, safe, context rich, and anti-oppressive patient dialogue with Indigenous animators. Recommendations for optimizing the sessions included ensuring tutors have a deep understanding of the significance of cultural safety in patient care. As the pedagogy is different from the familiar standardized clinical skills sessions, tutors and students benefit from education on the pedagogical approach. Conclusion: Simulated Cultural Communication Scenarios, co-created with cultural insiders and academic educators, represent an authentic education approach to teaching culturally safe clinical encounters. The findings contribute to our understanding of translating social accountability into the clinical setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers further reflections on a chapter I published in the anthology Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital. I begin by exploring the reticence artists and critics have shown in attempting to define what experimental animation is, and I then offer a way to provide a definition without delimiting what it is or can be. Subsequent to this, three additional traits of experimental animation are added to the original list of defining features that were published in the original article. They are as follows: the subversion of unchecked assumptions about filmic experience, a willingness to potentially alienate viewers, and the application of symbolism in which viewers might not be able to discern the artist's original intentions. Following this, the unique relationship experimental animation has with the commercial realm (notably in idents, title sequences and music videos) is also considered. Finally, the conclusion points towards the experimental animator's creative process as a further avenue of exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), also known as The Large Glass, is one of Marcel Duchamp's most complex works and has elicited a wealth of scholarly suggestions as to its meaning and sources of inspiration. Nevertheless, although it is recognized that Duchamp's early practice as a maker of cartoons paved the way for an oeuvre replete in wit and wordplay, the inspiration Duchamp drew from well-known French caricatures received almost no attention. To fill this void, the present article proposes that The Large Glass was based on the caricature A New Game of Rings, issued by Charles Vernier on the eve of the 1848 presidential elections for the Second Republic. Upon close inspection, Vernier's satirical cartoon suggests not only the composition of The Large Glass, but also themes that are central to Duchamp's oeuvre: games, absurdity, and hilarity; chance, whether uncontrolled or controlled; and the dichotomy between male and female, reality and idea. Moreover, the political scenario presented in the mid-nineteenth century caricature had considerable relevance for the situation of the Third Republic when Duchamp created his work. Thus the tragicomedy of the Bride and her Bachelors represented in The Large Glass may be said to epitomize the changing relationship between Marianne – the female personification of the Republic – and the French people during the turmoil of the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new framework for sketch-based modeling and animation of 3D organic shapes that can work entirely in an intuitive 2D domain, enabling a playful, casual experience. Unlike previous sketch-based tools, our approach does not require a tedious part-based multi-view workflow with the explicit specification of an animation rig. Instead, we combine 3D inflation with a novel rigidity-preserving, layered deformation model, ARAP-L, to produce a smooth 3D mesh that is immediately ready for animation. Moreover, the resulting model can be animated from a single viewpoint --- and without the need to handle unwanted inter-penetrations, as required by previous approaches. We demonstrate the benefit of our approach on a variety of examples produced by inexperienced users as well as professional animators. For less experienced users, our single-view approach offers a simpler modeling and animating experience than working in a 3D environment, while for professionals, it offers a quick and casual workspace for ideation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to analyse the cause and effect relationship between the emotional labour, burnout, organizational commitment level and turnover intention of animators. In line with the study purpose, data is collected with survey forms. Survey forms are applied to animators working in the accommodation business in Antalya between August-September 2019 by professional interviewers. 400 animators selected with convenience sampling form the study sample. As a result of the structural equation model analysis conducted to analyse the cause and effect relationship between continuous variables obtained from the data, statistically significant findings were obtained. Study results are presented based on these findings. Lastly, recommendations are provided in line with the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]