Category: Uncategorized

Star Wars: Rogue One, the second of the recent Star Wars spin offs, was a great success in the box office. This movie, unlike the other recent Star Wars remake, had a more difficult chronological placement. As a result, the writers of the film brought back many characters from a movie that was made in 1977. Due to the large span of time that has passed, one of the supporting actors, Peter Cushing, had passed away in the meantime. Instead of writing his character out of the new movie, the writers decided to ambitiously include the character Cushing played by recreating him through computer generation. Motion Capture Technology is a method of computer animation that involves using a real life actor whose motion in a role is recorded with intricate detail and then mapped to a CGI model that perfectly mimics the actor. The computer generated model of Cushing was rendered based on a plaster cast of his face that had been made in the 80s. The mapping onto this rendering was created by the actor wearing a mask with dots which move with his facial expressions and then replicating these same dot’s movements on the computer model. The effect is a flawlessly animated replication of a dead actor, the first time such a stunt has been pulled off.

This is the scene from Dr.Strange that I thought was the most interesting out of CG effects. It is the open your eyes scene from Dr. Strange.

The 3D computer graphics project that stood out to me the most is the scene from the movie Dr. Strange. I thought that this scene was immensely visibly engaging and incorporates so many different elements, such as entities and even a butterfly. What I admire the most of it is simply how realistic it is and how it sucks the audience into a whole new reality. By referencing what we are familiar with, such as the planet Earth and a butterfly, we are able to see just how surreal the experience is. The point of CG typically is to make untrue things seem as realistic as possible, but with this project, its goal was the opposite- to make things seem bizarre as possible but with such technological skills to make the surreal look realistic and blend well with the actor himself. I admire these aspects because it is something so different and unique and at the same time memorable.
I think that the algorithms that were used to generate these scenes definitely used 3D algorithms like camera to make things more 3D. I also think that they used scale and translate in the parts where locations are being zoomed out, while the characters stay in the same place. The must have also used recursion because there were a lot of recurring elements when Dr. Strange is in the different dimensions.
The director’s artistic sensibilities manifested in the final form when he was able to tell such a compelling story with the crazy graphics. He used a voiceover to explain what is going on in the scene and how it relates to the story. Doing so anchors the intense and out-worldly CG into a rock-hard reality in the story and doesn’t confuse the audience but rather teaches them. I think that this particular scene sets up the story of the whole movie very well.

Source:
Movie: Dr. Strange
Director: Mads Mikkelsen
Actor in scene: Benedict Cumberbatch

I am using one of my autolab grace days for this project.

sketch

// Audrey Zheng
// Section A
// audreyz@andrew.cmu.edu
// Project 04

var cwidth = 300;
var cheight = 400;

var listPoints1 = new Array();
var listPoints2 = new Array();

function setup() {
    createCanvas(cwidth, cheight);
}

function strings() {

	stroke(0);


	var x = 10;
	var y = cheight/2;
	//var listPoints1 = new Array();

	for (var i = 0; i <21; i++) {

		point(x,y);

		var p = new Array(x,y);
		listPoints1.push(p);

		x += 14;

	}

	var x2 = cwidth/2;
	var y2 = 60;
	//var listPoints2 = new Array();

	for (var j = 0; j<21; j++) {

		point(x2,y2);

		var point2 = new Array(x2,y2);
		listPoints2.push(point2);

		y2 += 14;
	}

	noLoop();

	var start = 0;
	var end = 9;

	var start2 = 20;

	var end2 = 11;


	for (var k = 0; k<10; k++) {
		line(listPoints1[start][0], listPoints1[start][1], listPoints2[end][0], listPoints2[end][1]);
		line(listPoints1[start2][0], listPoints1[start2][1], listPoints2[end][0], listPoints2[end][1]);
		line(listPoints1[start2][0], listPoints1[start2][1], listPoints2[end2][0], listPoints2[end2][1]);
		line(listPoints1[start][0], listPoints1[start][1], listPoints2[end2][0], listPoints2[end2][1]);

		start += 1;
		end -= 1;

		start2 -= 1;
		end2 += 1;





	}

}




function draw() {
	background(220);

	stroke(255);
	line(10,cheight/2, 290, cheight/2);
	line(cwidth/2, 60, cwidth/2, cheight-60);

	strings();
    
}

function mousePressed() {
	print(listPoints2.length);
	print(listPoints1.length);
	print("5");

}