Imagina 2006: Again the Great European Event it Once Was
Interestingly enough, and while the project does not reach the technical level of Electronic Arts, French animation studio Duboi is producing a 26x26 animated TV series, Ugly Duckling and Me. Using a textured 3D environment baked with a global illumination render, the series was created in realtime with the help of StoryMaker, Duboi’s proprietary previs tool. The only concessions to traditional production were the re-renders at three times the size to avoid anti-aliasing and definition issues.
Visionary professor and scientist Ken Perlin kicked off the Imagina conference cycle with a keynote on “The Illusion of Life — Revisited.” He presented a series of expressive and funny applets. They can be used to produce small, automated animations and were a hit with the audience. While more geared toward fun or educative purposes, Perlin’s work prefigures a new approach of character animation, by combining procedural behaviors with motion capture databanks and piloting everything with very simple controllers (he particularly likes the piano keyboard), a user playing the animations can become a virtual puppeteer.
The presentation of French scientist Frédéric Kaplan at Sony Labs in France on the development of Sony’s little robot dog, Aibo, was particularly interesting. Despite the fact that Sony recently announced it would no longer manufacture Aibo, there is much to be learned from this experiment. The audience was treated to the birth of one of the programs that gave life to the artificial animal and allowed it to discover the world just like a newborn or an animal would. Watching this small plastic creature learn to walk or recognize objects, the audience was entranced, reacting to the illusion of life reflected in the robot’s awkward moves. The researchers found out that, rather than programming Aibo to do or learn specific tasks, they could program it to be motivated by learning in itself!
It’s easy to imagine what such programming could do for tomorrow’s videogames, but more difficult is to clearly see how it affects animated film characters. And yet, wouldn’t humans be fascinated by programs where virtual people would develop and discover life and the world around them? It’s pretty much a certainty that new intelligent artificial life forms will play a role one way or another in the future development of filmed entertainment given the convergence of cinema and videogames and the trend of film trying to burst out of its linear form of storytelling.
Ramesh Raskar, senior research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, presented a conference on augmented reality that foreshadows another kind of revolution. Raskar is using a mighty weapon to get rid of virtual reality’s cumbersome stereoscopic glasses — a mini video projector barely bigger than an iPod coupled to a tracking camera and a computer. With a setup straight out of a Star Trek episode, Raskar can scan the environment around him and project on it all sorts of information. The whole world becomes a screen — a portable, interactive and intelligent screen. The projector functions more or less like a flashlight that not only illuminates the environment, but also reveals its hidden meaning. Imagine pointing it toward a book in a bookcase and instantly seeing the book’s summary appearing next to it. This truly innovative project paves the way for countless applications, not just in videogames, but also for interactive film projections, particularly ones with computer-generated content.
In essence, if we were to tie in the technical presentations at Imagina, we could imagine a 3D realtime TV cartoon with semi-automatically animated characters that could react with a certain form of primitive imagination to improvise beyond the original script. Such a show could then be projected anywhere by viewers using mini video projectors (which, according to Ramesh, will be embedded in our cell phones within the next five years). The image walls thus created could even interact with one another and, just like characters, be traded in online game communities. Fictitious characters could also be traded by transferring them from one projector to another. The digital cinema era has only just begun.
Inspirations
A fine example of digital filmmaking was Renaissance, a French feature film that premiered at Imagina (to be distributed in North America by Miramax). This film noir set in a futuristic Paris and geared for the 15-35 crowd was created entirely with motion capture. Beyond the very strong black-and-white-only graphic choice, Renaissance achieved a true technological challenge. It hints at what tomorrow’s movie-making can be, when the separate phases of pre-production, production and post-production won’t make sense anymore, with actors’ performances captured before shots are framed during the editing process.
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