Realexis: General Uni. Stuff

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PRP_Research_Document

The first artefact was made to be used in a later query were people will be asked to describe what type of a character they feel that the deferent variations of it have. I created these illustrations using 3ds max and Photoshop based on an ordinary object a stapler. I had no specific character personality in mind while creating my artefact but simply to use facial parts as well as changing it in to a more organic structure and see how it will be developed. I limited myself by only changing the shape and adding facial clues on my object adding more human characteristics for example limps that could be used through body language to express emotions that would create too many variables making any of my findings unreliable. Keeping in mind that I have these two limitations of what I can do to my artefacts (objects) I intent to create a variety of characters to be used to gather information and then try to see where it leads me. My hopes are that the last character will seem to be just another one of my artefacts but in reality the expressions will be to express specific emotions and see if the audience can identify them. I hope to show that by imputing facial parts as well as giving it a more organic look help the audience to connect with the character in some way and then express what emotions they attribute to the character. I am interested to see if people see emotions express by the character and most importantly if these emotions are constant from person to person.

As the first artefact was based on an ordinary object, my goal for the second one, was to create something bizarre and unusual. The actual object for my research in reality plays a small part in what I am trying to achieve. As my goal is to see how the audience respond and whether they will attribute emotions or not and if there is consistency between them. What you see is a crazy wagon that seems to be part of a Wild West movie with a machine gun. I chose to create something like this because of the nature of its use is co-national, and without a driver or horses dragging it, it is useless. As it is made to kill people. I wanted to confuse the audience and try and see their responses and whether they will be able to give me a small inside in to how they interpret the characters. Though my research I came to a confusing point were the character designer makes decisions on how the character will look like and act, based on a variety of factors (ex. Personality, look and style of animation). But how the audience interprets the final result, is based on the success or failure of the designer to interpret the factors to create an appealing character. I am trying to do the opposite and give them something that looks like a character and let them create its personality, or not. I believe if I find a large enough audience that will be willing to participate in my experiment, whatever the results may be, It will give me a better inside on the development of characters. Even if the results are questionable, because of the complexity of the task and my inexperience to developed characters and my bias, it could influence the structure of the query.

For my third artefact I wanted to create a realistic object that could exist in the real world in a similar form so I created a candlestick covered with melted wax. This is an object different to the other five I am making because I am not anthropomorphizing it like I do with the others. Instead I made a realistic looking object to see whether people can find animal or human like features in it on their own.

I will ask the people looking at this object to tell me where on this object they see eyes, noses or any other human or animal parts and whether they see any evidence of expression and in what form. They will be given a variety of simple shapes that will be corresponding to different parts, for example ‘O’ to describe eyes ‘X’ for the nose and many more with the option of adding their own. They will be asked to draw these shapes on the image to show me what they see. It is very important not to lead people with my questions and to see their response without guiding them. The point of the exercise is to see how much work the viewer does in the process of anthropomorphization.

While I was creating the candlestick I realized that the shadow of the object has potential to be expressive as well. Through my research I learned how important the silhouette is on an object and that while creating the character we should always be aware that the character should be recognizable from its silhouette . Therefore I made some changes and continue working with the premise that the shadow should be a part of the image and not a side effect of the more realistic nature of the render I was after. It should compliment my research enquiries.

My idea for the latest artefact was inspired by Luxo Jr, the character that

Pixar Animation Studios first created for the Siggraph exhibition in 1986.

This character has developed over the years with character properties that I Thought

I could use. For example it’s an easy character to recreate with plenty of references and simple enough to be created within my time frame, even more important is the amount of information that we have about this character from the time of its creation to the present day. We know how the object looked like before it was made into the animated character and we also know why changes where done to the original character from the articles that were published during the Siggraph exhibition of 1986.

My goal is to take the specific character and remove the small variations that were done and create the object of the Character.

I found some blue-prints of an old model of the Luxo Lamp and from those I created my characters, gave them similar colours and basically created a “lamp”.

I want to see how many people will recognise it as a “Luxo Lamp” the Pixar character and how many will see it just as a “lamp”.

The differences between them are quite obvious, but I feel that the success of the “Luxo Lamp” the Pixar “Luxo Jr.” animated character will overwhelmingly win as an image and more people will relate to that, than the alternative “lamp” .

Through my questionnaire I hope to see how differently people view my “Luxo Lamp” character, upon whether they had knowledge of “Luxo Jr.” the character that

Pixar Animation Studios first created, or Not.