Virtual View: animation theory

The last weeks I’ve been working on designing and researching my third experiment. The next step will be to introduce animation and to study its effects. I was curious to see if there had already been research into the effect of different types of animation on stress reduction. Rather to my surprise I couldn’t find anything. It was hard to find any articles on animation what so ever…

My starting point was neurocinematics and psychocinematics. New fields of research on cognitive function during movie viewing. Attention is an important subject here. Then I found a journal dedicated to animation and found some very interesting information on the nature of animation and links between Eastern philosophy and religion and Japanese anime animation. That was very interesting for me. This way I can combine the visuals of Virtual View with Zen mediation and Buddhism, which I have been practising for almost 20 years. I realize now that my forests experiences on which Virtual View are based are rooted in my meditation practice. This is also what I want to convey with this installation.

In the next part I’ll summarise my findings and explain how I will test them in the animations I will make for my next experiment.

Even though the book chapter by Carroll and Seeley (draft version) is about Hollywood cinema it shed light on some aspects of my research. Because I want the users of Virtual View to have a relaxing and restorative experience attention is very important. How do I keep my users softly fascinated? Hollywood films capture attention by giving the viewers only just enough information using stylistic conventions. They also use variable framing: different techniques like camera movements and zooms to direct our attention. The theatre design with the big screen and darkened surroundings helps to minimize cognitive load. My interpretation of these thoughts is that a certain amount of abstraction can heighten attention. As can “camera” movement. These are things to play with. The actual installation should be set up to avoid distractions.

What interested me in the article by Torre is that animation can be expressive of itself. Motion can be transferred from one object to another to create surprising results and again, capture attention. As animation can be layered movement and transformation will have a cumulative effect and make anything possible in the way the impossible is possible in dreams. It will be nice to experiment with non-realistic events in the Virtual View animation.

The articles by Chow were a real revelation to me. His ideas of types of liveliness and holistic animacy fit perfectly with what I had in mind with Virtual View and what should be happening on the screen. For him primary liveliness is goal oriented and can been seen in for example Disney animations where a character causes all kinds of events. Secondary liveliness is unintentional and emergent. The sort of movement that can be seen in nature: the swarming of birds, waving of trees but also growth and shape changing. Where primary liveliness focuses our attention, secondary liveliness dilutes it, capturing our attention in a soft way. For Chow this wonder is linked to the ideas of Daoism and the concept of kami in Shintoism. They both promote respect for and connection with nature. He explains liveliness in computer graphics. Techniques like morphing, looping and Boids are good representatives of secondary liveliness. The eastern animation style called anime is also has good examples of this kind of liveliness. He shows some very nice examples of computer animation:

The Nintendo DS game Electroplankton

Chow also refers to old, Chinese maps of which the design is of the landscape elements was tightly regulated by rules. Rules are there to be bend so artists turned the maps into multi-perspective narratives. The maps are just beautiful, clear and mysterious at the same time.

Chow goes on to link animation with interactivity by looking at some pre-cinematic technologies. One of them is the handscroll, an ancient form of Chinese painting of which Along the River During the Qingming Festival is an example. When someone looks at a handscroll painting they interact with the picture emulating what we now call a camera pan. This way they include both time and space into the painting. I’m now considering capturing head movements as added interactivity to Virtual View. The animation will pan in the direction the head moves. This way people can expand they view and have richer, more varied experience.

The installation Along the River During the Qingming Festival

The last inspiration comes from an in depth article by Bigelow on the Japanese animation artist Miyazaki. She states that Miyazaki creates an aesthetic experience “… that invokes a Zen-Shinto pre-reflective consciousness of the inter- relation of the human with the tool and nature. It is a way of perceiving change in stillness…”. Bigelow sees a parallel between the state of mind of the artist and the state of selfless emptiness as it is described in Zen Buddhism and Shinto. It can create a state of wonder because this empty mind precedes concepts and naming. Miyazaki also expresses in his films the idea of the Shinto notion of kami in which all things have life spirit. This way of looking at reality makes way for a dimension of mystery and wonder to be discovered in nature.

Japanese anime is rooted in the art of woodblock printing of which I am a great fan. Miyazaki’s work is not photo-realistic but tries to capture the essence of reality that expresses interconnectedness. These things can, in his view, be lost in virtual reality, as it is often very technical and an industrialised method.

In my Virtual View animation I would like to evoke a sense of wonder by offering a non-photorealistic view that is lively in a way that reminds of real nature. I don’t want to replicate nature the way it is done in 3D virtual reality. It always seems dead to me, after reading these articles I understand why. The aesthetics will come from eastern art, which I love. The view will be a lively tableau with different kinds of computed animations which have there origin in natural phenomena. I will introduces panning to add extra space and “time” to the animation and to be able to add more, conscious interactivity in the prototyping stage. I will use these starting points to create a video of the animation which I will test in my next experiment. A description of that will appear soon on this blog.

Sources

Noel Carroll & William P Seeley. (2013) Cognitivism, Psychology, and Neuroscience,: Movies as Attentional Engines. Psychocinematics: The Aesthetic Science of Movies (draft copy).
Torre, D. Cognitive Animation Theory: A Process-Based Reading of Animation and Human Cognition. Animation: an interdisciplinary journal 9(1) p. 47-64
Chow, Kenny Ka-nin. The Spiritual—Functional Loop: Animation Redefined in the Digital Age Animation, March 2009; vol. 4, 1: pp. 77-89.
Bigelow, S. J. Technologies of Perception: Miyazaki in Theory and Practice. Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 55-75.
Chow, K. K. Toward Holistic Animacy: Digital Animated Phenomena echoing East Asian Thoughts. Animation July 2012 vol. 7 no. 2 175-187.
Shimamura, A. P. (2013). Presenting and analyzing movie stimuli for psychocinematic research. Tutorials in Quantitative Methods in Psychology, 9, 1-5