Animated Short - This Wonderful Life

dfluke2 writes "It's been around for awhile, but Lian Kemp's This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short. Over at rendernode there is an interview with Lian, where additional background information can be found about the flick, including other plans for more animated movies. The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short."

Comments

Something about that virtual actress...

[Anonymous Coward]

Scares me... It's too perfect, it's creepy. And yet even though you can't find imperfection with your eye, somehow it still doesn't seem human.

Where's the full length feature though?? Am I the only one that could only find short demos that were about 5 seconds long?

Re:Something about that virtual actress...

[sTalking_Goat]

I was impressed with the little imperfections in her skin tone. Its the kind of thing magazines will touch up to erase but this guy puts in here, you don't even really notice it, but it makes it not plastic somehow, and subtle shadowing, Man I've spent hours trying to get that look with a film camera and natural light...and the tiny covering of body hair.

I've never seen CG like this, it is a little creepy how real/unreal it feels. Its very surreal stuff.

Re:Something about that virtual actress...

[pchan-]

this is what is called the "zombie" effect. that is, when a cg character goes for total realism, you very often get a case where it does something small and usually not obvious, that makes in not quite human, and gives it a very creepy feeling. you won't get that feeling from an obviously non-human model. i definitely can't put my finger on it, but there is something in her face (when you see the motion, at least), that just seems wrong.

Re:Something about that virtual actress...

[AJWM]

It's creepy because although the rendering and small scale motions are well done, there are enough motion (or lack thereof) clues to tell you it's not real -- the motion is reminiscent the characters in the Final Fantasy movie or of Princess Fiona in Shrek (in human form -- the ogre form and the other characters are sufficiently inhuman we don't expect real motion, so don't find it's lack "creepy"). (In the stills you can look at detail long enough to pick out that it's rendered, not real.)

Take a look at Sample 1, where she raises her head. Well done: the blink, the hair movement, the way the eyes track. The giveaway: she manages to raise her head without moving her shoulders or (apparently) using any neck muscles. That's an unnatural motion.

In Sample 2, the hair is a bit odd -- it sways a little with head movement and ambient breeze, but should swing through nearly 90 degrees as she bends over (styling gel, maybe?). More significantly, the skin on the hands is far too smooth (no wrinkles on the knuckles), and the motion of the hand to the mouth (as in surprise) seems to have the wrong speed profile -- it's too slow and smooth, it should be faster and just a little jerky.

That latter tends to be the giveaway -- live creature motion is either fast and relatively smooth (a "preprogrammed" muscle sequence, as with eg. a gymnast or other athlete), or slow(er) with many minor "course corrections" through the feedback loop. It takes a lot of practise, coordination and concentration to move both slowly and smoothly -- people don't normally move like that, but androids and animations do.

Nothing particularly *advanced*

[reality-bytes]

Okay, its fair to say that all CGI animation in this class is advanced but this doesn't really further the technology much beyond what we have seen before.

Certainly, plenty of render-farm time has been devoted to this character's hair just as Aki Ross's hair was in Final Fantasy.

The trouble is, the hair, while obeying *some* of the laws of physics, still doesn't 'feel' right because there are so many more factors involved. (like did she wash it this morning / static attraction etc).

In fact, the whole motion of CGI characters is still too 'soft' to be believable, they sort of wave-around like marionettes whereas real human movement has a certain sharpness about it.

It looks like they've done some good development work with the skin textures but thats about the height of it, nothing really that new or exciting to see.

physics is still lacking

[Doppler00]

Everytime I see one of these CG rendered figures, the lack of accurate physics really stands out. While many advances have been made in the quality of the 3D graphics, the polygon count, and the texture detail; to me they still look like hollow shells (which they essentially are).

In Sample1.avi for example, her eyes move much too mechanically and instantly. While individual hairs on her head move with the wind, it still doesn't look quite natural. I'm not complaining, it's just it will take quite some time before mathematical models are created that can accurately represent real world physics and not crude approximations thereof.

it's still too perfect...

[SuperBanana]

Still doesn't 'feel' right because there are so many more factors involved

It's because it's still too perfect. Even if he did randomly texture/color it, he didn't randomly change the reflectivity and such.

Several of the poses are also very unnatural, and the expressions just don't seem right.

Special F/X people will tell you that the brain is astoundingly good at picking up when something's wrong. You may not always know what it is- like that the car leaping over the bus didn't have a shadow, or the sun was at the wrong angle for the story- but your brain is on a somewhat subconscious level saying, "What the heck?" and the scene 'bothers' you.

It is a little similar to what I call Stump the Baby. Babies shown a box where two cars go in and two come out will loose interest quick. Show them two going in and only one coming out- or the opposite- and they'll stare at it for much longer...

I don't get the plot.

[JessLeah]

I am confused as to the plot of "This Wonderful Life".

This woman's obviously lost her husband; hence the crying and the kissing of the ring. Then she sees the baby, which seems to bring a new hope into her life. But she abandons the baby (placing its fragile head far too close to the stone walls of the bridge where a single jerk could damage it-- she seems intelligent enough, and any intelligent woman wouldn't do that) to jump off the bridge when she loses her ring... and then what? She doesn't die immediately, but what happens? While she's down there lying on the rock (wounded?), someone else comes and takes the baby away-- because she was too afraid to 'let go' of her deceased husband and open a new life with the baby?

How about an essay on the plot? A review? A synopsis? Anything? Bueller?

Why we find her so inhuman

[TwoPumpChump]

To quote the website which discusses Doctor Masahiro Mori's famous theory on why we reject the "nearly human" vs. the "obviously inhuman" - The Uncanny Valley, " This chasm -- the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori's thesis -- represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting." - Basically, we tend to "humanize" and accept as human objects which do not appear human at all (Shrek) but outright reject and even feel uncomfortable with objects which try to appear fully human (Final Fantasy Movie and this Wonderful Life animation.) It's actually a facinating read!