Motion Study of Étienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotography in Second Life

Motion Study of Étienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotography in Second Life

This piece is inspired a lot by Étienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotography, who is a French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer. I am interested in the idea of motion study in Marey’s chronophotography, but instead of showing 2D still movements, I want to reanimate the gestures and experiment with different types of motions in 3D. For instance, in Second Life, avatar, object, texture, even environment can be modified into motions.

I build a tunnel-like structure, which contains five spheres in Second Life. Each sphere has a texture of animated gif file I made from Marey’s chronophotography. The scale of the whole piece is relatively big, and inside of it there are five spheres, which are divided into individual display spaces. Inside the spaces, installations, photographs, animations are shown according to the outside texture I made from a certain Marey’s piece.

Technically, I made the animated gif files in Photoshop and upload the gifs online as webpages, and inside Second Life, I use those webpages as textures. I also use Dazstudio to do bvh animation files. 

Here is a documentary video, but I will edit it later on.

https://vimeo.com/55815022

WWSM

Miya DeBaker / Talupie (sl)

WWSM

Video project for my final crit, WWSM, uses, aftereffects, secondlife, photoshop, daz, animare/poseballs, quicktime, cameras, and a bit of maya.  The conceptual structure consists of one part news broadcast, one part music video, and two parts tetris (explosion).  As Rainer Werner Fassbinder's matriarch says, (from his 1972 movie, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) "People are terrible, Karin.  They can bear anything."

Here are some stills from the video, and some stills from the "secondlife workplace" (pretty much a purple 'green'screen:

I will post the link to the video as soon as I compress/convert it and upload it to my vimeo account!

Statement:
    Exploring Second life in this class has been a very intresting journey for me. Its a place where people can become something else, show the world a diferent side of them. It is also a place where we can build any type of structure in inumerable ways. This was the part of Second Life that caught my attention, the diferent types of structures that we are able to build, from ships to castles to mountains. In my work I tried to create a structure with a historical aproach. my idea was to build a Cathedral and in it include many diferent types of architectural designs from the history of church building. cosidereing this was my first time building in Second Life, I could say that I am very happy with my end result. I will defenitly be working again on this project during the break and taking it to a next level.


Cathedral Video:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYnSlkbuK4E

Life within Second Life - Chester

snapshots of work in progress:

Statement:
I have been very interested in exploring the idea of second life, so here is my attempt at trying to reach that goal. Second life is a weird concept to me, because it led me thinking of after life or the idea of double life/identities, and this software itself I think had explained a lot why it's called this way. People get to be other people in different disguises that sort of represent themselves in this virtual environment, each players achieve different things in this game, some use it as a game engine and social interaction site, others simply use it for creating art, second life could mean anything to anybody. But I am more interested in the idea of two different identities and wanted to create an environment that sort of looks like a factory and I used everything completely white to generate the concept of "blank slate" or "tabula rasa". I believe there was an identity that was embedded inside everyone deep in our unconscious mind when they were born, and another identity that we chose to be for the rest of our lives. This is considered as my first project using Second Life, although I've been using it over the semester I still think this is new to me, a lot of things that I needed to know in order to achieve exactly what I imagined for my concepts.

Final video:
- https://vimeo.com/chesterhuang/videos
(I had trouble uploading video on here...)

The Interactive Art Gallery

Somewhat related narration:

"Immerse yourself in a situation where the entire room you stand on is a puzzle. Where you came from and how you got here is of little importance. Before you is what appears to be the only exit. Yet it is locked. And there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to open it.

Looking around, you see an arrangement furniture with an assortment of objects and an array of items placed everywhere. Some contain symbols, maybe letters, or shapes, or even colors. Some just don't make any sense.

What do you do? How will you find a way out?"

Statement:

While my final project is not very conceptual in any way, I hope that it is at least easy to understand. Those who are unfamiliar with these game genres will obviously be unfamiliar with some of the conventions and patterns or cliches in these games. As such, I suggest new players thoroughly examine and re-examine objects that can be vital clues. Everything needed to solve the puzzles is there. Attention to detail is a must!

I should have probably included instructions with the game but ran out of time.

To play you simply click stuff to examine or interact with them.
-Interacting with things will cause a message to appear.
-You will receive a HUD which act as your inventory.
-Items in the inventory can be used with objects in the room by first selecting the item and then clicking the object.
-Some puzzles require actually typing out the answer.

About the room itself: It was based on a horror game called Ib. This is a Japanese indie game in which a girl visits an art gallery with her family and suddenly everyone disappears. She finds herself locked in the gallery and ends up in a nightmarish surreal gallery.

My game has no horror elements though. It's only related to Ib in the most general ways.

I tried to make the puzzles fairly straightforward. But, again, attention to detail is important.

Detail.

Detail.

Detail.

There's a clue here somewhere! Maybe!

What's inside the magic sphere?

Inside

Some technical aspects of the game:

Most of the coding is in the HUD so that it's player dependent. All the variables needed are stored with the player instead of the objects. This way different players can be at different stages of the game.

When it comes down to it, all programming is simply: when or if that happens, do this.

It's just a matter of planning it all out in a coherent manner and finding shortcuts so you don't kill yourself doing something that could waste a huge chunk of time.

The game works by having the HUD and objects communicate on a certain channel.
-On setup, the HUD listens to this channel.
-Clicking objects sends a message on that channel.
-The HUD hears the message and goes through a list of if-then conditionals until it finds one that matches the message.
-The code in that conditional is then executed.

The only thing that any object does is send messages to the HUD.
Any other coding (items found, dialogue, etc) is stored in the HUD.

Video

I was gonna make a silly, overly dramatic video about the room. Stuff like Ominous Latin Chanting and me staring at everything shouting,

"WHAT DOES IT MEAAAN!?!?"

But I decided to take the room a bit more seriously.

I don't want to spoil what's inside so here's a video of someone playing Ib instead:

If you're easily frightened, beware the first few seconds.

Ib Playthrough Part 2 (No Commentary)

Radniel Padron

Second Life Final Project

What fascinates me about Second life is our ability to build and come up with amazing structures and thousands of different types, it is a world that is completely created by its residents and building structures its something that everyone in Second life must learn. To every Sim I visit I see the most astonish buildings, and most of them are just organized formations of prims. A good example of an amazingly large and complex structure is Mont Saint Michel, where it is mostly just made out of simple Second Life prims.

 My idea for the final project was about creating a room or just a small structure of one or two floors and try to achieve the same type of detail that I see in so many castles and churches and Victorian style houses all around the Sims.

 I wanted to give the atmosphere of a clean and simply detailed catacomb, basilica or a not too complex pantheon. The structure would have columns, not extensible complex, but enough, keeping in mind the number of prims allowed in each sim, these columns would be brought from Maya to Second Life. I would have an extensive variation of textures for different walls and also for the columns, doors and windows. For the window I would be trying to create gothic shape to it. The floors would have elevations, creating steps between rooms and the entrance.

My goal is to get as close as I can to the very complex buildings that we can find around Second Life. I want to create a place interesting enough where avatars from Second life could walk in appreciate its textures, inside configurations of spaces and forms of columns. I want the avatar to enter a renaissance structure, where you could find a mix of roman and gothic architecture. 

Final Project Proposal

As I mentioned last class, I am interested in Marey's chronography, especially those with people. Since poses and animations are important elements of Second Life, especially avatar, I think I will be worth to bring the motion of Marey's study in Second Life and at the same time, export Second Life animations outside SL. Last several days, I was playing with one of Marey's photos, which captures the motion of pole vault. I used Animare to adjust my avatar's position to be the same as the man in Marey's photo. Then I export each pose and export them as a bvh file. When I upload the new animation back into SL, my avatar is able to pose as pole vaulting. But I have the problem to adjust the position of my avatar when she is animated, so she is doing the poses at the same place, which looks unrealistic. On the other hand, I also did screen shots of each pose in SL, and appropriated the original Marey photo into a new Second Life version. Back in SL, I uploaded the appropriated SL motion study pic as a texture and made four transparent walls. At the center of the walls, there is a big rotating pose ball with Marey's original chronography on it. Here are the screen shots:

At present, I am not satisfied with the presence of Marey’s poses in SL, either the pose ball or the texture. I am still thinking about how to combine my animation and Marey’s original photo together. And I also want to export the SL animation as either gif or jpg to put them on web, in parallel to Marey’s work.

SL Final Project: ILRC&

I am making a video called, ILRC&.  It will combine the qualities of a news program, a music video, and Tetris to present landscapes and bodies in motion/ in time.  I plan to use mostly aftereffects for the landscapes and SL for the bodies and shapes.  I will need to focus on creating body and shape forms in maya to build with in SL (like a tower moving tower of heads), animations with avatar(s) (animare/ poseballs), and making videos  in SL (camtasia studio, hopefully set up a greenscreen room for the avatar(s)).  

There are a lot of time issues that I want to consider: reversible, indifferent, sophisticated, accurate, accelerated, anticipated, and repetitive.  I am in a class about technology and time as well as reading one essay in particular called, “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics” by Michel Serres.  For example, in the first page, he says, “The notion of system may also be mechanical: a set which remains stable throughout variations of objects which are either in movement or relatively stationary. Laplace speaks in this sense of the solar system. Within a set of mobile material points distributed in space and governed by a law - Newton's law, for example-it is clear that time is fully reversible. If everything starts moving in the opposite direction, nothing significant in form or state will change.”

I want to bring these things together in a sort of pseudo- propaganda narrative about time and our bodies/nature that ends in tragedy and addresses an issue raised in one of Fassbinder’s films, when the matriarch laments how awful it is that humans can bear anything.