Now that we’re making the animations for our Drama Princess (with the aid of the very talented Laura Smith), I’m starting to worry more about the amount of animations that is required to make a characters seem believable. We have already concluded previously that that amount is relative to the amount of realism in the appearance of the characters. In a more abstracted style, you can get away with less variation in animation and still retain believability. It’s as if everything becomes symbolic and the viewer translates things to reality in his or her imagination.
But for the games that Tale of Tales wants to make and the stories we want to tell, an extremely cartoony style (as in Animal Crossing) is not suitable. Nevertheless due the limitations of technology, budget and time, we will end up with a relatively small set of animations. According to the logic above, this would require us to stylize the look of our characters somehow. Perhaps we can find a way to do this that is compatible with storytelling aspirations…
I’m thinking of film noir and underacting, where the actors are being “cool” and flegmatic for reasons of style. The actors look realistic, but they behave in a stylized way. This particular form of stylization is based on reductionism and minimalism. And not on the exaggeration and caricature that are common in games (and animated films). I’m not sure, however, whether Humphrey Bogart really has a small set of animations or a very large set of very subtle ones.
Come to think of it, to some extent the appearance of the actors in those old Hollywood movies, is in fact not as realistic as one might assume since they are clearly real humans. The abstraction happens on the level of their clothing. As was the fashion of that day, the clothing that people wore was very formal, very stylized. They tend to wear simple suits and modest dresses. They walk with a straight back and their polite behaviour supports the abstraction of their formal appearance. In fact, a lot of the romantic tension comes from the conflict between this controlled comportment and the passions that we know rage inside of them.
So maybe the solution for the animation problem in Drama Princess is to make our actors very polite. 🙂
( They’re starting to sound like children that we need to educate 😉 )
Posted on July 30, 2006 at 10:49 am
[…] The inevitability of having a relatively small set of animations leads to a problem with this, however. When an actor meets a character that he really likes, he will choose to perform the interaction offered by this character that matches their relationship best. The number of interactions offered by this actor will be limited (by the number of animations that we have made and behaviours that we have programmed). […]
Posted on August 10, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Aren’t you using a key frame animation engine? Or are you pulling each animation in Maya or somesuch in a more “by-hand” way. In the latter you can invest 100 hours of work and get rapidly increased turn around time on animations, just specify a few frames and the engine does the rest.
Thats the plan I’m aiming for with the Fianna production, since the engine makes for somewhat over the top characters I feel a wide repotoire of gestures and postures is nessecary.
Hey, BTW, whats your budget and whats your funding model? You can e-mail me that info if you don’t feel like publishing it naked, or not tell me at all if you like. 8)
I ask because I’m trying to get project-based funding and want calibrate by pitch and budget proposal.
Posted on August 10, 2006 at 1:06 pm
We use the .X format for transferring character animations (mostly from 3ds Max’s Character Studio) to our game engine (Quest3d). This format and our engine are perfectly capable of interpolating between keyframes. But the exporter that we’re using (Panda) insists on making a keyframe for all frames of all bones and b) the interpolation in 3ds Max is much more sophisticated than the one in our engine (so for reasons of accuracy, we need a lot of keyframes).
The Drama Princess project is funded mostly by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund, a local governmental organisation that funds mostly films but has a tiny “experimental media” category where we can submit proposals for our projects. The budget for design and development of the Drama Princess system is 51.000 Euros, of which the VAF supplied 40.000.
Posted on August 11, 2006 at 3:07 am
Interesting, thanks!