steroscopic images

Heres my four images, some are more successful then others but i think they work for the most part.

As for the glasses, I used the traditional red and blue glasses in our pack.

Widget Lighting in Maya

Widget Image

Maya recreation

Widget image

Maya recreation

Maya Scene

So for this assignment I started one scene and ended up doing a second one off a crazy whim that I had.
I condensed all the shots from each scene onto one page for each scene in hopes of not glitching out blogger.
The first scene is my initials and the shots are the scene composition, Fill Light, Key Light, and Rim Light.

The second scene is also my initials, but i broke them apart and set up so that the produced shadow was my initials while the pieces were just spread out, this took a bit of work, but it was mostly just to see if the idea would work.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

            One of the most familiar laws of physics we feel in our everyday life is gravity, followed by inertia.  It's defined as a force of attraction.  Gravity is important for keeping things in place and in control.  Without gravity we would have no weight.  We wouldn't even have a solar system, instead it would just be specs of matter. Without gravity an object in motion would move at a constant regular speed, it would never speed up or slow down.  If however that object was hit, how resistant it is to the change in motion would be defined by inertia.  If we look at this in film the easiest way to see it would be when something goes up, how far does it go before gravity pulls it back down and when it comes back down how much force does it hit ground with when it lands?  How does it's force affect the object it lands on? Would it break it? Would it bounce off it?  Would it push it in another direction?  In other words: Speedy object goes up, speedy object comes down, speedy object comes in contact with a larger more solid object and bounces to a stop.  Special effects have come a long way and have allowed filmmakers to exaggerate, bend and even break the laws of physics more realistically than ever before.  However the mastery in the craft is how well they can pull the viewer out of reality and make us believe that what we're seeing is indeed physically possible.  It's not uncommon for a make believe scene to be completely believable.  How believable these scenes are is based on how well the anticipation to the climax is built up.  To argue the point we can look at a few key scenes from Event Horizon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Iron Man.

            Event Horizon is a Sci Fi Horror film that was released in 1997.  It takes place in the year 2047 and the story revolves around the mystery of a exploration spaceship named the Event Horizon.  Seven years prior to the beginning of the story (2040) the Event Horizon set out to explore the outer limits of our solar system and mysteriously disappears.  Seven years later a decaying radio signal just outside Neptune orbit gets received and is identified as the Event Horizon.  Upon receiving the transmission a major space company sends out a search and rescue team to search and assist the crew of the Event Horizon.  Upon reaching the Event Horizon, the rescue team finds that the Event Horizon is empty and powered down, only having enough power to send out its radio signal.  As they search the Event Horizon they find the captain of the ships corpse mutilated, frozen and floating in the cockpit of the Event Horizon.  Shortly after, they power up the Event Horizon and restore gravity and when they do the body falls, hits the floor and shatters. 

            The main problem with this scene is that even though the body is frozen, it only falls a few feet, probably no more than two to three feet.  We know that a flash frozen cadaver dropped from the same distance (a waist high gurney) bounces, not break or shatter.  In class it was demonstrated that a onion frozen in liquid nitrogen would indeed fall and shatter.    So why not a human body?  Because the body is frozen the effects of inertia might be more sever since it's not soft and  able to absorb and distribute the energy produced by the impact and distribute it like a normal soft human body would. Even at best the body still won't shatter mainly because of the bone structure, it may break in a few weaker jointed areas if dropped from a exceptionally high location, but it will still bounce.  To test this Dr. Allfred from the BYU Physics department froze a turkey in liquid nitrogen, and it dropped it off the roof of the building.  It breaks into a few pieces but still remains largely intact.  If a turkey dropped from a few stories doesn't shatter then it's highly unlikely that a human body would if it falls from a few feet.   A human body falling from a few feet just wouldn't generate enough inertia to break under the force generated by a sudden stop, if it would, us living unfrozen bodies might be in some trouble with the amount of damage tripping over our feet, or even just jumping could inflict.

            Pirates Of The Caribbean 3: At Worlds End is the final film in the original Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy.  The film is about the desperate struggle between the freedom that pirates enjoy as a major trading company is trying to put an end to piracy and control the oceans.  The main plot of the story revolves around bringing a now dead jack sparrow back to life and getting all the pirate leaders in one location to make a big decision on how best to handle their current predicament, fight the company, free a heathen god that they trapped, or stay in their hidden fortress to do nothing but try to wait the companies armada out.  But like a true story of people who live dishonest lives, some have decided to side with the company and of course Jack Sparrow is in high demand on both sides.  In an escape scene after being captured by the company, there's a stunt where Jack makes his way to the deck of the ship where he takes a cannon, removes its restrains and readies it to fire.  He ties a rope to the cannon and throws the rope over a sail arm (as if it were a pulley) and holds onto it as he fires the cannon and uses the force generated by the recoil to be lifted off the deck of the ship he is on and hurled over to the deck of the Black Pearl.  

            The recoil of a cannon is pretty powerful.  I think it's safe to assume that Jack Sparrow weighs somewhere between 160-200 pounds, so I'll call it at 180 to be in the middle.  At first this looks to be impossible so we have to barrow from the laws of action/reaction and recoil while remembering that inertia is how resistant an object, in this case Jack Sparrow, is to movement when force is applied on it.  Recoil speed is (Bullet/Gun Weight Ratio) x (Bullet Speed) meaning that the recoil speed of the cannon would be one hundred times less than the speed of the cannonball Jack fires (as explained in one of our class lectures).  With this in mind we need the recoil of the shot to be strong enough to pull Jack off his feet, into the air and propel him to the Black Pearl.  So if we fired a shot one hundred feet per second using a thirty two pound cannon and twelve pound ball then (12/32)x(100) equals a recoil speed of 37.5 ft per second or 25.6 miles per hour.  This might be enough to lift Jack off his feet with the use of a pulley.  We can't forget that Jack is standing still, and the rope isn't moving either and both are pulled and propelled at that speed from a dead stop.  Jack standing still holding the rope could just fly with it, but because of the inertia generated by the sudden jerk, his hand would probably get burnt by the rope making this a very painful experience.  If someone is willing to try this I'd be very interested to see how it turns out.

            In the first Iron Man film, lead character Tony Stark makes many big jumps and many big falls, and seems to walk away from each one with no injuries.  At the beginning of the film we see Tony Stark giving a weapons demonstration to the army to demonstrate the destructive power of a new missile developed by his company.  After the demonstration his army escort is attacked by rebels in the desert and he is kidnapped and fatally injured by some shrapnel which leads him to develop a small clean energy reactor that powers an electromagnet to stop the shrapnel buried in his chest from reaching his vital organs.  With the reactor he also begins to develop an armored suit to use to break free from his kidnappers.  In the final scene where he escapes his kidnappers, he blows up their artillery and then presses a few buttons to ignite some thrusters and flies into the air.  As he's flying you see him fly clear of the explosions and over the ridge of a mountain, and then crash.  The time between take off to crash is eighteen seconds, and we can see that he flies up into a arc, so we can safely assume nine seconds from ground to apex, and nine seconds from apex to ground.  In class we learned that it would take five and a half seconds to fall forty stories, and three and a half seconds for twenty stories.  A large variable in the scene is the suit, we don't know how much it weighs, and we don't know how well it absorbs and distributes the force generated by the crash.  But we do know that in reality Iron Man wouldn't survive a ten story crash, which was something else that was explained in class.  We also know that the heavier an object is the faster it falls and reaches its terminal velocity, and the first Iron Man suit looks very clunky and very heavy (Tony Stark even requires mechanical help to move in) which would cause Tony Stark to fall faster, and decrease the amount of time it would take for him to reach his terminal velocity.  Chances are that there is no way that Tony Stark could survive the crash, and one other important thing in the scene to take into account is how he lands when he crashes.  In the scene Tony Stark doesn't land on his feet, he crashes face first, even if he survived the initial crash he would most likely die from injuries resulting from the crash shortly after.  But in the film, we see him stuck in the ground as if he landed feet first and unharmed. 

            How believable these scenes are is based on how well the anticipation to the climax is built up.  In Event Horizon we know that the corpse is frozen and floating in zero gravity.  But before the climax of the scene where it drops, we see it many times as a plant to instill a certain amount of uneasiness in the viewer, and when we find out that their turning the gravity on, we know that corpse is going to drop.  As we predict this, we also get to see it happen, and maybe we are left with a certain amount of uneasiness as it shatters and maybe even shock.  In Pirates of the Caribbean 3 we see Jack throw the rope over the sail arm and tie it to the cannon and know what he's planning to do.  Before he fires the cannon he has a small conversation with the person in charge of the company.  He could have very easily just ignored him and fired the cannon and taken off, but this small conversation serves the purpose of dragging out the anticipation and making us wait to see it happen.  And when it does we're even more entertained and are taken out of the moment and forget what might really happen if someone attempted this.  In Iron Man we see this incredibly heavy and clunky armor suit take off and fly.  As we watch it take off there's a certain amount of disbelief that this armored suit could really fly.  As we watch it fly we realize there's no way it can go very far and then suddenly its propulsion systems cut out and we get to watch it do what we knew it would do when it took off which is crash.  If these scenes were rushed they probably wouldn't feel as real and might remove us from the film and remind us that what we're watching isn't reality but a work of fiction and don't need to believe what we're seeing because it is fiction.  And if an audience doesn't believe what their seeing is real, then where's the entertainment value of a film, and what's the point of paying to see a movie?

 Final word count: 2,095

I tried to get the scene from Event Horizon that I talked about but unfortunately it is not posted on the internet and I don't have the film available in a format I can work from.  But here's the test from BYU that I mentioned in my paper.

 








This is the scene where Jack escapes from the Endeavor

Here's the scene from Iron Man where Tony Stark escapes from the rebels. The scene underneath is a segment from a Mythbusters episode where they dropped 2 pigs from 600 feet on to pavement and into water and compare the damage each sustained.  While not entirely accurate, these drops should give us a good idea of how severe the damage a real Tony Stark would have taken in his crash.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction outline

This is probably less of a outline and more of a rough idea as to what I'm thinking of for my second term paper

1.  Intro: introduce Movies, and thesis, and law which is kept intact or broken, and for all intense and purposes I'm thinking Gravity and Inertia

2.  First move: Event Horizen
    Sci Fi horror film in which a ship designed to create and travel through blackholes disappears and returns ten years later abandoned and full of mystery, except for the overly frozen corpse of the ships captain which falls to the ground and shatters when gravity is restored to the ship.

3.  Second Movie or two: Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl and At World's End.
    In a scene in pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the black Pearl Jack and Will covertly steal a small boat and flip it upside down and use it to travel underwater so they don't drown while making way to steal a larger boat as a diversion to steal a different boat.
    In At World's End there's a scene where Jack throws a rope over a ships sail and ties it to a cannon and fires the cannon and uses the force of the recoil and pull him off the ship, fling him into the air and land safely on the black pearl.
   Later in AT World's End Jack engages Davy Jones in a sword fight while both of them are balancing on top of a sail arm.

4.  Third movie, or movies: IronMan
     In the Iron Man movies Tony Stark in the Iron Man suit takes a lot of big hits and a lot of long falls. As well as accidents from when he's testing his designs for the the armor.  And no matter how bad the hit, he always walks away unscathed and uninjured.

5.  Fourth Film: Sherlock Holmes
In one of the early scenes during the main invenstigation, sherlock and watson come under attack 3 henchman and sherlock finds a odd device that conducts electricity and uses to shock one of the henchmen a few times, throwing him back onto the ground at high speed.

Conclusion: Restate opening, thesis and close paper with final thoughts.

reverse walking reference

The Laws of Physics in an Animated Universe - Megamind

                                                The Laws of Physics in an Animated Universe

             

            Thanks to skilled animators, 3D computer programs, and the collective works of the various teams at Dreamworks we have the movie Megamind.  Physics in the world of Megamind do exist and function almost like they would in reality but are bent for entertainment value.  The fictional Earth that Megamind takes place in still follows all the natural laws of physics.  If it didn't, the animation wouldn't look real and would pull the audience out of the film and story making it a long unenjoyable film.  If the Paths of Action (including arcs and parabolic trajectories), Action (gravity and velocity), and Inertia (impacts) don't look right then they won't feel right. 

            Megamind  is about two gifted aliens who crash landed on Earth.  Our hero is an antihero named Megamind.  When he started school he realized that he never really fit in.  Unable to do anything right he decided he was going to be the greatest super villain in history.  His rival?  Metro Man.  An amazing hero who has the power of flight, invulnerability, super strength, the ability to shoot lasers from his eyes, and really good hair.  How does Megamind fight his rival?  Unsuccessfully.  Megamind (with his super intellect)  loses every battle but never gives up no matter how bad he loses.  After their most recent battle, Megamind sits in prison plotting his escape and revenge on the day that Metro City (the imaginary city where the film is set) is celebrating and immortalizing Metro Man's heroics.  After Megamind escapes prison, he starts his new battle by kidnapping the reporter Roxanne Ritchie and taking her to a secret location, tricking Metro Man into going to another location and unexpectedly killing him.  Shortly after his victory, Megamind grows bored of not having a rival and not getting his butt kicked, so he dreams up a new scheme, create another hero just like Metro Man by bestowing a normal human being with Metro Man's DNA which gets recovered from Metro Man's cape.  Unfortunately Roxanne's Camera Man Hal, who has a small chip on his shoulder, gets zapped. In disguise Megamind trains him to use his power.  After getting turned down by his dream girl (Roxanne Ritchie) Hal decides being good sucks and that life is cooler when you can just take what you want.  With no one else able to stop Hal as he terrorizes Metro City, and Megamind is forced to step up and stop him.

            The opening of Megamind introduces us to parabolic arcs and paths of action and informs us that when a super hero or villain is involved, additional outside forces are not required to force an object (such as Megaminds and Metro Man's baby pods) to deviate from its intended path of action.  Megamind and Metro Man as babies are hurled from their home planets.  This scene sets the stage of Megamind as the underdog to Metro Man.  As their flying through space Megaminds pod hits an asteroid, and bounces into another, and this continues like a game a pinball.  Instead of being crushed by the asteroids, Megamind's pod bounces off and is mildly damaged.  But this doesn't feel off as the angles of the bounces show in a smoke trail behind them, and you can see that their sharp angles much like if you threw a ball into a corner and watched it bounce off the faces of the wall that form the corner.  Where things get weird is when Megamind and Metro Man are plummeting to earth in their pods.  In the next scene, they falling parallel (with nothing but Earth's gravity affecting them) to each other as they approach the Earth's surface making way to a luxurious mansion.  But suddenly as if it has a control system (which these don't appear to since their passengers are babies) Metro Man's pod moves perpendicularly slamming into Megaminds pod knocking it off current path of action, and then fixes its course taking on Megamind's pods original path of action, hitting the mansions courtyard and losing all its energy after two very small bounces and slides to a perfect stop under the Christmas tree.  Meanwhile Megamind's pod seems to take almost a full ninety degree turn and bounce into the city prison.  Discarding the scene with the asteroids for comedic effect, we know that an object in motion  will stay in motion unless a larger force acts on it.  This means that it would not be possible for Metro Man's pod to move perpendicularly and hit Megamind's pod unless that was its original path of action in the first place or was forced into that path of action by another larger force.  After hitting Megamind's pod, Metro Man's pod wouldn't continue to change direction and steer itself to take on Megamind's original path and go into the mansion.  As for Megamind's pod, in order to make that ninety degree turn, it would take an object moving faster and coming from that path of action to force such a drastic turn.  As Megamind's pod bounces through Metro City, it leaves a smoke trail behind it, as we follow the smoke trail, we can indeed tell that the arcs are parabolic as well.  However later in the film we can tell then when the normal humans interact with an object, they still follow standard paths of action.  One such scene would be during the opening ceremony for Metro Man's museum, Metro Man juggles babies, and the Mayor tosses Metro Man a microphone, all of which follow normal arcs and paths of action and feel right.  But shortly after Megamind reveals that he's kidnapped Roxanne Ritchie and Metro Man springs into action but is tricked into going to the wrong place.  Megamind blasts him with a death ray powered by the sun and we see Metro Man's skeleton fly into the air at a steep angle that would make for a very high arc, but in the next scene its trajectory has changed and is flying at Megamind with a very shallow arc that doesn't match the original path that it was shot into the air at. 

            Moving on in Megamind we find Megamind training Hal in how be a hero.  In these scenes, gravity exists but is uniform in how it affects objects.  But we also know that the acceleration of an object is parallel to the force needed to accelerate an object.  In a scene set up like a classic 8 bit Donkey Kong stage, Minion (Megamind's right hand henchman) stands atop the stage hurling objects at Hal, ranging from cars to barrels on fire.  This is significant because the car weighs more than the barrels but actually accelerates at the same rate as the barrels. It may be possible that Minion, having a super powerful robotic body that looks like a gorilla, is throwing these objects in such a way that it equalizes the acceleration (after all he can lift a car).  Or there just isn't enough room on each ramp for the car to reach a speed faster than the barrels as it falls and changes direction. 

            What makes this more significant is in the following scenes, Hal introduces himself to Roxanne in disguise as Metro Cities new hero Titan. Hal figures that since he's Metro Man's replacement that Roxanne will instantly fall for him, but then decides he should take her for a flight and save her a few times.  During this scene, Hal flies high into the air, and drops her, rushes down and catches her, and throws her around like a rag doll, and even throws her over a building.  According to the law listed in the previous paragraph it would take as much force as she weighs to throw her, and even more to throw her any real distance, or even over a building.  But Hal is now a super hero with super strength so no problem there. But when he catches her, he just catches her, absorbing all the inertia generated from her falling.  This is best demonstrated in the scene where Hal throws Roxanne over a tall building.  As he throws her, she picks up speed and slows at the top of the arc over the building and picks up speed as she falls.  Before Roxanne hits the ground, Hal comes bursting through the building and catches her in a chair.  Hal experiences some drag when he catches her but keeps flying in the same direction unaffected by her falling velocity and weight.  Once again when super heroes are involved, certain physics don't apply.

            A little further into the film we see Megamind walking around town in his giant robot that he is going to use to fight Hal.  With each step the impact from the robot's foot is so great that it causes the cement under it to break.  As Megamind shows off his giant robot he swings around on top of city hall and leaps off and lands on the ground, and doesn't break the cement at his point of impact.  When Titan doesn't show up Megamind angrily makes his way to Hal's apartment, jumps off a raised freeway and when he lands, breaks the cement at the point of impact.  What this tells me is that gravity exists, speedy object decelerates as it reaches the apex, and accelerates as it falls.  However the inertia generated by the falling objects and the energy released in the impacts is completely subjective to the character or what the character is feeling when it's related to a super hero or villain. But it is possible to tell that Inertia, weight and mass exist in the film from a scene in which Megamind blows up the Metro Man museum.  We see pieces of it hit the ground, and depending on the size, they either break the ground or bounce off it upon landing.   

            When Metro Man flies around and lands, he lands like a feather, and can even make himself land on water and walk on it as if it were solid.  When Hal lands and takes off he does so with more energy and velocity.  We never see Metro Man break the sound barrier, smash the ground or generate so much energy when he takes off that he breaks his surroundings.  Hal smashes the ground when he lands, creating small craters, and breaks buildings when he takes off from on top of them.  Both characters have equal strength and power, and even though they can do the same things, the amount of energy released when they do the same thing is different.  If this weren't the case then it would be safe to assume that super Hal has more mass then Metro Man.

            Physics in Megamind exist almost as they would in reality.  We know that objects when not acted on by a super hero or villain do follow proper paths of actions, objects are affected by gravity,  and velocity is created as objects fall, but it depends on what super force is acting on the object.  the one thing that seems to not exist in the film is mass.  In the final fight between Megamind and Hal, it starts with Hal breaking off the top half of Metro Tower, which is the tallest building in Metro City.  Hal has tied Roxanne Ritchie to the spire on top of the tower and as its falling, Megamind has enough time to save Roxanne and fly under and away from the tower.  After Megamind makes his escape with Roxanne, the tower isn't even halfway to the ground giving Hal enough time to fly under it and catch it and lift it back up and throw it.  The other problem is that as Hal throws the tower, the path action, weight and mass of the tower wouldn't allow the tower to hit the ground and continue to slide forward on a path to impale Megamind. 

            So in conclusion, physics in the world of Megamind do exist and function almost like they would in reality but are bent for entertainment value.  If they weren't bent in some scenes then the film might become boring as due to a lack of entertainment.  So the real question should be when is it ok to bend the rules and when do you need to abide by them?  When is too much and when does it become unbelievable?  As long as the paths of action, action and gravity stay consistent then I think the audience won't even notice where they get bent and the film will remain believable and entertaining.  And in my opinion that is where the mastery and the craft of the animators lies and is what keeps a film like Megamind entertaining.

Final Word Count: 2,122