3D Modelling - Text 6
A Programmable and Modular Puppet
Automation
What the digital dimension brings to animation through 3D modelling is the ability to incorporate rules directly into the code of the object depicted by programming automatic movements or anatomical limitations in particular. This makes it possible to avoid physiological mistakes, like a human head turning 360 degrees, and to facilitate manipulation of the model. In addition, Rickitt underscores the fact that some movements are caused directly by another movement, a phenomenon he calls “hierarchization”, providing the following example: “when a human being moves an upper arm, the forearm, wrist, hand and fingers all move in response to a certain extent”.[6] What digital technology makes possible is programming the hierarchization of movements in the 3D model itself in order to render them automatic. This automation is a principle of new media, as described by new media theorist Lev Manovich, for whom “numerical coding of media (principle 1) and modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow to automate many operations involved in media creation, manipulation and access”.[7] Digital media thus have the ability to carry out actions automatically, on condition that the rules of this automation be programmed prior to manipulating the model.
The use of automation enables the animator to save time and energy, whereas in the analogue era hierarchization, or three-dimensional animation more generally, required great fastidiousness. One had to repeat the same gestures for each movement, in each photogram, while remaining aware of the needs of mechanical continuity. For Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963), Ray Harryhausen, when animating the battle scene between seven skeleton soldiers (using the stop-motion technique) and three heroes (recorded with live-action filming), had to animate manually every movement of the monsters, for a total of thirty-five separate movements in each photogram, while at the same time matching the movement with the live-action protagonists.[8] This scene alone demanded of Harryhausen four and a half months of work, at a rate of thirteen photograms per day, for an animated sequence some five minutes in length. It goes without saying that traditional stop-motion animation required a large investment of labour, and that the automation provided by digital models made it possible to reduce this amount of time.
