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Computer Graphics and Mass Media: Communicability Analysis

The document discusses the relationship between computer graphics and mass media, specifically how computer animation has been adopted by television and film over time. It outlines a methodology for analyzing these relationships and how computer graphics have evolved from 2D to 3D formats in different media like television continuity designs, film credits, and advertising.

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261 views2 pages

Computer Graphics and Mass Media: Communicability Analysis

The document discusses the relationship between computer graphics and mass media, specifically how computer animation has been adopted by television and film over time. It outlines a methodology for analyzing these relationships and how computer graphics have evolved from 2D to 3D formats in different media like television continuity designs, film credits, and advertising.

Uploaded by

malik
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Computer Graphics and Mass Media:

Communicability Analysis

Francisco V. Cipolla Ficarra1,2 and Miguel Cipolla Ficarra 2

HCI Lab. – F&F Multimedia Communic@tions Corp.


1
ALAIPO: Asociación Latina de Interacción Persona-Ordenador
2
AINCI: Asociación Internacional de la Comunicación Interactiva
Via Pascoli, S. 15 – CP 7, 24121 Bergamo, Italy
[email protected]

Abstract. In the current work are studied the existing relationships between
graphic computing and mass media. The main purpose is to establish a method-
ology of qualitative and creative analysis of the different layers that make up
the existing interrelations which are scarcely visible for the computer animation
designers and the users or receptors of these contents. The methodology known
as “onion-iceberg” allows us to establish the first isotopies on the level of the
content of those computer productions. Additionally, a study of the state-of-the-
art is made, bearing in mind the diachronic and synchronic factor of technologi-
cal evolution, and also the diffusion of these contents in the mass media and the
Internet.

Keywords: Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, Communicability, Mass


Media, HCI, Evaluation.

1 Introduction
The television, the computer, the video games, the cinema screens are mainly emitters
of visual images. The social mass media have their reason of being in the diffusion of
messages, however, an unprecedented event was the interrelation emerging between
the mass media and computer animation, mainly in the cinema and television [1] [2]
[3] [4]. As a rule it intervened in the titles or credits of the films, documentaries, se-
ries, etc. Letters and animated figures rich in colours and special effects seize the
spectators’ attention. Then the interaction of the three-dimensionality boosted this
event. Now the proof are the continuity designs, chain image, publicity curtains of
television, both public and private. These are minutely thought out works, since there
the international image of the firm is at stake. The idea they express is constantly
repeated during the station’s programmes. To this you have to add publicity. Some
creators, designers and programmers of computer animation in the nineties talked
about a saturation of 3D inside it, that’s why curtains or continuity designs are seen in
2D. This was the main reason why some European channels have subtly returned to
bi-dimensionality. In the new millennium 3D prevails over 2D, even in the cases in
which there is a combination of both animations by computer. Now the 3D term refers

F.V. Cipolla Ficarra et al. (Eds.): ADNTIIC 2010, LNCS 6616, pp. 182–192, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
Computer Graphics and Mass Media: Communicability Analysis 183

to the infographic synthesis in 3D (Computer Generated Imagery –CGI, and 3D


Computer Animation) not to the 3D illusion upon watching the film, the sense re-
cently spread by cinema marketing. The acronym 3D has had a wider diffusion in-
stead of the stereoscopic term. However, the three-dimensionality of the images in
origin is more meaningful, as it will be seen later on.

2 Computer Animation, Mass Media and Creativity: Evolution


In almost five decades, computer animation has progressed and has been internation-
ally spread as a technique and as a means in a fast way. Currently, the computer is an
alternative element to the camera that allows the visualization of any thing imagined
in motion. And computer animations, whatever their genre, are more and more attrac-
tive and remarkable. A way of grouping the animations by computer in relation to the
mass media or their genre is as follows:
1. Development and research with the latest technologies
2. Creative experimentation
3. Short and feature films
4. Visual effects
5. Scientific dissemination
6. Marketing, entertainment and corporative image in TV
In the two first it can be seen how the origins of computer animation are located start-
ing with the first drawings made by Ivan Sutherland with a computer (Sketchpad) in
1963 [5] In the same year we have the first interactively controlled animation, that is,
the first videogame in history: Spacewar 1. Other examples inside the first environ-
ment and whose titles in brackets are [2] [5] [6] [7]:

• Application of genetic algorithms to create morphologies of creatures which have


to act in a simulated three-dimensional environment (Evolving Virtual Creatures).
• Modelling of natural landscapes and visualization of atmospheric effects (First
Flight).
• Demonstration of the creative possibilities of the particles technique: explosions, a
water cascade, a snow storm, etc. (Particle Dreams).
• Virtual encounter between two famous actors: Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey
Bogart, when the realism of human characters was very hard to accomplish (Ren-
dez-vous a Montreal).
• Recreation of the Parthenon of Athens, starting from the current construction and
the remains that are kept at the British Museum.
The creative experience entails the creativity factor. A notion that entails a rhetoric
question: What is meant by creativity? Creativity may derive from three different
stages: inspiration (the Muses as the ancient Greeks called them), experiences (the
more one knows, the more creative one is), and luck (the moment in which, through
random reasons, one finds that one had been looking for a long time [8]). The two
former are contradictory. As long as one reaches something creative that does not
respond neither to the first postulate, nor to the second, evidently it is the play of

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