3D Images

All of the images use the red/blue glasses

Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

The photo I chose to use.

My photos

Building a scene in Maya

My initials with 3 point lighting.

Second Term Paper

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction?

The movies employ a variety of special effects and techniques which utilize real world physics for the stories that they tell. Certain stories require special circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Sometimes the things which happen in the movie world does not match the physics of the real world. The cinema does the best it can to make us believe in the worlds they create. They do not want us to question, but rather to believe in the movie world as being real. Some movies are more successful at this than others, though.

One principle of physics which is not always done right is that of action and reaction forces. Along with that concept comes the forces involved in jumping and landing. There are certain rules in regard to acceleration, force, and timing which go into these actions. For different reasons, these rules are not always followed in the movies. One of the easiest physical actions to see this in is the jump.

We see an example of a jump in Star Wars Episode 1. During the fight between Darth Maul and Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan makes a 40-50 foot jump. He gets kicked off a ledge and then jumps back up to a higher platform. The gap is a considerable distance away. His push time for his jump is about one second, or twenty-four frames. Using the formula relating push time with jump magnification and jump time, I found that his correct push time would be about four or five frames.

A jump is affected by three forces: that of gravity, the supporting force of the floor, and the frictional force of the floor. In order for someone to jump, they need the reaction force of the floor to oppose the downward force of their feet. This resistant force must be greater than the force of gravity and the resistance of their weight. In order for Obi-Wan to jump as high as he did, he would need to generate a great amount of force. He would have to push on the floor with a force six times his weight. This kind of force is only generated in a short period of time, and a long push time does not create a greater amount of force.

The opposite holds true instead. The greater the acceleration or force, the shorter the push time. In order for him to credibly make that jump in the film, he would have to generate a force of about nine hundred pounds. His push time would be about four to six film frames, all to take him forty feet in the air. What does work in this scene is the fact that he uses his arms to generate force. He swings his arms before lifting off the ground, which is in line with the rules of body mechanics. He also spends half of his time in the top quarter of the jump arc. Both these things are believable physics.

Another film which displays a jump in a very cinematic way is the Matrix. In this film Morpheus makes a jump across the space between two skyscrapers. In the film his jump magnitude is about thirty, his jump time is about four seconds, and his push time is about one second. What does not work in this sequence is his push time. Assuming all other factors are correct, for the height and time of that jump his correct push time would be one to two frames.

This is an even bigger jump than Obi-Wan's and it requires a larger amount of force to be applied to the ground. Based on estimates from the film, Morpheus would have had to generate about five thousand, seven hundred pounds- or about thirty times his body weight. The time is not short enough in the push to show how great a force he generated. Also, the film does not reveal that his jump force is this great by the effect he has on the ground. If he had generated this amount of force, it would have made an effect on the cement roof he was standing on.

Morpheus's landing on the other side is more accurate, however. It shows him landing and cracking the cement of the other building's roof. In a jump, the landing force is very similar to the pushing off force. So the effect of the land would mirror the effect of the jump. Given that much force, it is plausible that Morpheus would damage the surface he landed on. But this movies does not accurately show the force he would need in taking off. It also does not portray the push time accurately. If the correct push time were there, the audience would not be able to see what was going on. One or two frames would not be enough time for the audience to catch the action. It would go by too fast for anyone to see.

There are a lot of special circumstances with physics in the movie Spiderman 2 as well. In one scene, Spiderman is swinging in the air and loses his power to shoot webs. He falls about 300 feet, from the height of a skyscraper. He lands on a couple of aluminum air ducts. His fall is approximately three seconds. The timing of this fall seems believable for the height at which Spiderman falls. However, the force with which he lands would seem to be greater than implied. He only slightly dents the air ducts, when in reality he would have created more damage. Because the air ducts are hollow, they slow down the impact time which makes the fall safer. However, with such a great force of the fall, the metal would not be able to maintain its shape with its resistance force.

For a pulling action, a person would need the opposing force of the floor and the friction of the ground to help them pull. If not using the ground, they would need the opposing force of their own body- an opposing action or body part. This force would need to be greater than the weight, friction, and inertia of the object being pulled.

An example of is in the bank scene in Spiderman. When Doc Oc is robbing the bank, Spiderman throws a table at him with his webs. He knocks Doctor Octopus through the bank window and into a cab. Doc Oc, who weighs about two hundred pounds, flies about twenty feet in the air. The force needed to knock him like that would be about four thousand pounds. This force was created by the pull of Spiderman's arm holding the web, the opposing force is generated by his other arm. Assuming his muscles could generate that type of force, the time at which he does the action does not demonstrate this. In the same way a shorter amount of push time creates a greater force for a jump, so would Spiderman need to create a greater force in a shorter time period. The table does not accelerate fast enough to create as great a force required to knock Doc Oc twenty feet.

For each of these examples there are cinematic justifications for their physical errors. In Star Wars, the physics are presented as being different from our world, or at least some characters have exceptions. The Jedi are a group who are able to master and bend the physical laws of the universe. For that reason, it seems believable that Obi-Wan is able to make that jump even if it does not follow reality's physical laws.

As for the Matrix, it too has characters who bend the laws of physics. They breaking of natural laws and actions is used to demonstrate the power of the characters. The directors could have made Morpheus jump with a physically accurate jump. However, for the sake of clarity his push time was slower. In order to have an accurate push time for that jump the audience would not have been able to see it. The real push time would have actually seemed unnatural.

And Spiderman's fall was scaled back in order to make him seem more durable. If the director put more damage at the end of Spiderman's fall, the audience might have thought that he might be dead. The director lessened the damage created to give the effect that Spiderman didn't receive as much damage from the fall. Lastly, the scene with Doc Oc was used to show the strength and power of the characters. If the table accelerated too fast, the audience might not have caught it or understood it. The main point of the scene was to show the superhuman power of Spiderman.

All the bending of these physical properties and laws served to tell the story of these movies. Sometimes following the laws of physics helps to make the cinematic world believable. At other times, bending them or breaking them serves to define who the characters are. And in other circumstances disobeying the physics of a situation actually can make a scene more believable to an audience.

Stop Motion assignment

For this assignment I animated a walk. I planned out the poses on paper, then built the model out of clay and wire. Then I shot the frames and edited them in Photoshop. Finally, I composited them all with Flash.


Stop Motion Walk from Aaron Soon on Vimeo.

Reverse Video Reference of Walking

First term paper

It isn't very often that we watch a movie to analyze the physics that operate in its universe. Most often, if the movie is made well, we accept everything that happens within the world of that film. The physics of the film may not coincide with the physics of our real universe, but if it makes sense in the story or is consistent throughout the film, we don't question it. However, when one analyzes the physics in a movie, certain hypotheses may be drawn from the observations. I have chosen to analyze the stop-motion animated movie “Chicken Run.” The interactions between the characters and their physical environment play a key part in the film, and those interactions work in a specific way.
    My first hypothesis has to do with the air resistance in the world of the movie. I call it the “Power of the Air” hypothesis. In terms of our physical world, air resistance is dependent upon the size of an object and its speed. The larger the size or greater the speed, the more resistance there is. In this movie, we are dealing with chickens. They are not very large and they don't travel at fast speeds, but the way they move through the movie's world is a little different from the real world.
    At the end of the movie, the chickens make a flying machine in order to escape the chicken camp. This machine uses a flapping motion to keep it suspended in the air. Judging by several clues in the film, it carries about fifty chickens. I estimate that each chicken weighs about five pounds. Also, during a certain part of the sequence, the aircraft carries an adult woman as well. In order for this machine to work, it would have to be very light or there would need to be a great amount of air resistance. Even if the chickens were not that heavy, having such a great number of them in the craft shows that it is not light. Also, in other parts of the movie, the same flapping motion is not able to lift the chickens themselves up off the ground. Therefore, the reason the aircraft is able to lift off the ground must be due to air resistance and not weight.
    The chicken flying machine would only be able to lift off the ground if the force pushing it off the ground exceeded the force of gravity. There are a couple forces at work in this scene. First is the force of gravity in the world of “Chicken Run”. It is pulling the flying machine down to the ground and keeping it from going into the air. Then there is the force of the wings flapping. The wings exert a force pushing down on the air below them. There is also the force of the air resistance pushing back on the wings. Let's say that the majority of the force used to lift the machine up comes from the wings (as implied by this scene). In total, the estimated weight that the flying machine carries in this scene is about 300 pounds. That means the wings would have to exert a little over that in order to carry the craft upwards. At the same time, the air would have to resist that force with the same magnitude in order for the craft to get off the ground and stay off the ground.
    The second hypothesis I want to talk about has to do with the way gravity works in this film. This is the “you don't fall till you're ready” hypothesis. The force of gravity in this film's world is not as strong as in the real world, and it acts a little bit differently. There is a delayed application of the gravitational force. Also, it is not as strong as in the natural world. It is counteracted by the air resistance principle I talked about before.
    Let's look at a shot from the opening scene of the movie. The chickens are trying various ways to escape. One method they use is to disguise themselves as Mrs. Tweedy, the farm warden, and walk out of the camp on stilts. The two guard dogs see them and knock them down to the ground. In this shot, the chickens are hit off of two stilts. They take a moment in the air to be launched up and then fall to the ground at somewhat of a constant speed. A couple things might be concluded from this observation. One way to look at it is that the force of gravity is not very strong. It takes a lot more time for its force to counteract the upwards force of an object and even more time to accelerate that object downwards. Another way of looking at this example is that the chickens reached terminal velocity very quickly and maintained a constant speed down because of the powerful air resistance and weaker force of gravity.
    Some other instances of this occurring are when the chickens are being trained by Rocky. He has them do a series of different exercises. In one of these the chickens spring off a trampoline into the air and fall back down. There is considerable hang time in the air once they have been launched and then they fall quickly back down. There are numerous examples of the chickens flying or jumping or falling through the air like this. There is also a scene in which one of the chickens knocks an R.A.F. medal out of another's hand and it flies through the air. Normally this kind of action would complete in a second or two, but the whole path of the medal through the air till it falls to the ground is about six seconds. These examples show how the force of gravity is weak and it takes a long time to act on an object in the air.
    There are certain exceptions when an object is in the air in which it acts differently than normal  (the first two hypotheses). When an object is launched, catapulted, or shot into the air by an active force such as a canon or slingshot, it does not follow a parabolic arc. In normal actions such as the character or object falling, they usually follow a parabolic arc. However, in certain circumstances such as when Rocky is shot out of a canon or Babs is flung out by a slingshot, these normal physical rules don't apply.
    When Ginger first meets Rocky, he is flying through the air. In the first couple shots, he is traveling in a straight line. Then he hits a wind vane, bounces off of telephone wires, and travels in a diagonal path of motion to land in the chicken feed. In none of these actions or motions does he follow a parabolic arc, and hardly does he travel in any arcs at all. Then in the scene in which Babs is launched by a slingshot, she travels in a straight line as she leaves the cart and flies through the air. She doesn't fall to the ground until after she is redirected by the fence and lands on the rats.
    In both of these scenes the character doesn't fall to the ground until after colliding and bouncing off of another object. They both travel initially in a straight line and hold it until being acted upon by an outside force. What can be suggested from these observations is that an active force such as a slingshot or canon causes objects to travel in a straight line or path of action. The force of gravity seems to have a delayed effect in other cases, but here it is not involved at all. Gravity does not act on such a catapulted object until it is first acted upon by an outside force, such as a wall, fence, or other object to collide with.
    Another aspect of the universe of “Chicken Run” has to do with balance and the line of gravity. This observation is not so much a hypothesis, because it is an example of an inconsistent way things work in this film. In the end of the movie when the chickens have built their flying machine, they are taking off to leave. However, unfortunate for them, Mr. Tweedy comes and knocks down their ramp. They will crash into the fence if they continue their course, so they must make a turn. Fowler, the pilot, makes a hard turn to the right to turn the craft around. What the flying machine does is lean into the turn. This is an active pitch, and an example of the machine participating in active balance. The whole flying machine leans into the turn to maintain balance and lean with the line of gravity.
    This would not be physically possible in reality. After making that turn, the flying machine turns around again at the end of the runway to make a second attempt. This time, however, the machine leans outward, with the force of the turn. This is a passive turn, the whole craft continuing in its path with inertia. In the first turn, the flying machine made an active lean to maintain balance. But in the second turn, it swung out as it would naturally do in real life. Just within a couple seconds of each other, the world of this movie contradicts itself.
    Under normal conditions, when watching this film you are not analyzing the rules of its universe. You are only following the story and watching the action. If things are consistent or they make sense to the story, we normally accept it. Only by looking for them and observing the film do you find out certain “rules” of way things work. Some of these are specific to the story while others may be there only for consistency. Either way, the physics of the film's world play an important part in the movie watching experience.