Recreating with Cameras and Lights in Maya

I couldn't figure out the problem:

Lighting Your Scene

1. For my Key lighting, I created a warm spotlight:

2. For the fill light, I threw in a slightly green low intensity spotlight:

3. For the rim light, I threw in a cool intense spotlight:

Building a Scene in Maya

1. For my Key lighting, I created a warm spotlight:

2. For the fill light, I threw in a slightly green low intensity spotlight:

3. For the rim light, I threw in a cool intense spotlight:

Special Effects and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were both above 80; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline of Third Term Paper

Winston Gregory

Phys 123

Alejandro Garcia

Outline for Third Term Paper

Explosions in Scale

Intro: Miniature models at times create a much more believable environment than cgi rendered backgrounds. We can see them brilliantly used from the space crafts in Star Wars, to the stunning castle in the Lord of the Ring series. However some of the most brilliant use of miniatures are when they are fused with the special effect of explosions.

At the beginning of the early 2000s, when Computer Graphics was starting to blossom in the film industry, many of the first effects that were created were explosions. Now a days, with major block busters like the Avengers and Transformers, movies goers are desensitized to the constant barrage of cgi explosion effects. Some may argue that movies are starting to use a bit of their magic by going away from practical special effects. However I argue that both of these effects can be just as useful with the use of convincing miniatures.

Paragraph 1: In the 1984 classic action movie The Terminator, a tankard explodes when a character throws a bomb in the trucks back pipe. The explosion of the vehicle, which looks amazingly realistic, has fooled audiences into think that the speical effects team blew up an actual real tankard.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9lw3ndQpWc
• Because the explosion was going to take place near a police stockpile of ammunition in Los Angeles, the film makers decided that they could not blow up a full scale tankard.
• The miniature was built a sixth of the scale of the actually downtown place
• The shot was slowed down to make it feel like it was too scale.
• 42 charges were set off to get the realistic effect!

Paragraph 2: The business: Fonco Creative Services uses miniatures to create believable models for movies. When creator Fon Davis first saw Jurassic Park, he moved fast to adapt his skillset to the current use of Computer Graphics, however he was surprised to find out that computer graphics actually worked well for miniatures, in which he calls it a hybrid approach to visual effects.

• the example we will be looking at is a scene in the matrix, when a ship crashes into the human city of Sion.
• It uses the practical effect of the 30 food miniature moving through the gateway, with lighting and cgi explosions along with a mix of lightning strikes.
• The used large ships called bigitures.
• We you see miniatures in film, you don’t notice them. The best special effects are the ones you don't notice.

Conclusion: CGI and practical explosions can both make convincingly believable action scenes in movies with the combination of miniatures!

Character Animation

For my project I decided to animate with legos. By far the hardest part of this sequence was have the robot walk. In order to do that I fastened the robot to a cellphone charging chord attach to the bottom of my bunkbed to provide the lift and drop in the walk. It was often difficult because it was hard to get the right pose needed in my walk. Tape was used to help track the feet. In order to get the proper timing I wrote my whole animation on an x sheet for my  robot. The sounds were provided for a website called freesounds.com.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

Winston Gregory

PHYS 123

10/27/2015

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

One of the most important rules of physics is the action of falling. This is one of the first things we learn in animation when we practice the simple exercise of animating a bouncing ball. In order to create believable falling of a bouncing we have to have the correct timing and spacing. The ball should slow as it starts to fall, and properly accelerate as it approaches the ground due to the nature of gravity and weight. Animators can exaggerate this by effectively “stretching” a ball while maintaining its volume to create a type of motion blur. Without the use of stretch, we find that balls can get the undesirable strobing effect. The impact of the ball when it hits the ground also has to be convincing. This is often accentuated by adding squash the ball, where the ball is compressed while keeping the same amount of volume.

  In the movie industry, in order to avoid injury or death, the action of a person falling is almost always created with special effects. With the use of green screens, hidden ropes, and CGI, movies attempt to make a believable fall, but sometimes fail to capture the illusion. We are going to look at some examples of movies that attempted falling physics, but somehow fell short.

The first example we will be looking at is from the 1995 James Bond movie, GoldenEye. In this movie, James Bond is trying to stop a formerly fellow agent, Trevelyan, from hijacking a nuclear space weapon. In the scene that we will study, James Bond drops the villain from an incredibly high height at the top of a satellite station, that hangs over a large half dome. Trevelyan is dropped from a height that appears to be above 850 feet, however when he hits the concrete ground, he somehow survives the fall with a couple of drops of blood spilling from his mouth, while being incapacitated, and visibly unscathed. This would mean that his terminal velocity wouldn’t have been high enough to kill him, however from that height, a human would have definitely reached a speed that would cause them to practically cause their body to explode when hitting the ground. In real life a body hitting the ground from a great height would “splatter.” Although not many scientific reports have been done on the effect of a human body at its terminal velocity, according to the hit show Mythbusters, the human body implodes on contact with the ground and that explodes.

Although the impact from Trevelyan’s body was not convincing, The fall of his body felt relatively believable. This has mostly to due with the fact that the special effects department dropped a dummy from a great height and filmed it. We can tell that the man falling is fake because his arms and legs remain straight and stiff through the falling.

The final noticeable effect of faulty fall logic is scene during Trevelyan’s impact, where his body suddenly rotates ninety degree before the impact before he hits the ground. The reason this is noticeable is that in the scene with the dummy the, body turns into a head first dive downward during the fall, however when we switch to the villains impact, we can see that he lands on his back. In order to achieve this, Trevelyan would have had to adjust his center of gravity, by tucking or twisting his body somehow before the impact.

The second scene we will be analyzing is a spoof of James Bond, Austin Powers. This movie is a little more able to get away with its ridiculous physics because unlike Goldeneye, Austin Powers is meant to be exaggerated and corny. This is especially emphasized when Austin Powers travels back in time to the 1960s in the sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me. While Austin Powers is flirting with a women at a club, he soon realizes that she is part of a group of assassins out to kill him. After a couple of hilarious gags where Austin Powers uses the woman's body as a shield from the assassins barrage of attacks, the two of them get blown out a window. The first part of the falling is obviously shot in front of a greenscreen, because although both of the character's hair is blowing back, we can see that there is no follow through in the cheeks or the skin in either of the characters. The movement of the background also moves at an unconvincing rate as the windows move past the actors at a fast, but even rate, showing no acceleration from the apex of the fall. As Austin Powers is falling he uses the body of the female assassin to cushion the impact. Although theoretically the woman's body would absorb more of the impact than Austin’s body, the fall would be lethal for both of them at the height of twenty stories due to the extremely high terminal velocity. The actors or stunt devils, handle the fall just fine, by falling just a few feet off the ground onto their stomach, however this means that the Austin and the woman would have had to decelerate in order to survive the fall. After the impact of the characters, we realize that even though the women has been stabbed, riddled with machine gun bullets, blasted with a bazooka, and dropped from twenty stories, she still hilariously survives.

The next movie with poor falling action comes from 2006s film, Ultraviolet. The film, meant to be a serious “sci-fi” action flick taking place in the 22nd century, stars actress Milla Jovovich playing a superhuman who is on the run from authorities. Although the movie was created after groundbreaking visual effects films, like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, Ultraviolet failed to capture the magic of CGI, with poorly rendered background against live action actors, mediocre animated vehicles, and extremely unrealistic physics. The scene we will be looking at is the motorbike chase scene. While the motorbike defies physics by driving perpendicular to walls and making impossible jumps, the scene were the motorcycle drops from its fall is noticeably one of the least believable displays of physics in the segment. The first thing we notice is that the tracking of the motorcycle as it moves up and down feels a bit jagged. Because of the poor tracking we get a jagged and jerky stop motion effect. The film is trying to capture the action of a bike falling, while at the same time it tries to switch time from slow motion to normal speed. The reason is effect is so unbelievable is that even while in slow motion, the wheels on the motorcycle are still rotating as if they are in “real-time.” Another noticeably unrealistic falling effect in this film is how the actress reacts to the fall on the motorcycle. As the bike falls from the height, what we should expect is a squash on impact. What we get instead is her body squashing with the bike as it falls. In order to create a more believable effect  the actress should have “stretched” off the bike as it fell, until the point of impact where she could have squashed down. We can see this in the film Madagascar 3 in a scene where a woman officer drops down in her motorbike and effectively stretches and squashes on her fall.

Movies have the ability to create illusions and convince us that the characters and actions within 

them are real, however we learn that the best way to make a convincing scene is to do your 

homework and study how people and thing actually move and act. Sometimes movies can 

manipulate physics for either story or for comedic effect, however there are always a couple of films 

that forget to take inspiration from real life create a more believable illusion.

Here are the referenced videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtYZYxvsToM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvTb1B253fQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspmSTzFV-8