The Gaze in the media - writing task

As the entertainment industry and communication media is based on the distribution of visual images and being a culture mainly controlled by men, the circulation of imagery of women has become an obsession.  Taking sexual pleasure by observing rather than being close it is consider voyeurism, and the contemporary society has portrayed women and their aesthetic sex under constantly changing values depending on the society and moment in time.

This are some stereotipical character designs for some MMORPGs where the male armor is proportional to its function while the female is ...not. 

Women are now a day attacked from every angle with images of other women; with concepts that alter the idea of beauty day by day, and in opposition of men who look at this women as desirable,  but women identify themselves.  This ideal women streamed all over the media creates a narcissistic damage and it fires in every direction the idea of a passive woman that does not desire, one that only waits for men’s attention. 

With this last criteria, the media has created hundreds of stories where the female character becomes the victim and the male character fights for her safety. Videogames in particular have been quite characteristic for having this goal among the different genres. Having men as the primary user for the industry, it is easy to target aesthetically speaking some pleasant parameters for the female roles in games. Whether they’re weak and fragile as the female character in Lost in Blue for Nintendo DS or strong fighters like Samus Aran, the female idealisation of the body clearly seems affected by either the behaviour of the character or the sexual desirability it needs to portray to the audience.

Lost in blue (above) is a survival game where first you play as a male character helping a delicate injured girl. The roles are completely stereotypical and there are many points where she is helpless yet tries to fix everything with cute smiles. On the other hand Samus Aran (below) had its beginning from the franchise of Metroid, where people didn't even realized it was a woman inside the suit. It was until it became well know that Nintendo decided to give Samus a "Zero suit" appearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl that the character and the franchise became quite popular.   

In videogames, like in cinema, the role is played on the straight and socially established perception of the sexual difference of the characters. The desirability level of the character seems reflected on female characters and the pleasure this takes in being looked at. Among some visual media, the term Fan Service is used to defined those moments, images or scenes that are designed to attract the audience; focusing on part of the body that are private and forbidden  to make sure the audience gets excited. Knowing that a videogame character has no physical body or ego, the creators take part of creating this possible pleasure creating this contrast between the libido and the ego in a fantasy world. This is noticeable in franchises where the evolution of the character is clearly affected by the trend that happens at the moment of its development.

There are many cases in games where male characters can be represented in many shapes, ages and with different visual attributes as a variant. In the case of Tekken as a franchise you even get male bears fighting while all the woman are skinny and delicate looking. 

An example of the voyeurism is Sophitia, a recurrent character from the fighting game Soul Calibur. Despite the background created for the character her visual development has been adapted to make her more attractive to the audience but maintaining the innocence and purity characteristic of her.  

Another way in videogames to create this male phantasy is by enhancing her eroticism but in relation to the male character himself. It means that identifying with the male character thought his power, the user indirectly can possess her as well. This is fetishistic scopophilia where she becomes the objects of satisfaction. Such is the example of Tidus, the main character of Final Fantasy X which fights, among other things, for the sake of saving Yuna, the trophy girl of the game. 

Gaze and the media

According to the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger (1486) a woman has a “dual” nature. "A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep,"

The nudity of the women became to challenge many aspects in a daily life of the society ruled my men. With beginnings in paintings where impossible reflection would allow to get views of the part of women that would normally not be seen started to generate in society a need to see what is forbidden.

 A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by  Édouard Manet is one of the early examples of the gaze as you can see an impossible reflection of the woman in the back mirror. 

The contemporary media soon became used as an extension of the male gaze at women. A social voyeurism in where the audience takes pleasure from looking at other people’s body creating photography and cinema a perfect way to approach to it. It’s a guilty pleasure shared by a mass, unspoken yet well accepted as it is only with an erotic purpose yet it draws a line from pornography.

From the beginning the male took an active role as the protagonist leaving a passive female as an accessory. Over time, the gaze of the media started to control the image of the body and this became subjected to trends and demands. This form of voyeur was affected by feminist movements which included the male body for the female eye, although in a smaller proportion.

 The prospect of a Paparazzi was created (after the 1960 film La Dolce Vita, and referred to it as an annoying buzzing mosquito) in the parameters of an audience demanding for fraction of privacy of celebrities.

Advertising

This is Sarah Dahl posing for the advert of Opium. This caused commotion all over the UK in 2000 receiving over 900 complains. The main complaint was the pose was not suitable for children as this poster was publicly exposed. In result they flipped the poster making the eye of the audience focus on the face. This at least allowed the ad to be shown in women’s magazines.

This advert was deemed to sexual for billboards. So the advertising company flipped the image on its side. Doing this meant the eye was no longer drawn to her body and instead more to her face ...

Television and cinema

In television, the biggest representation was the creation of Reality Television; It would allow a passive voyeur consumption of a type of reality leaving aside editing and granting the position as an all-seeing-eye and empowering the audience. Such extreme case would be consider as Big Brother; strangers confined in a house filled with mirrors. The audience had the possibility of watching them 24 hours no matter what they did and was also engaged with a decision making role by voting and rating the individual.

1970 French film Les Stances à Sophie. This is an example of the camera use and mirror arrangement trying to get as many angles as possible from the nude actor. One of the early voyeur cases dedicated to women in the cinema industry.

Video Games

Loaded Magazine (2000); Lara Croft making appearance in the front cover of a magazine in a pose that has nothing to do with the game.

This way of attracting male audiences expanded even to the videogame environment with strong cases like the character from Tomb Raider, Lara Croft. At the same time as being the strong part of the game story, the breaking sexual image she gives to the male audience caused by the erotic representation of her body is what made her into one of the overly sexualised objects in videogames. Her visual develop became a spectacle to be consumed and the audience took pleasure in the fantasy of her destruction. The development of the character varies and it is until the most recent entry that Square Enix decided to give a more “humanistic” look to the character. 

Time management = FAIL

For the final submission we had a massive problem: we had all the assets, we just didn't have the time to put the together.
Once again I failed to manage time and left post production a ridiculous short time. The music that Sophie found and the particles that Ryan made where really good and suitable for the project and it was a massive shame not to see them together. Like I mention before only the animation that Ryan did (first part) actually managed to be worked on with camera, colour correction, depth of field and bloom for the lights. It looked really well and it would have been a massive success if we actually managed to have it done on time.

We'll do our best to finish this in a good quality, as we hope to use this as part of our portfolio and we're also looking forward to have a decent presentation for the exhibition.

Animation - Iron Heart

Very last minute after having finished all the props and having everything in place, me and Ryan decided to focus on the animation while Sophie was finishing the textures for the scene.
I took the task to animate the second part of the animation that can be broken down as:

-Tabitha finds Albus
-Gets close to him
-Notices the key next to him
-Winds him up with the key
-Albus "wakes up" scaring her
-he stands up looking intimidating
-He asks for a second and turns around
-Tabitha is curious of what he started to make
-he turns back with a flower like object offering it to her
-She gets happy and accepts the flower

Unfortunately my part of the animation didn't get to be worked on unity with different lights and camera effects because of time constrains, so I'll just put a play last direct from Maya just to give an idea of my work.

The animation isn't perfect, it was made with little time and also the characters had a lot of restrictions with their movements, but for what it is, I'm really proud of it :-)

Bradford Animation/Game Festival 2012

This year I finally got the chance to assist to the whole part of events that we had planned (unlike last year) and this year the plan was to attend to most of the animation related talks.
It turned out that most of the program was focused on independent and student films, and it's not that I'm not interested or anything like that, but by this point I knew I had more interest on Video Games so I ended up booking extra talks in the Game part of the event taking place on Bradford University's campus. Bioware, Double Negative, Urban Environments and even Valve. I think I was quite pleased with this year's festival.
The talks where quite amazing; some inspiring, some interesting, some...not so much, but either way I think for next year I'll try to get a hold of the itinerary sooner and plan a more defined route focusing on games again.
I scanned my notes hopping that if anyone wants to have a look can read them, and some of them have even some doodles. Enjoy.

Cel shade for robots?

One of the ideas I had from the very beggining was to make the game with a cel shade finish.
Part of the reason was that some of the games that I recently played were Valkyria Chronicles for PS3 and the re-release of an all-time master piece: Jet Set Radio.

The gameplay it's completely different in both games, but the graphics have a same basic core. In the case of Jet Set Radio, it was the second game that ever used this technique, but certainly the one that pushed it to the maximum for the time and brought it up to the map. Now a days it might seem a bit outdated and most of the graphics seem blocky, but if people can tolerate to play minecraft then there's not issue with it.

This is an image of the main character in jet set radio rendered witout and with cel shade. Clearly there's a lot of personality added to the character just by outlining the geometry.





In a more modern game, obviously the amount of detail that can be added is much greater, but the among other filters, the effect of it being a cartoon, or in the case of Valkyria Chronicles an anime, it's still there.

Another reason why we thought of approaching this style was because the faces in the characters are just plain animated textures and using the cel shade would make everything fit just right. Unfortunately we weren't very happy with the results Unity puts by default, and didnt have time to actually look for other possible solutions as they might just make the process to go slower. 

Wind Waker textures analisis

When I was doing some research about making a cartoon style I came across with this thread on a Polycount forum where a user took a good time to "open" the game The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker and made a really good break down and analysis of them.

What caught my attention initially was just to see how professionals do textures but then it expanded to more helpful stuff of how to make scenes more efficient by adding baked shadows to the textures for scenes with no changes in the illumination and also something really iconic in the game where the particles.

There are also some libraries of assets that I found. All of them are cartoon style but it's surprising how iconic and similar the explosions look to this saga. 

You can check the rest of the post for more information. It breaks down a lot of secrets that where used to make this game a total jewel. 

Warehouse work and development

The original idea for the environment was to make it an attic where loads of unused robots where stored and that's when she would fin him. While developing this we decided to modify it into more of a ware house. A place where the robots are being made at the moment and there are prototypes everywhere.

When I was working on it on Autocad I started to notice that the scales where too simplistic and slightly realistic for the style that we were doing, so I split the place into two, a small attic like studio where the the first scene takes place.

This is an office type with a desk, chair, lamp and a few blueprints of some work. The place has wooden floor and nice wallpapers. On one side there's a metal door half way open where surveillance bot leads the girl to have a peek.
This leads to the second part of the scenario; a massive workshop like building that is under level of the previous room but at the same time it has a quadruple height ceiling. It is all surrounded by copper walls that have got rusted over time giving a multicolour shade.there are 4 main beams connected at the top and holding a balcony like there are several smaller pillars as support. Right in front of it, there a massive circular window, from which the main light comes in.

The plan is to have Albus lying there motionless and having this really strong light coming to him; this was with the porpoise of creating a really intense scene where the connection between the Albus and Tabitha is made.

Part of the emphasis is the hight of the ceiling also try's to remark on the importance of the bound of the scene and all I did was to try to create an environment that looks messy like a workhouse would be but still keeping a central focus on the character without getting lost in details.

Mothhead

Even after seeing the video of Unity 4 (butterfly effect) I wasn't sure unity had the flexibility that other game engines tend to show. I was looking a lot into trying UDK or Cryengine just to give it a go and hopefully make a personal project on it, but I was afraid to use them as I know very little about scripting and I know those software a bit less user friendly due to their complexity.

Luckily I fount this video online called Mothhead, which is meant to be a videogame as well, and the graphics are just amazing.
It clearly has a lot to do with the textures work, but it certainly reaches the quality of a mainstream game which really regain my hope on keep working on unity.

Mothhead is an interactive art demo built in Unity by San Francisco-based industry art studio Massive Black. Explore the beautiful dark and whimsical underground grotto as a moth, meet a new friend, and find your other physical half. Solve a simple puzzle allowing you to cross a chasm and make your way outside where you'll find yourself in a beautiful outdoor environment and be able to free a friend from captivity using a combination of brains and brawn. 

Interested? well check their website or check the video below in case you need more:

Hydraulics

One of the important parts for Albus movements were the hydraulic pistons included in both legs and arm.
The idea is that despite his movements, for cartoonish as they might be, they needed to be constrained to each other at all time to keep this feeling of being a mechanic character. Matt gave me a good idea to aim constrain them one another and, on its own, it was working just fine. The problem came when I had to constrain those constrains to parts of geometry that where already bond to the rig.

I found this very useful video online that basically takes you through a good way of not only make functional pistons, but also how to "cheat" by making an infinite constrain between the master and slave parts of the hydraulic part.

Skeleton of Albus

Rigging was not such a bit task as the robot had a simple structure, but the problem began when I had to bind it to the geometry.
I was told to try a rigid binding as it could work best for robot like movements, but no matter how much I tried I just couldn't get my head around it.
I ended up going for a soft binding and it turned out to be just fine, as I just had to do be very specific with the weight painting to avoid having organic movements.
Probably the part that made it a bit difficult was the fact that the character was not model in a T pose so the influence between the joint in the arm and right leg was creating a bit of confusion, but the character doesn't have a full arm extended so not putting him on a T pose from the beginning was part of the plan.

After weight painting, the joints were working smoothly but I discovered that there were some issues when the elbow would bend above one point. By the time I realised this issue the project was ready to start animation and going back to fix this small issue was probably going to delay the whole process. We opted to just make a note next to the model to let them know where to be careful in case someone else was to work with it in the animation process. Luckily, the movements of Albus did not require to bend his elbow to that extend.

A Slower Speed of Light

Something that always captivates me is when dynamic in game are just different from the others. Despite the fact that our cinematic is not playable and the amount of scripting that we put on it is limited I found this game that at first caught my attention because I thought the style was similar to ours. Turns out that the styles is not what this game is about; in fact this is probably not even a game itself. More than anything this is a test of how physics related to speed can alter the way a game looks and more than anything how the game play can be taken to a whole new level, and it's is done surprisingly in Unity.
I remember back in high school I was really interested in physics, but I always got disappointed as there weren't many creative ways to apply it (back in t he days) but now seeing how wonderful things can actually manage to work in an amazing way it gives me hope to actual someday work mathematically to create something artistic.

Check the website and possibly try it out :) 

Manga Society - Thought Bubble

So everyone is allowed to have a hobby or guilty pleasure, and mine is to read manga. Despite the fact that I don't do it so often now a days because it can be quite expensive, I quite enjoy going with some friends to the Manga workshop, part of the anime society at Leeds University.
Last year I attended but didn't really do much there, but this year I decided to go for it as there was a more ambitious project of making a comic/manga in a short period of time and get it published to present it at the Thought Bubble event that took place on the Royal Armouri Museum in Clarence Dock, Leeds this last 17th and 18th of November.

Now I didn't have time to really come up with an original concept so I thought I might as well use the our concept and develop it in a different way. Many films are based on comics now a days, and seeing that our storyboards weren't very polished I went in with it and made a 4 comic.
The time for it was pretty short, and on top of that I had the rest of the stuff to model, so it was probably not very smart of me to get into this kind of commitment, but it was a nice experience to see it published (and we actually sold all the copies).

 So the quality is not up to professional standards, but it was a lot of fun to make it and I also realized how hard it is to plan panels and the flow on between pages. Also another good part of this is that I got my hands on a software called Manga Studio, which helped me to make the panels and the screen toning. This is clearly not the full potential of the software, but I have to say if I didn't master it because of the speed on which I had to work at the end, at least I understood a great part of it. It might not be a very useful tool for the course, and I probably shouldn't have been spending my time doing this, but that's why it's called guilty pleasure I suppose...  please don't judge me

Moving Alien

Having started our own project, I really didnt wanted to waste time on making a decen texture for the alien, so I apologise for it.
Also the unity file from which I worked to make a web version on the turntable of the alien went corrupted for some reason, and all I could do at the moment is to put a playblast of the small idle animation I made.
Bare in mind that I did this in matter of a few minutes during class and it was all because we wanted to try the scripting on Unity that would allow us to play different idles in a random way, just to show a variety of expressions of the character.

(I'm so sorry you had to watch this) I probably bring shame to the college by showing this, but I promise the animation for our own project will be of much better quality; this was only a quick test.

Ni no Kuni

Another game that inspire me for the process was the upcoming Ni no Kuni for PS3.
I started following this game from the very moment I heard it was made in collaboration of Studio  Ghibli  (to which I'm a massive fan).
You can tell straight away that the mark of Hayao Miyazaki is everywhere in this game; the world and characters are just full of this incredible magic.
The game hasn't come out yet so the game play and other part of the story are something that I can't say I have experienced, but something that I absolutely loved is that Level-5 did a great job on keeping the fidelity of the concept to it's maximum.
The game has some anime openings (which where to be expected) but during the game play the textures are just astonishing, as it keep at all moments and incredible amount of detail and the iconic charm of any Ghibli film. The cell shade works just fine, and even thought the characters could have done with a bit of more expressions, I really can't wait to get my hands on it and give it a go.

The Backwater Gospel

Came across this video on tumblr the other day called "The Backwater Gospel" and so far I've seen it easily over 20 times. 

It just happens to be an incredible piece of animation part of The Animation Workshop in Denmark and not only the animation itself but the style that it has makes me drool every time I watch it. 

A well done animation that it's aimed not for kids it's probably something that you dont see a lot, specially with the quality that this posses. 

Feast your eyes: 

Amazing isn't it! 

Well I was really glad to find the making off, and seriously would love to do a project with this level of character and definition in style. 

On the video I'll put below you can see the way they worked in facial expressions and how little details become incredibly important, like the little "pen strokes" that come off the silhouettes of mostly everything. Props and scenery just works in a perfect harmony. 

This video has cause a massive impact on me...seriously. It is actually making me think that this could probably be the way I want to take my dissertation project or at least a personal project, but for now, enjoy the process of the making of The Backwater Gospel. 

Colours of a robot

UV mapping Albus was more than a challenge, it was just time consuming. having all the little pieces separated made it easier, but still it took longer than what I expected. 

Most parts went out smoothly, but having to model the environment and UV map it at the same time made me not to be able to texture Albus until really late stages of the project. 

Also it was really hart to think of a colour that would suit him, and me being not so good with colour theory I ended up opting for a "typical" bronze scheme. 

Here's some of the progress images of Albuss texture: 

1.- just the UV map capture. 

 2.- The textures finally painted...took me ages to do it and I also put a small clover as a signature :)

3.- This is just an example image of the final render of Albus. Looking great and so happy :) 

This is just an idea that I thought could work (if we had more time). I wanted to make an occlusion render pass to the textures that would add a nice feeling to the textures, and probably help to give us a cartoon style with a bit of more complexity, but unfortunately this was just an attempt  the process was becoming a bit more complicated that what I expected, and it had to be done to every single object in the scene, so probably the rendering time would have double and the time for the deadline was just upon us.