Re: chick flick? (story vs emotion)

[Dan Lyke]

On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Todd Gemmell wrote:
> Well Story is the primary goal (I think for all of Us).  Conveying emotion
> has become a paramount part of my world and I would defer to Dan to explain
> our concept nonverbal comunication.

Given that Todd and I spent a while at a place that values body expression
above all else, we're probably a little too gung-ho on the whole thing,
but...

I think conveying emotion is a critical element of story. But I also think
that for mass-market appeal graphics are necessary (now bear with me,
'cause there may be a place for two renderers off the same data set...).

Given what I've seen of anime, and the animation process at Pixar, I know
that speech is a small part of conveying the emotional state of a
character. Facial animation is fairly well studied and a good portion of
it is cross cultural, so it's relatively easy to create a bunch of facial
shapes and animations to handle that level, but I'll bet we could take two
laser pointers, and by your dot encroaching on my dot, and how my dot
reacts, we could tell a story.

The direction Todd and Steve and I were going were with the non-verbal
methods as interactions with herds. If you happen into a pride of "lions" 
(need a tag for the creature, not ascribing any similarity between the
comptuer simulation and the real thing) and run, they'll hunt you like a
pack animal. If you approach boldly, their leader will fight you for
dominance. If you kill their leader, they'll kill you, but if you fight to
the surrender of your opponent, you'll be accepted as the alpha.
Similarly, you can be accepted into the herd if you concede defeat before
you're killed.

We were fleshing out these sorts of ideas, but somewhat outside the whole
structure of story because we figured that was a doable first bite.

Dan