Monday, October 29, 2012
Character Animation
I chose to use my desk LED lamp as my animated character. Yes, Pixar has definitely inspired me for this assignment. I imagined how a lamp, something without any legs or wheels, would look like if it needed to get somewhere. The long bendy neck of my lamp made me think of a worm and how it contracts and stretches. I also wanted to be able to feel the weight of the base of the lamp as it moved, so I made it drag its base behind.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Saturday, October 6, 2012
The Laws of Physics in an Animation Universe
For my Physics of Animation term paper, I chose to dissect the laws of physics in one of my favorite animated films, “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It is a feature length animated film produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick. It was released in 1993 and has since then become a Disney classic and garnered a die hard following. I chose to analyze this film because it is a stop motion animation. In traditional or 3D-animated films, artists can create the world from nothing but lines on paper or algorithms on a computer and apply an infinitely wacky amount of physics to its characters and environments. Because stop motion animation utilizes hand crafted characters and environments, it has the added difficulty of obeying real world physics in structure while at the same time breaking those laws of physics in order to create the fantasy world. This additional element intrigued me, and I wanted to discover if it would restrict the events that can happen in this particular film. I have found that the world in “Nightmare” has the following laws of physics unique to its universe and apart from our own: first, that buildings and furniture will remain standing despite seeming structurally unsound; second, that an object at at rest may not stay at rest, and have the capacity to generate its own forces in order to set itself into motion; and third, that gravity is not a constant and varies its effects on objects in the world.
"Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas" has a distinct, unique visual style, full of spindly sticks contrasting against looming masses, and harsh, jagged straights striking against fragile, delicate, curls. These elements repeat infinitely in the world’s design, prominently in the architecture of the town. Jack, the main character of the film, lives in a house atop a ledge that hangs over an abyss. He sleeps in the tower at the top of his house that extends even further into the abyss. It is completely unbalanced and would not be able to stand in our world. Figure 1 shows the actual prop of Jack’s house used in the film; note how the ledge is supported by a straight rod, and how the filmmakers cleverly employed camera angles to ensure the rod is hidden from the audience’s view (figure 2). Beds are featured throughout Nightmare’s world, and almost all of them have very spindly legs, too spindly to hold up any mattress. Figure 3 shows Sally the Ragdoll sitting up on her bed. Each bed leg is only about ¼ the size of one of Sally’s legs; the combined weight of Sally and her mattress should have crumbled the bedframe. Dr. Finkelstein’s tower looks as though it will topple over and roll down the hill it sits atop (figure 4). Oogie’s tree, all gnarled and bent over on one side, and its thinning branches can still hold up various buildings (figure 5) instead of collapsing into the land sink it rests atop.
"Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas" has a distinct, unique visual style, full of spindly sticks contrasting against looming masses, and harsh, jagged straights striking against fragile, delicate, curls. These elements repeat infinitely in the world’s design, prominently in the architecture of the town. Jack, the main character of the film, lives in a house atop a ledge that hangs over an abyss. He sleeps in the tower at the top of his house that extends even further into the abyss. It is completely unbalanced and would not be able to stand in our world. Figure 1 shows the actual prop of Jack’s house used in the film; note how the ledge is supported by a straight rod, and how the filmmakers cleverly employed camera angles to ensure the rod is hidden from the audience’s view (figure 2). Beds are featured throughout Nightmare’s world, and almost all of them have very spindly legs, too spindly to hold up any mattress. Figure 3 shows Sally the Ragdoll sitting up on her bed. Each bed leg is only about ¼ the size of one of Sally’s legs; the combined weight of Sally and her mattress should have crumbled the bedframe. Dr. Finkelstein’s tower looks as though it will topple over and roll down the hill it sits atop (figure 4). Oogie’s tree, all gnarled and bent over on one side, and its thinning branches can still hold up various buildings (figure 5) instead of collapsing into the land sink it rests atop.
Figure 1. Actual prop of Jack's house.
Figure 2. Jack's house in movie.
Figure 3. Sally on her bed.
Figure 4. Dr. Finkelstein's tower.
Figure 5. Oogie's lair.
Newton’s first law, or the law of inertia, states that objects at rest stay at rest until an unbalanced force acts upon it. “Nightmare” deviates from this physical law with one of its most iconic scenes. After another routine Halloween celebration, Jack laments his unhappiness in the graveyard upon a hill with a tip that curls in on itself (figure 6). The hill’s curl unfurls and provides Jack a bridge to step down and continue into the forest. The tip curls in again. And all of this happens without any explanation as to why or how the curlique could have come undone. There were no buttons pushed or flips switched; Jack did not push down on the hill or have his dog Zero pull on the tip and pull it taut – no amount of wind could have unfurled it and kept its shape long enough for Jack to step down. The hill’s curlique, the object in question, should have stayed at rest, considering no force was applied to it. But it moves anyway. This is an example of "Nightmare's" physical law in which objects can exert and apply a force on itself in order to set itself into motion. This I would call an "inexplicable or unexplained" force.
There is another example of this unexplained force that is used to progress the movie’s plot significantly. Jack stumbles upon a grove of trees with a specially designed door carved into each one, depicting the major holidays of the year. He opens the Christmas tree door, peers into a blank darkness, and turns around to shrug at Zero when a sudden air current picks up and sucks Jack through the open doorway and down into the dark pit. Jack is not a man of literal substance – he is composed of a few stick-like bones, so it would not take much force to blow him off his feet. What is certainly off here is how or why the open doorway would suck him in. And only Jack was affected,; Zero, his ghost dog made of far less substance than Jack, managed to stay unaffected. As far as the audience can tell, there is no giant vacuum cleaner down this hole. It seems as though the air in the darkness managed to set itself into such a violent motion as to create a suction force. There may have been a literal vacuum inside the tree, which would have explained a rush of air from the outside in, but it would have happened as soon as Jack opened the door. If this were true, however. the force of the atmosphere outside the tree door would have been too great for Jack to have been able to open.
The same inexplicable suction force occurs during the second half of the film. Sally has sneaked into Oogie’s lair in order to free Santa but before she and Santa can escape, Oogie starts to “suck” them back into his lair. He is generating a strong enough suction force with only his inhalation that he wrenches Sally from her perch, and rips the very rotund and massive Santa from the ladder right towards him. It is revealed later on in the movie that Oogie is actually just a bug-filled burlap sack, with no contraption or machinery visible that could create this suction force (figure 7). It is an inexplicable force.
Gravity in "Nightmare" works in strange, erratic ways. There is a constant feeling of weightlessness and “floating" throughout the movie. When objects are thrown into the air, or whenever Jack leaps to and fro, they seem to hang in the air for far longer than they should. It conjures the same feeling as watching astronauts walk on the moon. This hints that the gravitational force in "Nightmare" is far weaker than the one in our world. In some cases, gravity is entirely negligible: witches manage to fly and hover in the air without steam power, jet packs, hydro power, or magnets, and can take off and stop at a dime, even though they generate no friction, and feel no force of gravity until the witches choose to. Vampires, for their girth, calmly flap their wings/arms once or twice before achieving full liftoff straight into the air. They would have had to generate much more air resistance/pushing power with their arms before being airborne. The reindeer during the second half of the movie also commit to this physical law that defies gravity.
When objects in “Nightmare” are thrown, tossed, or jump through the air, they are also able to travel in some pretty improbable arcs. One example of this improbable arc is when the Easter Bunny lunges out of the garbage bag it is trapped in. The first half of its jump is more vertical and of a steeper grade than the second half, which flattens out. The Easter Bunny creates another improbable arc when it jumps back into the bag, having been scared by the Halloween Town citizens, creating more of a sweeping or gliding action towards the landing. A second example is when Jack gets hit by a missile while riding Santa’s sleigh over Christmas Town. The missile hits his sleigh at an angle, but instead of being thrown in the direction of the missile and the missile’s force, Jack and all the objects with him go straight up. Their reaction to the missile hitting them is not taken into account; it is as if the missile had hit them from the very bottom of the sleigh and not at the angle which it hit.
Despite the seemingly infinite number of ways “Nightmare” manages to break physics, it surprisingly adheres to one particular physical law from our universe. Both Sally and Jack free fall through space, and how each of them land follows the real world physical law of terminal velocity (to an extent). From her isolated perch, Sally sees Jack pacing in his tower, struggling to unravel the mystery of the Christmas holiday, and proceeds to concoct several simmering brews and shiny doodads to aid him in his research. She unlatches her giant circular window, lowers the laden basket to the ground with a rope, and, with a determined glance towards Jack's tower, thrusts herself out into open space. She hits the ground hard enough to tear her stitching and explode into a mess of rag doll limbs (figure 8). Later on in the film, Jack is riding Santa's sleigh high up over Christmas Town before being blown out of the sky by a ballistic missile. He plunges dramatically toward the snow-covered fields. The audience does not see the actual landing, but finds Jack on his back in the outstretched arms of a stone statue, his spindly limbs dangling limply (figure 9). He does not explode into a million pieces like Sally does, despite being made of more fragile material, and this is because his terminal velocity is much lower than hers.
Terminal velocity is the maximum constant speed an object reaches during free fall. This happens when the downward force of gravity on the object is cancelled out by the upward force of air resistance, or drag, against it. Terminal velocity depends upon the shape, size, and mass of an object; generally, the bigger and more massive an object is, the higher its terminal velocity, and the more kinetic energy it will gain and need to dissipate in order to land safely. A squirrel or an ant falling from a height of 40 feet, or any other height, will land safely on the ground. A human falling from the same height, however, will likely incur major injuries, or even death. In this particular scenario, Jack equates to the ant, and Sally equates to the human. Sally may have more surface area than Jack does, which should catch more air resistance and thus slow her fall, but her mass and material ensure that she will have a much higher terminal velocity. She also falls a distance of five stories, which is about 50 to 60 feet above the ground; it is too short a distance for her to react, and enough of a distance to kill a human, so it's no surprise she explodes upon impact. When Jack was shot down, he is inside the lowest layer of clouds, which is about 6,500 feet above the ground. But he is of very little mass, is knocked unconscious and therefore has an even weight distribution throughout his body, and has a Santa suit to contribute to air resistance, so his landing in one piece can be believable…except for one small detail: his landing position. Because he is on his back with his limbs dangling, it indicates that he did not have even weight distribution when he made contact, and therefore should have snapped in half from the force of impact, rather than staying in one piece.
I could have gone on forever listing the various laws of physics in this world (i.e. how ghosts in “Nightmare” are actually non-Newtonian liquid-gases with the ability to carry heavy packages without having any mass of their own), but I focused on ones that were more consistent throughout the movie and more relevant to the progressing the story forward. I ignored the more blatantly magical parts, such as Sally’s hands moving of their own accord while detached from her body. I consider that particular example more of a biological anomaly than one related to physics, anyway. I conclude that the creative minds behind "Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas" did not allow the laws of our physics to limit their storytelling. I was fully submerged into this fantastical, frightful, and fun world, and I believe "Nightmare" did a wonderful job of breaking physics to result in this Christmas story that has a special place in my Hallow-heart.
Figure 6. Jack on the hill.
There is another example of this unexplained force that is used to progress the movie’s plot significantly. Jack stumbles upon a grove of trees with a specially designed door carved into each one, depicting the major holidays of the year. He opens the Christmas tree door, peers into a blank darkness, and turns around to shrug at Zero when a sudden air current picks up and sucks Jack through the open doorway and down into the dark pit. Jack is not a man of literal substance – he is composed of a few stick-like bones, so it would not take much force to blow him off his feet. What is certainly off here is how or why the open doorway would suck him in. And only Jack was affected,; Zero, his ghost dog made of far less substance than Jack, managed to stay unaffected. As far as the audience can tell, there is no giant vacuum cleaner down this hole. It seems as though the air in the darkness managed to set itself into such a violent motion as to create a suction force. There may have been a literal vacuum inside the tree, which would have explained a rush of air from the outside in, but it would have happened as soon as Jack opened the door. If this were true, however. the force of the atmosphere outside the tree door would have been too great for Jack to have been able to open.
The same inexplicable suction force occurs during the second half of the film. Sally has sneaked into Oogie’s lair in order to free Santa but before she and Santa can escape, Oogie starts to “suck” them back into his lair. He is generating a strong enough suction force with only his inhalation that he wrenches Sally from her perch, and rips the very rotund and massive Santa from the ladder right towards him. It is revealed later on in the movie that Oogie is actually just a bug-filled burlap sack, with no contraption or machinery visible that could create this suction force (figure 7). It is an inexplicable force.
Figure 7. Oogie's bugs.
Gravity in "Nightmare" works in strange, erratic ways. There is a constant feeling of weightlessness and “floating" throughout the movie. When objects are thrown into the air, or whenever Jack leaps to and fro, they seem to hang in the air for far longer than they should. It conjures the same feeling as watching astronauts walk on the moon. This hints that the gravitational force in "Nightmare" is far weaker than the one in our world. In some cases, gravity is entirely negligible: witches manage to fly and hover in the air without steam power, jet packs, hydro power, or magnets, and can take off and stop at a dime, even though they generate no friction, and feel no force of gravity until the witches choose to. Vampires, for their girth, calmly flap their wings/arms once or twice before achieving full liftoff straight into the air. They would have had to generate much more air resistance/pushing power with their arms before being airborne. The reindeer during the second half of the movie also commit to this physical law that defies gravity.
When objects in “Nightmare” are thrown, tossed, or jump through the air, they are also able to travel in some pretty improbable arcs. One example of this improbable arc is when the Easter Bunny lunges out of the garbage bag it is trapped in. The first half of its jump is more vertical and of a steeper grade than the second half, which flattens out. The Easter Bunny creates another improbable arc when it jumps back into the bag, having been scared by the Halloween Town citizens, creating more of a sweeping or gliding action towards the landing. A second example is when Jack gets hit by a missile while riding Santa’s sleigh over Christmas Town. The missile hits his sleigh at an angle, but instead of being thrown in the direction of the missile and the missile’s force, Jack and all the objects with him go straight up. Their reaction to the missile hitting them is not taken into account; it is as if the missile had hit them from the very bottom of the sleigh and not at the angle which it hit.
Despite the seemingly infinite number of ways “Nightmare” manages to break physics, it surprisingly adheres to one particular physical law from our universe. Both Sally and Jack free fall through space, and how each of them land follows the real world physical law of terminal velocity (to an extent). From her isolated perch, Sally sees Jack pacing in his tower, struggling to unravel the mystery of the Christmas holiday, and proceeds to concoct several simmering brews and shiny doodads to aid him in his research. She unlatches her giant circular window, lowers the laden basket to the ground with a rope, and, with a determined glance towards Jack's tower, thrusts herself out into open space. She hits the ground hard enough to tear her stitching and explode into a mess of rag doll limbs (figure 8). Later on in the film, Jack is riding Santa's sleigh high up over Christmas Town before being blown out of the sky by a ballistic missile. He plunges dramatically toward the snow-covered fields. The audience does not see the actual landing, but finds Jack on his back in the outstretched arms of a stone statue, his spindly limbs dangling limply (figure 9). He does not explode into a million pieces like Sally does, despite being made of more fragile material, and this is because his terminal velocity is much lower than hers.
Figure 8. Sally's limbs.
Figure 9. Jack in tact.
Terminal velocity is the maximum constant speed an object reaches during free fall. This happens when the downward force of gravity on the object is cancelled out by the upward force of air resistance, or drag, against it. Terminal velocity depends upon the shape, size, and mass of an object; generally, the bigger and more massive an object is, the higher its terminal velocity, and the more kinetic energy it will gain and need to dissipate in order to land safely. A squirrel or an ant falling from a height of 40 feet, or any other height, will land safely on the ground. A human falling from the same height, however, will likely incur major injuries, or even death. In this particular scenario, Jack equates to the ant, and Sally equates to the human. Sally may have more surface area than Jack does, which should catch more air resistance and thus slow her fall, but her mass and material ensure that she will have a much higher terminal velocity. She also falls a distance of five stories, which is about 50 to 60 feet above the ground; it is too short a distance for her to react, and enough of a distance to kill a human, so it's no surprise she explodes upon impact. When Jack was shot down, he is inside the lowest layer of clouds, which is about 6,500 feet above the ground. But he is of very little mass, is knocked unconscious and therefore has an even weight distribution throughout his body, and has a Santa suit to contribute to air resistance, so his landing in one piece can be believable…except for one small detail: his landing position. Because he is on his back with his limbs dangling, it indicates that he did not have even weight distribution when he made contact, and therefore should have snapped in half from the force of impact, rather than staying in one piece.
I could have gone on forever listing the various laws of physics in this world (i.e. how ghosts in “Nightmare” are actually non-Newtonian liquid-gases with the ability to carry heavy packages without having any mass of their own), but I focused on ones that were more consistent throughout the movie and more relevant to the progressing the story forward. I ignored the more blatantly magical parts, such as Sally’s hands moving of their own accord while detached from her body. I consider that particular example more of a biological anomaly than one related to physics, anyway. I conclude that the creative minds behind "Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas" did not allow the laws of our physics to limit their storytelling. I was fully submerged into this fantastical, frightful, and fun world, and I believe "Nightmare" did a wonderful job of breaking physics to result in this Christmas story that has a special place in my Hallow-heart.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Laws of Physics in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" - Outline
The Laws of Physics in The Nightmare Before Christmas
I.
Introduction
a.
Introduce “The Nightmare Before Christmas”
b.
Stop motion animation
c.
Hypothesis: The Halloween world deviates from “real”
physics in several major ways
II.
Impossible Structures – Balance and Weight
a.
Majority of the structures (buildings,
furniture, characters) in the Halloween world are “impossibly structured” i.e.
will collapse under their own weight/be greatly affected by our gravity
b.
Buildings: Jack’s house (26:19), Dr. Finkelstein’s
lab (21:38), Oogie’s Lair (31:00)
c.
Furniture: beds (throughout the movie)
d.
Characters: Jack Skellington, Unicycle Clown,
Bat Boy, Sally
III.
Improbable Arcs and Weightlessness
a.
Various objects thrown/jump in improbable arcs
b.
Lack of variation in
timing/acceleration/deceleration make objects seem as if they are merely
floating in air
c.
Weightlessness/Floating: Witches on their brooms
(throughout the movie); the reindeer (35:00 and 59:00); Zero, Jack’s dog; every
time a character jumps
d.
Improbable Arcs: Easter Bunny jumps out of the
bag (34:07), Jack being blown apart by the missile (51:47)
IV.
Reaction without Action – Sentient Objects and
Unbelievable Forces
a.
The hill upon which Jack sings uncurls, despite
no visible force behind it (8:00)
b.
A vacuum sucks Jack into the Christmas World
entrance (12:13)
c.
Oogie uses mighty suction power to prevent Sally
and Santa from escaping (51:00)
V.
Competing Hypothesis: Accurate Terminal Velocity
a.
Sally is made of heftier things than Jack, so
she explodes upon impact with the ground from 5 stories high (24:28)
b.
Jack is
lighter and doesn’t explode even though falling from a greater height (51:47)
like a squirrel
c.
Jack should have broken anyway upon landing on
the angel statue – uneven weight distribution
VI.
Conclusion
a.
I can go on forever with deviations (such as
non-Newtonian “solid gases” - a term I
had to coin for this movie), stuck to more major ones
b.
Ignored the more blatantly “magical” parts (i.e.
Sally’s sentient body parts)
c.
Halloween world physics versus Christmas world
physics
d.
Animation taking physics past its breaking point
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)