Week 1 - Organizational Stuff

No real assignments (reading or written) for this week, but you will need to get prepared for next week.

Day 1 - Oranization

No real content, just a discussion as to what the class will be about.

Day 2 - History of Film and Animation

Overview lecture. Hopefully with some video of old films.

Readings: None

Web Resource:

• My notes from 2002 http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-2002/Lectures/01-Art-History-of-Animation.htm
• A great page about Melies http://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/melies2.htm
• Dan Mclaughin (UCLA Animation Scholar's) History of Animation http://animation.filmtv.ucla.edu/program/anihist.html
• Web page of early animation at the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/oahtml/oahome.html

Week 2 - Introduction

This week we'll get into real course content. Note that there are assignments due each day.

Day 3 - Topics in Animation

Assignment Due: What's interesting to you? http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~cs777-1/TextWeb/Assignments/Assignment01-Topics.html

Be prepared to discuss what you found during the assignment

Day 4 - Principles of Animation

Assignment Due: You should have read Lasseter.

Reading:

• (required - for class discussion)
  Principles of traditional animation applied to 3D computer animation
  by John Lasseter. SIGGRAPH '87. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/37401.37407 file:/p/graphics/public/quals/restore/Lasseter.1987.POT.pdf
• (not required, but worth it if you have access to it) The real reference for this stuff is the book "The Illusion of Life" by Thomas and Johnson. Chapter 3, Principles of Animation. This is a great book (its about the history of Disney animation) that was out of print for a long time. I started buying used copies on EBAY, but then it came back in print.
• (suggested - as food for thought)
  • Animation: from cartoons to the user interface.
    by Bay-Wei Chang and David Ungar. UIST '93. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/168642.168647
    (link fixed 1/25/06)
  • Applying cartoon animation techniques to graphical user interfaces.
    Bruce Thomas and Paul Calder. ACM Trans. on Computer Human Interaction (ToCHI) Sep, 2001. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/502907.502909

Other Resources:

Day 5 - Historical Perspective on Animation Systems

Assignment Due (pre class): Read Catmull

Assignment for after class: Think about how other systems (either from the readings or your experimentation) deal with some of the issues

Readings:

• (required for discussion:)
  A System for Computer Generated Movies
  by Ed Catmull. Proceedings of the 1972 ACM Annual Conference http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/800193.569952
  file:/p/graphics/public/quals/restore/Catmull.1972.ASF.pdf

• (suggested - as food for thought)

  in the past, I've suggested looking at some other historically significant systems. You should look at at least one of these.

  • (recommended: a system with interesting ideas)
    The Menv modelling and animation environment
    WT Reeves, EF Ostby, SJ Leffler Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, 1990 file:/p/graphics/public/quals/restore/Leffler.1990.TMM.pdf
  • Pete Litwinowicz's Inkwell System
    Inkwell a 2 1/2 D Animation System
    by Pete Litwinowicz SIGGRAPH '91 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=127719.122731 file:/p/course/cs838-gleicher/public/Reader/InReader/04-inkwell.pdf
  • The early 2D system of Burtnyk and Wein
    Interactive Skeleton Techniques for Enhancing Motion Dynamics in Key Frame Animation
    by N. Burtnyk and Marceli Wein CACM, October 1976 file:/p/course/cs838-gleicher/public/Reader/InReader/03-Burtnyk.pdf
• (suggested - as food for thought) one of the key concepts is the idea of good parameterizations as a way to make things easier to control. These "simplicial modeling" papers have an unusual spin on the topic, and really make you think about it. The original paper is, unfortunately hard to read. Our paper on it has some ideas that really don't pan out as well as we'd have liked.
  • Accessible animation and customizable graphics via simplicial configuration modeling
    by Tom Ngo, Doug Cutrell, Jenny Dana, Bruce Donald, Lorie Loeb and Shunhui Zhu. SIGGRAPH '00. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/344779.344964 file:p/course/cs838-gleicher/public/Reader/InReader/04Z-Ngo-Simplex.pdf
  • Simplicial Families of Drawings
    by Lucas Kovar and Michael Gleicher. Proeedings of UIST '01. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/kovar.vol/Simplicial/ file:/p/course/cs838-gleicher/public/Reader/InReader/04Z-Kovar-Simplicial.pdf

Other resources:

• My notes from 2002: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-2002/Lectures/02-Systems-History.htm