{"id":52,"date":"2006-06-16T17:07:52","date_gmt":"2006-06-16T15:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=52"},"modified":"2006-06-16T17:11:29","modified_gmt":"2006-06-16T15:11:29","slug":"repetitiveness-stylisation-and-underacting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Repetitiveness, stylisation and underacting"},"content":{"rendered":"

The core of Drama Princess is playing canned character animations. This is a very artificial situation. Human actors put a lot more variation in their performance. They never really do the same things more than once, certainly not within the course of a single play. Virtual actors, with the current state of technology, are not that versatile.<\/p>\n

The risk exists that, despite our efforts, our Drama Princess actor will still seem artificial and robot-like. We could compensate to some extent by making large amounts of animations for each character. But that costs a lot of production money, takes a lot of production time and increases the file size and probably the memory requirements as well. And ultimately, given the nature of the system, the actor will repeat its motions once in a while anyway.<\/p>\n

It looks like repetitive behaviour is a fact of life when working with virtual actors<\/strong>. The question now becomes, how do we work with this limitation? What can we do within this limitation to maximize believability.<\/p>\n

One solution could perhaps be found in stylisation. Certain forms of theater have embraced such stylisation. The Commedia dell’Arte is a well known example that inspired modern artists like Meyerhold<\/a> to develop an extremely stylised form of acting. Since the vocabulary of such acting is limited, it could serve as a model for a virtual actor system.<\/p>\n

The more expressive animations are, the more you will notice when they repeat. If animations are subtle, however, you will be far less likely to notice the repetition.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the underacting that was typical for Hollywood films in the 40s and 50s could be inspiring as well. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are masters in acting out passionate feelings while hardly moving a limb or batting a lid. We’ll have to study their work a bit to find out if they are really immobile or if there is still a lot going on that is possibly far too subtle for any virtual actor.<\/p>\n

\"Bogart<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The core of Drama Princess is playing canned character animations. This is a very artificial situation. Human actors put a lot more variation in their performance. They never really do the same things more than once, certainly not within the course of a single play. Virtual actors, with the current state of technology, are not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}