• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.20
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• pp.47-61
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• 2010

The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis introduced by a roboticist, Masahiro Mori. The theory holds that as robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act more human-like, the emotional response from a human spectator to them will become increasingly empathic, until they approach realistic similarity to humans but not quite exactly like them, when those images stop being likable and instead become repulsive and "uncanny." Although the scientific validity of this hypothesis is still debatable, it is true that many spectators has tendency to reject hyper-realistic animation. For that reason, the great success of the recent movie Avatar is remarkable. Computer animations that try to represent humans in hyper-realistic way fall into a paradox: successful result images would look too mundane and unsuccessful ones look "wrong". On top of that, audience would expect from hyper-realistic animation to see same level of acting of live-action films, which is usually not the case. The subtle differences between digital characters and real actors irritate spectators and hinder them in absorbtion. The biggest difference between Avatar and other hyper-realistic animation is the referent of their representation. While Avatar pursues a similar hyper-realistic visual style, the referents of the representation shown in this movie are totally alien to us thus impossible to compare with the real counterparts. Unlike characters in other hyper-realistic animations who had to fight an uphill battle with great actors in real life, those in Avatar have criteria of their own. That is why this movie can be free from the dreadful valley and let the audience absorb into the spectacle.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.22-30
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• 2017

CGI not only performed a crucial role to make cinema and animation evolved into digital cinema and digital animation but also CGI, an important visual format, settled realism-centric spectacle image culture in public commercial cinema and animation. The fact that CGI visual format could be structuralized in three different view points is discovered through Iconicity, photorealism, verisimilitude, uncanny valley, hyperrealism, and spectacular realism discourse research which explain image culture. First, a formative viewpoint that comes up in an iconic difference between drawing and photograph. Secondly, a cognitive viewpoint that sees visually perceived naturalness and abnormality as a realistic probability issue. Lastly, a customary viewpoint which is rooted in aesthetic tradition of cinema and animation. After that, the features of CGI which is used in the movie 'jungle book'(2016) were analyzed using the structured visual format. Consequently, this movie has hyper-realistic photographic iconicity on the base of realistic probability. Also, by following image-aesthetic convention which uses overstated and amplified narrative as a visual format, at the same time, the movie also has sufficient image-aesthetic convention in animation by personified animal character.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.1245-1257
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• 2008

The establishment of a production pipeline imported 30 computer graphics is suggested in this paper to improve the efficiency of existing production pipeline of clay animation. The point is that the process of building clay characters that remains labor intensive among the existing procedures is replaced by the process of creating computer generated characters. In order to create characters out of clay by means of 30 computer graphics, a diffuse map and displacement map are made of an oil-based clay according to the UVW coordination of polygon modeling, which is the same color and kind of clay used to make a clay character. In addition, a panoramic HDRI recording system is developed to record the lighting information of shooting environment for miniature sets, which is imported in 3D computer graphic tools as digital light source. On account of the new production pipeline, a hyper realistic rendering image can be produced, and at the same time it improves the traditional pipeline of stop motion animation that is know-how based procedure of a complete artist by the engineering approach to the automatic process.