ECSE 4961/6961: Computer Vision and Graphics for Digital Arts DVDs for the week of September 24–28 What Dreams May Come (Sept 24) Start with Chapter 6 (“Painting Your Own Surroundings”) about 24 minutes in. The setting is that the Robin Williams character has died and finds out that heaven, for him, is to be inside one of his wife’s paintings. There are some interesting effects reminiscent (although probably not technically related to) Hertzmann’s paper on painterly rendering. At about 25:30 there’s a shot with the camera pushing forward through flowers and plants. At about 28:00 there are some effects of sun-dappled water that capture a painterly feel. At 29:00 there’s a short clip of a bird flying through an expressionistic sky. You can stop watching around 32:00 (when the characters enter the house). Next, go to the extras and select the featurette. Skip forward to about 11:00 through 13:30 when the director and effects artists discuss how the painterly effect was achieved, and show some raw footage and steps to achieving the final effect. Discuss similarities and differences to Hertzmann, extensions and inspirations, technical strengths and weaknesses, etc. A Scanner Darkly (Sept 24) The whole movie is probably worth watching, but in the interest of keeping the video part to 15-20 minutes, I suggest going directly to the extras section of the disc. Watch the Theatrical Trailer, which gives a pretty good overview of the animation style in different scenes. Then watch the extra titled “The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales”. Note how the edges and strokes (most/all of which are traced manually by the animators, a process called rotoscoping) play a key role in the effect. Could this edge extraction be reliably achieved automatically? Do all of the edges of interest to ani- mators correspond to edges that would be picked up by an automatic edge-detection algorithm? Conversely, are all edge detections “important” to the animation? How to decide which edges need to be kept? Discuss also relationships to matting and morphing, as well as the animation style (much of which resembles cel shading). Given the edges, could the “interiors” of the polygons be filled automatically, along the lines of Stylized Video Cubes or Decorative Mosaics? Stranger Than Fiction (Sept 27) Start at the beginning of the movie, watching all of Scene 1 and Scene 2 up until 6:05 (“Don’t worry Harold- it is Wednesday.”) There are some obvious effects, and some that are more subtle (e.g. the pave- ment as Harold crosses the street). These effects are all based on matchmoving, which we’ll discuss in October/November. Go to the extras menu and watch the featurette entitled “Picture a Number: The Evolution of a G.U.I.” This features interviews with the directions, visual effects artists, and the effects house MK12 that developed and refined the effect, and does a good job of describing how the narrative influenced the development of the effect..