“Luminaries” by Independent Artist
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 1999 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 1999:
SIGGRAPH Video Review:
Track:
- 08
Title:
- Luminaries
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Independent Artist
Description:
Luminaries is related to a series of films produced in the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s that focused on an artist’s viewpoint rather than a filmmaker’s narrative approach. It applies the same approach to the medium of computer animation.
As in the films, the story is not a narrative about life events. It is the revealing of space and the nature of the medium that creates the space. Luminaries gradually reveals the space through light. In this case, light emanating from animated objects is the source for the revealing of the space.The animated objects act as the characters, and the characters act as the describers of space.
The earlier films utilized spatial ambiguities to describe space. The computer-generated environment allows for another set of ambiguous spatial situations. Gravity and the absence of gravity are used in Luminaries to illustrate the unreal nature of the spaces seen in the piece. Intersecting objects act as another tool to emphasize the synthetic nature of the events taking place.
Hardware:
A single SGI Indy computer was used for modeling, animation, rendering, and post production.
Software:
The animation was produced with Alias|Wavefront Maya 1.0 and Alias|Wavefront Composer 5.0. Keyframe animation and dynamics were used to produce the animation sequences.
