The Worcester Art Museum is currently sponsoring a lecture series on various topics in Computer Animation. There are a total of four lectures in the series; one offered each month from September to December 1999. Last Saturday's lecture was the first in the series, a presentation by Salvatore Raciti of Animation Café Studios in Plymouth, MA.
The lecture began with a brief history of computer animation technology and some of the older methods used through the years (film and digital) including x-y tables, that are physical tables used in film animation with knobs for adjusting the x and y axes. The camera serve as the z axis, and each frame is captured by taking a "picture" of each frame. Salvatore began as a film animator, and made several comparisons between creating animation by hand and on the computer throughout the lecture.
He showed a great deal of interest in the technological aspects of animation while concurrently emphasizing the importance of the artistic concepts expressed by the technology. By discussing a few of his projects, he presented the notion of "conceptual animation," which reduces the central idea of an animation sequence to a single concept. This concept is used as a starting point and as a theme to link elements within a story. A visual concept is a powerful tool as it allows the artist to unify visually expressed ideas without words.
In addition to this conceptual power, Salvatore discussed the endless possibilities of animation as a medium. "We haven't seen its power yet," he stated. Nearly any phenomenon which would be impossible in reality, such as walking through a wall, is technically possible with current animation tools, but the conceptual and artistic capabilities have yet to be exhausted.
During the middle and the end of the lecture, Salvatore showed a few short videos with clips of his work. Still images from the second video are available to the Animation Café website at http://www.animationcafe.com.
The next lecture in the series will be presented by Mike Taylor of Northeast Animation on October 9. Call the Worcester Art Museum for more details at 799-4406 ext. 3007 or ext. 3056.