New media

What is new media these days? its always changing, the front of what is new is differnt one year then it is anouther. Animation is now one of the fastest moving medias around in the speed it has developed, and is still developing, we are constantly making games better, graphics better, vfx better. Pushing the artist more with technology, and pushing technology more from the artist. Graphics is one way to show how much the industry is progressing but there is also anouther way. Over the past year there has been a large leap that has lead to well used job role. "sterographer" this person takes care of all that new 3D that u see in every single animated film at the cinema these days. Its become a real hit and has baught 3d back to the cinema in a real big way. James camerons avatar was the first to me to use 3d in such a compelling way with the vfx just jumping out at u but not in a unnessisary or gimmik kind of way. 3D should only be used when it is able to given the audeince somthing more then just 2 hours of looking like a geek and a couple of cheap thrills as somthing pops out towards you. It should be used for when the created world is so rich and well populated adding this new dimension only helps to show that and immerses you within the film.

Anouther recent development is motion capture, although it has really been a while for a long time (in animation standards is about 10 years) it has only just become useable in films. Motion capture can come in many differnt shapes and sizes, from mechincal suits, too rooms with funny looking lights and a guy standing in the middle with green dots on his face, too no green dots at all, just a man talking into a camera. Motion capture replicates the animtion of a person trying to get it as real as possible, so trying to capture every tiny little movement then if given to an animator would take weeks and weeks of work. This how ever is certainly not the be all and end all for animators, they will not start loosing there job because of this. Motion capture is still not acurate enough to get to the other side of uncanny valley, although close and a great tool for speeding production up, character animators everywhere do not have to worry about loosing their jobs to a computer.

But hasnt that feeling of animators loosing there jobs to a computer been felt before anyway? after all 2d animation had a boom and then disapeared after computer animation took hold. Animators everywhere feared they would loose there job but it was infact their skills that were needed to produce a nice looking beivable and appealing animation. Because of there artistic skill and well grounding in the rules of animation they were increadbily vauble to the progress of the computer animated industry. After all a computer can never replace a human being. so yes looking at the past we can see that eventually there will be a large change in which jobs may look as if they are at threat. But until the computer can calculate creativity it can never replace the human artistic hand.