The article my group decided to review was:

Animating for Interactivity: The Walk Cycles of Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988)

My group consisted of Kori, Anna, Luke and myself.

For this assignment we were analysing the trade-off between realism of movement and responsiveness to user input in video games, and how this affects their interactivity – through the walk cycles of Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988).

Notes from the main article and other sources.

 

One of the earliest animation devices to demonstrate movement in a continuous motion is a Victorian toy which was mainly marketed towards children called the Phenakistoscope. The walk cycle loop was first popularised with the phenaakiscope and the proto-cinematic toys.  These contained the earliest examples of walk cycles, whether they were of a realistic humanoid, a cartoonish clown, or the transposition of Muybridge’s famous running horse. 

The Phenakistoscope gives the illusion of motion by using the persistence of vision principle. The Phenakistoscope works in a similar way to film.

The first person to create what we would now call a Phenakistoscope was a Belgian physicist called Joseph Plateau back in 1832. He began to experiment with optical illusions when he was a university student in the late 1820s, and a few years later he created the Phenakistoscope.

Joseph Plateau had a background in art and design. His father had wanted him to follow in his footsteps. He was a painter and illustrator.  Joseph Plateau was enrolled in the Academy of Design in Brussel, but took a different path and became a scientist instead. Joseph Plateau artistic skills were useful as he actually hand-painted the original design on the first Phenakistoscope. 

• Gertie’s gait in Gertie the Dinosaur (McCay, 1914). Is a well-known example of a pre-cel walk cycle.  

The video of Gertie the Dinosaur

https://youtu.be/32pzHWUTcPc?si=UH-8x8F1i4cviDgl 

Gertie is the best-preserved film of pioneering animation Winsor McCay. It was named #6 of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time in a 1994 survey of animators.

Gertie was the first animated character to have her own personality

McCay created a 7-minute hand drawn cartoon of a sauropod dinosaur, based on the Brontosaurus skeleton that had been displayed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 1905.

• Early animations tend to lean towards “boiling line” this is because without a means to layer drawings, each frame must be completely redrawn or traced from a previous frame. By layering transparent cels over transparent cels over background images, cel animation systematised and standardised the separation of foreground from the background, which allowed animators to reuse animations – such as the walk cycle – as a loop. 

• Like early cartoons, video games also had a brief period when games had no background image, such as in Pong (1972) and Asteroids (1979), and little – to –no variation in a level layout, such as in Pac-Man (1980) and Donkey Kong (1981).   
• Disney’s high-budget films are exemplary of full animation, while the studios UPA and Hanna-Barbera pioneered limited animation for cinema and television, respectively.  
• these two approaches to animation aesthetics are certainly useful for understanding PoP and Gaiden’s walk cycles. Full and limited animations’ differences can be explained technically and stylistically.  
• Full animation uses new images between 24 fps or 12 fps 0n ones or twos.  
• Limited animation is anything less.  
• Japanese animation scholar, Lamarre (2002), states that limited animation of anime tends to move drawings instead of drawing movements. 
• Full and limited animation are not pure categories but, tendencies that link up with production demands and stylistics choices. 
• These tendencies exist in video games. They then become articulated in ways unique to the demands of the interactivity and the video games medium. 
• Prince of Persia experiments with full animation in a video game, while Ninja Gaiden deliberately takes a mini market approach associated with limited animation techniques. 
• These games both draw on the history of the animation that precedes them. 
• Animators might work overtime to finish a budget-constrained cartoon. 
• Video game designers are bound by the processing and memory constraints of computer hardware. 
• Actions of characters in cartoons are only ever bound by their creators’ imaginations. 
• Video game characters are interactive, therefore constrained to a few useful, repeatable actions. 
• Game designers draw on the tradition of both full and limited animation to make necessary compromises. 

This article compares the different techniques of walk cycle between two games, Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden and why the different techniques are used in each game. The article also talks about the history of animations and walk cycles.After reading this article and other resources I’ve learned about the ‘boiling line’ animation method. I also found the history of the Phenakistoscope interesting. The author of this article did have a lot of references through out the article however, I found while reading the article the author wasn’t the best at explaining animation techniques and that I have to go a research them myself to fully under stand what the author was writing about. Both of this techniques have a place in video games. Which technique the animator goes with depends on the style of game.

Conclusion

I found this article really interesting as it explained about the origins and a bit of the history behind animated  walk cycles. If I were to do this again I would make sure I had a bit more work done and speak more when presenting. I would also write out a script to read from as I felt I explained my slides poorly and out of order and I don’t think I made sense to anyone listening.  This is something to take away from and work on. I am dyslexic and also struggle when nervous with speaking publicly so a script to read from is a must in the future.

 

My slides

(Anna wrote the first 3 bullet points I wrote the last)

 References and resources 

 

Fong, B (2023) , ‘Animating for Interactivity: The Walk Cycles of Prince of Persia (1989 and Ninja Garden (1988)’  25 July.  Available at: https://journals-sagepub-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/doi/full/10.1177/17468477231182910 (Accessed: 7/2/2023).

Coules, V (2019) ‘Introducing..”Gertie the Dinosaur”,24 July. Available at: https://palaeomedia.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2019/07/24/meet-gertie-the-dinosaurus/ (Accessed: 7/2/2023).

Tiernan, J. (2022) ‘What is a phenakistoscope?’, 30 March. Available at: https://www.linearity.io/blog/phenakistoscope/(Accessed: 7/2/2023).

Torre, D (2015) ‘Boiling Lines and Lightning Sketches: Process and the Animated Drawing’ 14 July. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1746847715589060?journalCode=anma (Accessed: 7/2/2023).