Art Event #1

"Physics of Animation"
DATE & PLACE VIEWED: Tuesday March 10, 2009 in Science Hall 2 Room 242 at 12PM

This was a lecture given by Alejandro Garcia, who is a Physics professor at San Jose State University. In this lecture, we basically covered the three basic types of animation (traditional, computer, and stop-motion), other animation-related work, and a general physics lesson for animators which included a lot of equations. We learned that "to create believable animations, animators need to understand the basic principles of physics". This lecture was definitely relevant to what we are learning in class about Flash animation, but I thought it was interesting in that we got to view animation from a more scientific standpoint. I also enjoyed how Professor Garcia showed us some scenes from several movies which included physics that didn't really make any sense (for example, from "Hancock", "Hulk", and "Nacho Libre"). These movie scenes were really hilarious to watch actually. And finally, a really good website that he gave us was animationphysics.com