Animation excellence at Teesside University

A GROUND-BREAKING animation made at Teesside University is being shown around the world.

The film is by Simon Mckeown, a Reader in Computer Animation with the university’s School of Computing, and is being released tomorrow to mark the International Day of Persons. Motion Disabled will be projected on to landmarks in 17 countries worldwide to raise awareness about disability rights as the centrepiece of the event, organised by arts and disability organisation VSA and the DaDaFest International 2010.

The film is supported by a £30,000 award from the London-based Wellcome Trust and records the movements of people with different body forms.

Simon originally featured 14 actors with varying disabilities. They were “motion captured” performing a range of activities from kickboxing to riding a bicycle and their physically different movements recorded as animation. This was then mapped on to 3D avatars to replicate exactly the movements of the original actors using the same technology that created characters such as Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

Read more at: Nebusiness.co.uk