Bears on Stairs, an animation made from 50 3D-printed frames

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But consider the bear, man - consider the bear. Poor Ursa Major… trapped in a time loop, endlessly climbing the stairs and getting nowhere. His entire existence a Sysiphian joke, presented for our entertainment.

What does he imagine awaits at the top of the stairs? What goal motivates his endless quest? A maiden? Christopher Robin and a bowl of hunny? A rug, guaranteed to tie the whole room together?

I dunno, man, I dunno… I need to get out and score some more half & half, 'cause I feel the serious need for another White Russian coming on.

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How exactly it was “painstakingly” modeled, if it was a 3D model, and not a high-poly or a textured one to boot?

I think in the stop motion aspect. It wasn’t computer generated animation.

More stairs and
stares
poor tired white bear

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New incarnation of the “replacement” animation technique from George Pal’s Puppetoons.

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It wasn’t “painstakingly modeled” it was painstakingly (modeled, printed out and filmed over four weeks). It was the entire process that was “painstaking,” although the phrase I would have used is “utterly, gloriously pointless,” considering there’s not even a clue that it exists in the real world. As it is, they missed a step, in that they then really should have scanned it and turned it back into computer geometry that they rendered as an animation.

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All that effort seems wasted when it just looks like CGI. I’d like to see it in person as a zoetrope.

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With the increasing sharpness of CGI, and ability to replicate hand-drawn / stop-motion textures and feels, I wonder if we’ll see the rise (maybe its already here…) of a #noCGI tag parallel to the #nofilter

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Immediately reminded me of this old chestnut: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Web_0_0x2e_1.aspx

Although I suspect this was a more deliberate exercise in redundancy.

Oh, Bother

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Silly bear. He’ll never get all the way up to Bowser without 70 stars.

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I especially enjoyed staring at this while listening to the Alexandra Streliski piece linked yesterday.

Needs to remake the animation doing a 360 spin around the bear. Make that seamless too so we get a spinning bear climbing an endless set of stairs.

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In a similar vein, a few years ago Toys For Bob (the people behind starcontrol) did a 3D-printed stop-motion animation as part of the opening sequence for Skylanders. :slight_smile:

This is more like a bear climbing up the down escalator. Poor drunken bear.

This is an unexpected solution to the “That’s crappy CGI” complaint: making reality look more like crappy CGI.

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Disney’s California Adventure theme park has a pretty awesome 3D zoetrope with all the main characters from the Toy Story movies. It’s hard to appreciate in video form though.

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Not sure why they bothered with the 3d printing when they modeled it for animation in the design process. You do have to feel kinda sorry for the bear. I had the same feeling when I set up this walking cycle animation. It just screamed for music. There’s something about walking through the darkness, never getting anywhere, but still walking. http://youtu.be/RAy5MgVIn8g