History Of Computer Animation Essays - Phil Tippett, Stop Motion

History Of Computer Animation To look at him, you would not think that Phil Tippett is the creator of some of the most horrific and terrifying monsters ever witnessed by the human race. A quite normal-looking man of average height, with thinning grey hair, he has been at the forefront of movie animation for almost three decades. Phil Tippett is one of the greatest animators of all time, starting off with the age-old techniques of stop-motion and then moving on to the technical computer generated wizardry of today. I chose to write about him because I greatly admire the work he had done in the industry and he has witnessed first hand the technological advances that have occurred during the course of his career. I am also interested in him because as well as being involved in the field of cgi special effects (a career which I also wish to pursue), he was also closely involved in the ground-breaking (for the time) special effects and animation in the Star Wars Trilogy, which happens to be another love of mine . Born in 1951 in Illinois, Tippett has had a lifelong fascination with the art of animation. During his childhood he was fascinated by films such as King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts. He was fascinated by the surreal images in these movies and wanted to know how they were achieved. He went to his local library to research the subject and discovered the principles of stop motion. One of his favourite childhood hobbies was to make stop motion films with his fathers old movie camera. Tippett had been a lifelong devotee of stop motion as practiced by masters like Willis OBrien in King Kong (1933) and Ray Harryhausen in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Stop motion was, and still is an intricate, painstaking art in which animators pose and photograph miniature figures frame by frame. He wasnt alone. Just about every top animator or effects man today has favorite Harryhausen figurines, such as the part-rhino, part-centaur Cyclops, the serpent woman, and the two-headed Roc bird from Sinbad; or, from Jason, the harpies that are a cross between gargoyles and pterodactyls, and the seven-headed Hydra and its spawn (ILM). In traditional stop motion (still practiced by Henry Selick in marvels like The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), the camera records a series of subtly different poses rather than actual shifting, so the resulting flow of images is inherently surreal -- ultra-sharp and jerky. That is the reason that an audience can instantly tell when a creature has been animated in this way. If one was to look at a frame of film of a person running, they would see that the legs of the person in the frame are blurred. This was the thing that gave stop-motion away. If one were to pause a movie and look at a single frame, one would see that the movement was perfectly focussed and not blurred at all. Starting with the movie Dragonslayer in 1980, and later used on the Taumtaum creatures in Return of the Jedi, Tippe tt helped develop a new method of animating at ILM which became know as Go Motion.In go motion, motorized and computer-governed rods were attached to the models that were being animated. When each frame was shot, the rod moved to blur the movement on the film, thus giving a more realistic look of motion. In 1992, Tippett was hired to do the animation work for the film, Jurassic Park. He did not know it then, but he was about to embark on a journey that would forever change the way he, and many other artists like him worked. At the time, the director of Jurassic Park, Steven Speilberg thought that Tippetts Go Motion would do the trick for all the effects he wanted. Go motion was state-of-the-art in the early 90s. But there was trouble on the horizon. One of the computer artists at ILM presented Spielberg and company with a rough computer animation of the T. Rex circling the Land-Rover from one of the planned story board scenes in the movie. Computer animators at ILM, hired to embellish

History of Accounting From Ancient Times to Today

History of Accounting From Ancient Times to Today Accounting is a system of recording and summarizing business and financial transactions. For as long as civilizations have been engaging in trade or organized systems of government, methods of record keeping, accounting, and accounting tools have been in use. Some of the earliest known writings discovered by archaeologists are accounts of ancient tax records on clay tablets from Egypt and Mesopotamia dating back as early as 3300 to 2000 BCE. Historians hypothesize that the primary reason for the development of writing systems came out of a need to record trade and business transactions. Accounting Revolution When medieval Europe moved toward a monetary economy in the 13th century, merchants depended on bookkeeping to oversee multiple simultaneous transactions financed by  bank loans.   In 1458 Benedetto Cotrugli invented the double-entry accounting system, which revolutionized accounting. Double-entry accounting is defined as any bookkeeping system that involves a  debit and/or credit  entry for transactions. Italian mathematician and Franciscan monk Luca Bartolomes Pacioli, who invented a system of record keeping that used a memorandum, journal, and ledger, wrote many books on accounting. Father of Accounting Born in 1445 in Tuscany, Pacioli is known today as the father of accounting and bookkeeping. He wrote Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (The Collected Knowledge of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportion, and Proportionality) in 1494, which included a 27-page treatise on bookkeeping. His book was one of the first published using the historical  Gutenberg press, and the included treatise was the first known published work on the topic of double-entry bookkeeping. One chapter of his book, Particularis de Computis et Scripturis (Details of Calculation and Recording), on the topic of record keeping and double-entry accounting, became the reference text and teaching tool on those subjects for the next several hundred years. The chapter  educated readers about the use of journals and ledgers; accounting for assets, receivables, inventories, liabilities, capital, income and expenses; and keeping a balance sheet and an income statement.   After Luca Pacioli wrote his book, he was invited to teach  mathematics  at the Court of Duke Lodovico Maria Sforza in Milan. Artist and inventor  Leonardo da Vinci  were one of Paciolis students. Pacioli and da Vinci became close friends. Da Vinci illustrated Paciolis manuscript  De Divina Proportione (Of Divine Proportion), and Pacioli taught da Vinci the mathematics of perspective and proportionality. Chartered Accountants The first professional organizations for accountants were established in Scotland in 1854, starting with the Edinburgh Society of Accountants and the Glasgow Institute of Accountants and Actuaries. The organizations were each granted a royal charter. Members of such organizations could call themselves chartered accountants. As companies proliferated, the demand for reliable accountancy shot up, and the profession rapidly became an integral part of the business and financial system. Organizations for chartered accountants now have been formed all over the world. In the U.S., the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants was established in 1887.