Let's define some terms:

• A character represents a person with a well-defined personality, who can play out a scene while conveying his/her personality to an audience (eg: the Captain of the Starship Enterprise). For example, an easily frightened character might sneak into a room, look around, see Munch's The Scream, look startled, and then run off.

  You should be able to change around the furniture on the set, the goals and props, or the sequence of events, and the character will still convey the same personality.

• An actor consists of the model and movement vocabulary to act out what the character needs to do (eg: Patrick Stewart or William Shatner). For example, an actor that could play the character in the above scene would need to have movements for (i) sneaking, (ii) looking around, (iii) looking startled, (iv) and running. The actor doesn't need to worry about the sequence of doing these moves; that's the job of the character.

  Last semester, the Advanced Computer Graphics Class learned (among other things) how to build actors, but not characters.

• An interactive scene is a dramatic scene in which a character responds to an audience's actions in a way that conveys the character's particular personality, mood and thinking process. For example, a character in an interactive scene might be a compulsive eater who tries to resist eating sweets. If you show him a beer, an asparagus, and a chocolate bar, he might ignore the beer, consider the asparagus, and then convey that he really wants to eat the chocolate bar, but make a show of resisting.

What we'll be doing this semester:

• We want to create personalities this semester. The goal of the research group will be to make at least one character in an interactive scene, by using Improv's Behavioral Scripting facility. This character will be implemented on top of an actor.

• The goal of each of the animators will be to create their own actor who can play a character. They will do this by building an articulated model and the individual moves for that actor that form its underlying movement vocabulary.

• Toward the end of the semester, we will have each of the actors play the same character in the same interactive scene, by using the actor body and moves of each animator's creation together with the character implemented by the research group.

Who does what:

• Each Thursday at 4pm we will convene a meeting of both groups, to design a character on which we will focus. We will define the personality of this character, and how he/she would respond to various situations, as well as giving some example interactive scenes in which we plan to place this character.
• From this character description, we will define a vocabulary of component movements that an actor would need in order to play that character. The animators will spend much of the semester designing and building an actor whose component movements are sufficient to play the character.