Week 05 30/03/16 Wednesday

I looked through a few pages of comics by Jill Thompson, Jeff Smith and Doug TenNapel. Each one of them was very unique in style. Thompson's work is brightly coloured and highly detailed. The layout of her work is in a comic book form, but she also utilizes texts outside the panels to serve as narration for the story. The characters's dialogue are all in speech bubbles. Smith's style is reminiscent of "Adventures of Tin-Tin"; with simplistic characters and rich environment. The protagonists are sometimes seen with "real" human characters in the story, creating a great contrast between them and the side characters. TenNapel's artistic style is loose and free, the characters are identifiable, and they inhabit a world similar yet different to ours. I would love to read more of these creators' works, they are all extremely captivating.

I went on to do research about the Uncanny Valley, and discovered that it was first proposed by Japanese robotics expert Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. The Uncanny Valley was a model illustrated to demonstrate the feeling of creepiness evoked in a human being when presented with different robots of varying degrees of human likeness. Since then, the research gone into the Uncanny has intensified, yet no conclusive results have emerged. Some hypothesized that the feeling of creepiness came not only from the appearance of an object/entity, but also the movement it performs. I found that there was a relationship between the physical and behavioral attributes of the entity. It seemed that when something looked more realistic, humans would anticipate more realistic movements; if the object could not behave in a real human way, then the feeling of creepiness emerges. This piece of information informed me about how characters should be designed, either to be appealing or to appear creepy. It was also interesting to learn such theories behind the Uncanny Valley model. I hope to find more materials about the Uncanny, and not just within the robotics field (because when I searched Uncanny Valley, papers relating to robotics kept showing up in the results).

Here is something I drew with inspiration from my friend's makeup look.