The animated film "Shaft of Light" was made by Bill Tomlinson, who is
now an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine.
You can download a copy of the eight-minute film from Bill Tomlinson's
website at the university. This is a 99MB download, so it may take a
while:
University of California, Irvine: Pages of Assistant Professor Bill Tomlinson
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt/movies/ShaftOfLight.mov
Here's some information on Tomlinson:
"Bill Tomlinson is currently a doctoral student in the Synthetic
Characters Group at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on
simulating social behavior. Right now, he's working on an installation
(tentatively titled 'AlphaWolf') that will feature a pack of
autonomous interactive animated wolves. Some of the problems that this
project brings up are: How do virtual creatures think about each
other? How do development, evolution, emotion and learning relate to
social interaction? What does it mean for a virtual creature to be
dominant or submissive, or to form alliances? How can interactions
with virtual creatures change the ways that people conceive of their
own social interactions?
A while before starting this project, Bill studied biology as an
undergraduate at Harvard College. He then received an MFA from
CalArts, in the Experimental Animation department. His thesis film, a
stop-motion animation called 'Shaft of Light', showed at the Sundance
Film Festival and about 20 other film festivals internationally,
played on Bravo and the Independent Film Channel, and was distributed
by the Anti-Defamation League in their catalog of anti-oppression
resources. He then came to the Media Lab, where he learned to program
and wrote a Master's thesis about interactive cinematography. Now,
he's excited to have a chance to combine animal social behavior,
animation and digital technology into the AlphaWolf project."
Virtual Storytelling
http://www.virtualstorytelling.com/ICVS2001/programme.html
"Bill Tomlinson is a researcher and animator of autonomous
computational characters. His current work explores the connections
between social relationships, emotion, and human ethical systems.
Previous interactive projects have been shown at SIGGRAPH, Ars
Electronica, the ZKM Future Cinema exhibition and other venues, and
have been reviewed by CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Sculpture
Magazine, Scientific American Frontiers, the LA Times, Wired.com and
the BBC. In addition his animated film, Shaft of Light, screened at
the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by the Anti-Defamation
League in its Anti-Bias/Diversity Catalog. He holds an A.B. in Biology
from Harvard College, an M.F.A. in Experimental Animation from
CalArts, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Synthetic Characters
Group at the MIT Media Lab."
Arts Computation Engineering, University of California, Irvine
http://www.ace.uci.edu/people/faculty.html
Bill Tomlinson's website at the University of California, Irvine:
University of California, Irvine: Pages of Assistant Professor Bill Tomlinson
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt/
If you'd like to contact Bill Tomlinson at UCI, you'll find his phone
number and email address on this page:
University of California, Irvine
http://today.uci.edu/news/listbysubcat.asp?subcat=67
Google search strategy:
Google Web Search: "shaft of light" + "tomlinson"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22shaft+of+light%22+tomlinson
I hope this will enable you to view "Shaft of Light" again. I'm glad
to have been able to identify the film for you. If anything is
unclear, or if a link does not function, please request clarification;
I'll be glad to offer further assistance before you rate my answer.
Best wishes,
pinkfreud |
