CoP Seminar - Establishing A Research Question

In this seminar we had to come up with a reasonable essay question so that we could then actually make a start on are essays. Our tutor started off by giving us all a hand out sheet which took us through how to find a topic to choose for our essay, and also how to develop from said topic we've chosen. On the handout sheet we got there where four questions we had to answer about the topic we've chosen, this helped by getting us to go out and find multiple resources to back up are essay question to make it substantial enough to write about.

So for my essay I knew I wanted to do something relating to 3D animation or Visual Effects because those are the parts of animation I would like to go into when I develop my practise further, however I had no idea what my essay question could be about. I was struggling for quite a long time thinking of what I could write about, even though I'm not the best at writing. Luckily I was surrounded by my peers so they helped me out by giving me ideas on what to write about, for example how visual effects can make the film industry lazy, the narrative power of visual effects in films, or how some animated films are taken for granted because people don't understand how much effort animators put into films. Looking back at these ideas none of them were really catching my eye so I thought about what I liked and didn't like about 3D animation and the first thing that came to mind to the Uncanny Valley theory and how 3D animation can fail at capturing human emotions realistically and just make animated figures horrifyingly creepy looking instead.

After thinking about this I realised I wanted to write about the Uncanny Valley in 3D animation and how 3D animation can escape from it. I'll do this by talking about motion capture and how it's changing 3D animation, the pros and cons about using motion capture for 3D animation, and if 3D animation can escape from the uncanny valley.