〈White Crane Dance〉（白鶴陣）入選ACM SIGGRAPH會議Daliles單元，數位贏媽祖計畫主持人戴嘉明老師與許素朱老師於2015年8月參加在洛杉磯舉辦之 ACM Siggraph，並於8月11日由戴嘉明老師做口頭報告。由於 〈White Crane Dance〉不只是強調動畫之製作過程，也強調林智畫家信版畫之珍貴，更強調台灣將流失的廟會藝陣文化之數位重建，是整個Daily報告中極為特殊的發表。
Artist Lin Chih-Hsin spent over twenty years making his celebrated woodcut print entitled “Celebrating the Mazu Festival.” The Mazu Festival is one of the most important religious celebration in Taiwan and southern China. Lin’s woodprint is a period piece, preserving vanishing rural scenes and the simpler style of earlier times.
Lin’s print is 125 meters long, making it the longest woodcut print by a solo artist. For our artwork, we took a small section called “White Crane Dance” and animated it. Two characters, a crane and a child god perform dance derived from a mythological story. While this dance was once common in Taiwan, today there is only one group remaining that still performs this dance.
We went to a temple and captured this groups dance using a portable Kinect motion sensor to record individual performer’s movements. Using that dance as a basis, we then constructed the animation based on the recorded motions of the dancers and the depiction of the characters in Lin’s print.
The Kinect sensor had errors in its recording of movements, but by comparing the Kinect sensor to synchronized video of the same dance, we were able to find those errors and fix them.
Using thematic material from the original print, we manipulated the motion data to reconstruct the print as a set of animated 3D characters.
Our artwork has two special achievements:
(1) Helping to draw attention and preserve the disappearing folk art of the “White Crane Dance” by injecting animation of the choreography into a famous woodprint.
(2) Transforming a landmark work into animation while maintaining the original visual style.
We are proud to integrate a famous historical woodprint, a disappearing dance, and animation technology into a new art form. We feel that this is a new way to preserve culture heritage and make it relevant and engaging to a broad spectrum of viewers.
