{"id":2889,"date":"2021-03-27T16:04:07","date_gmt":"2021-03-27T08:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.magicandlove.com\/blog\/?p=2889"},"modified":"2021-03-27T16:39:19","modified_gmt":"2021-03-27T08:39:19","slug":"movement-in-time-part-2-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.magicandlove.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/27\/movement-in-time-part-2-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Movement in Time, Part 2 (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Chinese martial art film fighting sequence and Cursive style calligraphy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Background<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The artwork is the second part of the Movement in Time series. Part 1<\/a> used 100 popular Hollywood film sequences to generate animated action paintings. Part 2 of the project analysed the fighting sequences in traditional Chinese martial art films. The results will match against the brush stroke data from the famous Cursive style Chinese calligraphy text \u2013 the One Thousand Characters Classics \u5343\u5b57\u6587. In the end, the fight sequences will automatically generate a piece of unique text from the character database. Part of the project is funded by the Faculty Research Grant from the Hong Kong Baptist University<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cursive style Chinese calligraphy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Tang Dynasty, there was a legendary story about the famous Chinese calligrapher, Zhang Xu \u5f35\u65ed. When he was drunk as usual, he saw a sword dance performed by the madam Gong Sun \u516c\u5b6b\u5927\u5a18. Since then, he was inspired to create the Wild Cursive style in Chinese calligraphy. It was the first motivation that I tried to use digital media to connect these two different types of traditional Chinese art forms, calligraphy and martial art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Calligraphic work of Zhang Xu (from Wikipedia)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the help from a former student, Ms. Lisa LAM, I digitised all the 1,000 Chinese characters using a drawing tablet with a customer program developed in Processing<\/a>. Each character will have a separate XML file to keep the brush stroke information. Here is a sample of an XML file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<character>\n  <stroke time=\"0\">\n    <point>\n      <x>0.21666667<\/x>\n      <y>0.395<\/y>\n      <w>0.032258064<\/w>\n      <t>5<\/t>\n    <\/point>\n    <point>\n      <x>0.21666667<\/x>\n      <y>0.39666668<\/y>\n      <w>0.121212125<\/w>\n      <t>33<\/t>\n    <\/point><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Given the XML file, I can recreate each Chinese character either in still image or animation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Still image of the first character from the One Thousand Characters Classics (Sky)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
The collection of 1000 characters from the database<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n