SignWriting ListDecember 31, 2013
Happy New Year, everyone, and THANK YOU for such wonderful messages about animation …
Animation is one of two key elements behind the entire writing system, so this is amazing for me, because you are taking this further, through this discussion - I appreciate this very much -
This message may seem long, but it is actually relevant to this discussion on animating SignWriting and creating software to animate it faster...
I promised Erika Hoffmann that I would try to write down the early beginnings of the system, with diagrams from the actual pages and film that inspired the original invention, because a written history is needed and has never really been documented - so the year 2014 is the year for this documentation -
There were two influences that inspired the original movement-writing system, back in the 1960’s, when I was a teenager…
1. The first was seeing diagrams of a stick figure dance notation system developed in the 1800’s by Friedrich Albert Zorn… There are hundreds of dance notation systems, and there are several ones that use stick figures, but it was specifically the stick figure notation of Friedrich Albert Zorn that inspired me -
2. The second was viewing one of the earliest attempts at animated films of Walt Disney of Minnie and Mickie Mouse - but I am not talking about the later versions of Mickey Mouse animation, but the one of the earliest attempts. The mice had stick figure legs and funny bubble feet, and what struck me, was if you took the stick figures of Zorn, and placed them in an animated way, frame by frame, and flipped them on a piece of paper, that would create a way to have both a writing system with pen and paper, and one that had the potential to move like an animated film.
Once I wrote the first book on DanceWriting in 1973…from that point...the system changed and developed and became what it is today…there were all kinds of influences that followed, but I always kept the hope that someday that DanceWriting and SignWriting would be animated… An animation of DanceWriting was done in the 1970’s by a dance student…it is a crude attempt but looks just like the dance - and I think I will include that first animation, done before personal computers existed, in the history document -
When Stefan and his family started to use the Animated GIF tool to create animated SignWriting, it felt so good to see that it could indeed be done ...that we can have both a writing system with pen and paper, and the same writing system can be animated to move and to teach others how to read and write - and the animation matches the way we really see the signs - that is what is so exciting about it - It really looks like sign language - like someone is signing standing in front of you, except it is from your own perspective…so it is the way you see yourself sign, moving ...
Regarding an auto animation tool - well - I think we can pin down what the movement symbols do for us - You see, the hard work to the animation is really replacing the Movement Symbols with more positions - The Movement Symbols were developed to shorten the amount of positions we needed when writing with pen and paper - but animation takes the Movement Symbols away - and replaces the Movement Symbols with more Positions -
And thank you, Gerard, for your blog today about animated SignWriting - I am glad you chose Stefan’s sentence because it shows that indeed sentences can be fully animated -
Gerard’s Blog today
2013 has been such a great year - thank you to everyone for all of your gifts of documents, software, input, books, research, instruction, and so much it cannot be listed -
Val ;-)
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Hoi,
As I understand SignWriting, each character is made up of discrete parts that symbolise specific gestures. If this understanding is correct, it follows that where a character is a combination of static parts these static parts can be associated with dynamic parts. That makes it something where a dynamic character is a composition of such parts.
When this is correct, it becomes very much a matter of recognising the discrete static parts and associate them with dynamic parts. This could allow for automated compilations of dynamic gifs.
What you would do in the train / but / plane is checking if these preprocessed compilations are correct.
Thanks,
Gerard
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Valerie Sutton
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