Keywords

1 Introduction

Artist Chih-Hsin Lin spent over twenty years making his famous woodcut print entitled “Celebrating the Mazu Festival,” [1] one of the most important religious celebrations in Taiwan and South China. It is to preserve the vanishing rural scenes and simple style of bygone days. With a total length of 408 feet (124 m), Lin’s print is one of the longest woodcut prints by a solo artist. It has received much attention from international museums and academic research institutions (Fig. 1(a)). Lin’s print used Chinese scrolls to expand the form of space and time of the screen factors, but also carefully arranged scenes of 70 folk dancing groups throughout the print, so that the overall structure shows a musical sense of rhythm. The content of the print becomes an important documentary for the people of Taiwan (Fig. 1(b)).

Fig. 1.
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(a) Celebrating the Mazu festival exhibition at The Museum Fünf Kontinente München, Germany, 2009, (b) Lin with his woodcut print, (c) White Crane dance original print [1].

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We took a small piece of the print subtitled “White Crane Dance” (Fig. 1(c)) to develop into animation. Two characters acted out a historical story as a Fairchild and a Crane. They are the only group that exists who can do White Crane Dance in Taiwan. We went to their temple to perform motion capture using a portable Kinect motion sensor to capture individual performer’s choreography. Recording dramatic human performances of White Crane Dance derived animated content. The collected motion data was sent to a 3D program as animation frames. However, the Kinect sensor has a limitation of detection error, in comparison to the sync video, we were able to find missing or wrong motion data, then use traditional key frame to fix the problem caused by Kinect sensor. Using thematic material from the original print, we manipulated the motion data to reconstruct the print as a set of animated 3D characters.

2 Goals

2.1 Complete Taiwan’s First Digital Animation Featuring the White Crane Dance Art and Culture

Lin’s print art has been recognized by the international art museum, and White Crane Dance as a vanishing folk dance. The above elements drew high attention in visual art. This study combined art style and culture content to build Taiwan’s first White Crane Dance animation, to expose Taiwan’s religious culture to the international community.

2.2 Integration of Folk Dance Themes, to Provide Opportunities for Learning and Appreciation

Integration of folk dance and animation is important for this study, it presented a joyful visual art but also provide the contents for learning and understanding folk dance. The animation will show the form and the state of the performing choreography in White Crane Dance, so that the people can appreciate the connotation of the cultural activities.

2.3 To Enhance the Development of Animation Systems, Build a New Application Model

The use of 3D animation system and capture system transformed the print style into animation art. It involves production planning, role modeling, action design and calculation and other complex steps. This study produced development process to enhance the production quality and efficiency. The content of this project can be used in the future design interactive display device and innovative application development.

3 Literature Research

3.1 Mazu Belief and Customs

UNESCO officially announced the Mazu belief and customs as the human intangible cultural heritage in August 2009. [2] Mazu belief is Taiwan and China’s first world class heritage of faith and has a thousand years of history. Mazu is the goddess of merit, good deeds and love. [3] The Mazu temple is the main cultural venue. At current time, the Mazu culture is present in more than 20 countries, there are more than 5000 Mazu temples with more than 200 million believers. It became the most popular culture in Taiwan, residents celebrate it twice each year in formal temple fairs (Fig. 2). Farmers and fishermen temporarily suspend their work to sacrifice marine animals, venerate statues of Mazu and enjoy a variety of dances, including Mazu head flag, god of wealth, white crane dance, open drum, fighting spring cattle, eight-tone ancient band, car drum array, dragon array, Song Jiang array, seven fairies, twelve woman sister, clairvoyance and clairaudience, and other performances.

Fig. 2.
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Celebrating Mazu festival

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3.2 White Crane Dance

Among the folk dance groups, White Crane Dance is an original display in Tainan, south of Taiwan. According to the elder’s descriptions, the written materials and the relics, Bao-An Temple in Tainan wanted to escort Kong-Fu God in 1928. The people then got the god’s message to protect him by displaying White Crane Master (Fig. 3(a)) as the battle front. [4] White Crane Dance became a significant temple activity of Bao-An Temple (Fig. 3(b)). The story describes a man wearing a mask of fairy, holding the red cloth fairy fan, make-up for Fairchild. Another man is put on the head of the crane disguised as a crane, left and right hands tied wings, you can open and close the wings, swing fly. Fairchild tease play crane, crane dances with the Fairchild’s fan ups and downs, moving parts with both harmonious funny and dynamic rhythm.

Fig. 3.
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(a) Statute of White Crane Master, (b) Dancers in front of Bao-An Temple

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3.3 Kinect Camera

In recent years, RGB-D (color and depth) cameras have a reasonable price (for example, Kinect camera), attracting the field of computer vision researchers with great attention. Shotten et al. [5] carried out real-time pose identification in depth images (Fig. 4(a)), using the depth image features and skeleton nodes provided by the Kinect camera. Plagemann et al. [6] used depth images for body part identification and localization (Fig. 4(b)). Although depth images obtained with Kinect cameras have attracted many researchers to develop body position recognition and location estimation applications, a few existing methods have been developed for the use of Kinect cameras for video surveillance and character positioning applications. For example, Luber et al. [7] set the Kinect camera in a common space and set it in a non-overlapping viewing angle range, using the RGB-D camera for character tracking as shown in Fig. 4(c). Park et al. [8] performed a 3D hand tracking technique from a front view image through a depth camera as shown in Fig. 4(d). Baum et al. [9] used the RGB-D bird’s-eye view to track ground objects as shown in Fig. 4(e).

Fig. 4.
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(a) Real-time pose recognition [5] (b) real-time location and recognition of body parts [6], (c) non-overlapping viewing angle range character tracing [7], (d) 3D hand tracking techniques [8], and (e) simulated ground moving object detection [9].

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4 Methods

From the time point of view, Mazu belief originated in the Song Dynasty. It reached Taiwan at about 1700 AD in Qing Dynasty. Lin’s prints began in 1980, we used the Xbox Kinect for motion sensor launched in 2010. How can we link these time differences together? How to produce a new art form with technology? Our concept is to achieve cultural, artistic and technological integration; the core value of new media art is content-oriented art form of technology. Figure 5 shows our concept of art with technology.

Fig. 5.
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Concept of art with technology.

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Our method is to keep the brush style of original print into surface texture, deliberately removing the light shading on the three-dimensional model for the impact of light and dark. The resulting visual style of the 3D character animation still looks similar to the original prints. The dance action of the professional dancers cannot be seen when expanding the static part. With animation, viewers can see the folk dance action by motion capture sensor. The presentation of these movements will be an important document for the culture of art. Technology plays the role of integration, as the background of the control center to ensure the perfect front show. White Crane dance of animation art is completed in this framework (Fig. 6), it involves a lot of repetition and comparison.

Fig. 6.
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Framework of White Crane dance

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From 2D image to trace shape and texture, we used Photoshop as image tool. Then we started to build 3D model by 3D Max, and it became the integrated center for texture and motion. Both texture and motion data were imported to 3D Max. Our motion data was taken by Kinect camera. The reason we choose Kinect camera because it is easy to carry and install fast, especially for dancers who do not want to enter the professional studio with equipment. As the Kinect camera can capture both motion data and video, we can fix the problem part by compare data and video of action. We used several steps to complete the idea of transforming woodcut print and folk dance into White Crane Dance animation (Table 1):

Table 1. Steps of making White Crane Dance animation
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To evaluate the final result, we invited Chih-Hsin Lin to watch the animation and asked his satisfaction, in order to confirm the art style of continuity. Getting the artist’s certification and support is important for this research. After watching the White Crane Dance animation, Lin was very satisfied with excitement that his art work became a new media art.

5 Conclusion

The study was carried out in accordance with the original plan. White Crane dance is a unique local cultural assets. With the use of digital animation media, we were able to give it a new look. Different from the original woodcut print “static” concept of exhibition, the new media art form “animation” interpreted cultural assets. Visitors can clearly watch the exhibit of the characters under the performance details with animation, so that viewers have an easier time understanding the context of the theme. Regardless of the academic research or the use of industry, this work can provide complete information to facilitate further value-added analysis and application. Academic use of contents of this study can be analyzed and animated for in-depth local cultural studies. Industry can use the output of the text of this research content for mobile application value-added and development of cultural and creative goods, the establishment of local cultural brand.

Our artwork has two special achievements: (1) Save disappearing folk dance by injecting choreography into a woodcut print. (2) Transforming a landmark print work into animation and maintaining the original visual style. The result was accepted by SIGGRAPH2015 Dailies’ program where we show our video work [10].