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3D Animation

Automat(e)

Animation Marathon Festival 2024
ICONA Festival 2024
*Cinematic Achievement Award* KISFFO 2024
Special Mention at greek category of Athens Animfest 2024
 

A tribute to Edward Hopper

This project emerged from an extensive process of research and experimentation, aiming to demonstrate the results that can be obtained through a fusion of analogue and 3D virtual elements, combined with an automated interpretive tool such as artificial intelligence.

Based on the work of Edward Hopper, I singled out the paintings that personally stimulate me the most, and tried to bring them closer to me by visualizing parts of my imagination that would work more like my own brushstrokes. In the process I imagined them both as static paintings and as backdrops, and attempted to harmonize them into a society of their own - a three-dimensional microcosm. The later stage was the "marriage" with AI, as I tried to discover how a programmed machine interprets the same paintings, and also how it suggests a possible experience of viewing them. I wanted to capture the predetermined and detached effect of the AI, despite its dressing up with verbal embellishments, seeking as mechanical a camera movement as possible, with a steady rhythm, not taking a position, but passing, observing and moving on.

The resulting automated visual journey is the filtering of the dialogue between the above fields, in a world that I created starting from personal choices, in concert with an automated algorithm.

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Thesis supervisors: Dimitris Agathopoulos, Vicky Betsou

3D Assistance: Leonidas Adrianos

Maybe the mirror has the answer (trailer)

In this short film, famous paintings by Edward Hopper are transferred to a 3D environment and take on new life. The viewer's two-dimensional painted objects of observation are transformed into animated three-dimensional subjects and are included in a new urban microcosm, proposed anew for observation in a new medium. When looking at Hopper's paintings we feel a sense of familiarity, we feel sympathy for the depicted, who seem introspectively lost in their thoughts, and we can relate to the representation of the human condition.

In the present adaptation, questions of identity are touched upon and we follow the protagonist on her own inner wanderings - a search for the self. However, most of the figures that are animated retain the minimal action they seem to have in the paintings as well, and function as puppets offered to us to project our own reflections. We empathize with the sense of alienation in the urban space and the loneliness experienced by the subjects trapped in it. The aim is for questions to be raised regarding our position as well as our intention to take action concerning the present issues.

FIlm by Nikoletta Tsatsou
3D Design / 3D Animation by Nikoletta Tsatsou & Leonidas Adrianos
Sound Design by Andreas Tyranopoulos
Disintegration
3D visualization: Nicole Tsatsou
3D model: niyoo via Turbosquid (https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/male-anatomy-model-1333572)
Danse Macabre
3D visualization: Nicole Tsatsou
3D model from Turbosquid
music: Danse Macabre by Camille Saint Saens

© 2025 Copyrights Tsatsou Nikoletta

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