Figure 15.1: WWW15 Logo
Music
Scottish harp introduces Scottish country dance tune Flowers of Edinburgh followed by pipe band.
Animation
The main part of the Edinburgh logo is the thistle. There is a lot of detail and animating it was computational intensive so in the end we decided to concentrate on the six Ws (three on the head of the thistle). We had been adding to our library of XSLT transformations and we thought now was the time to add a scene definition facility and while we were at it introduce a third dimension. These transformations are called Path_ology3D .
Edinburgh made us think of Scottish Folk Dancing which directed us towards the Flowers of Edinburgh Chase. Normally, you need 4 pairs of dancers but it is acceptable to use three. The six Ws could be the three pairs. With our new 2.5D facilities, we could use the text in the logo to delineate the field.
Flowers of Edinburgh Chase
We looked at the short definition:
- 1-8:1W followed by 1M casts off 2, 1W crosses and casts up M side while 1M dances up the middle, both to P's place, 1C set
- 9-16: 1C repeat with 1M casting, finishing in original places
- 17-24: 1C lead down the middle and up
- 25-32: 1C+2C Poussette
As bad as knitting patterns! We eventually concluded that the three parts were:
- The Chase: Man chases Woman, 12 counts. Return: Man up centre Woman outside to Man's position, Balance in/Balance out - 4 counts. The Chase is repeated with roles reversed thus arriving back at the original position.
- The Promenade: Join right hands, down for 8 counts and return for 8 counts.
- Poisette: Come together up and back, with couples moving so that chase is repeated with the next couple.
The main difficulty was that the initial bow and curtsy needed the Ws to move in 3D which required us to make the Ws into 3D paths. The same is true when the couple poisette.
Figure 15.2: 3D Movements
To create the keyframes for the three Ws we set up a harness that allowed to create each of the keyframes and compare it with the base frame.
Figure 15.3: Creating the W Keyframes