Steventon Rectory (Parsonage) rebuilt

The above is a cel shaded anim of just the Rectory (Parsonage taken from the original 3D file of the demo and passed through Swift 3D. Initially with the idea of creating an interactive Papervision3D file so that users can rotate it and explore the building. Unfortunately, due to the building having been created in Autodesk Revit Architecture and then exported to Autodesk 3DS Max as an .fbx file, there are too many faces and Papervision struggles to show them all. A rotation only was then decided on, until more time can be allotted to simplify the 3D model.

The small amount of research committed on this so far brought to my attention that there seems to be a discrepancy on what the building actually looked like due to conflicting sketches. The fact that the building no longer existed made it a prime consideration for being the first of Jane's homes to be re-built in 3D, discovering the uncertainty in how it looked made it more of a challenge.

Below are the sketches in question:



The two images above show a much smaller building than the two below, although each image states that it is Steventon Rectory (Parsonage).



These two images although on first look appear similar, the chimney placement is very different. There is a central chimney in the lower image, and not in the one above, although they both have a side chimney, which is not visible in the top two images.

There is a theory that the lower images are actually depicting Ibthorpe House, you can see the likeness to this building in the image below. Certainly the top of the second set of images above looks very similar - except for that central chimney.


I puzzled over this for a while and read various articles from Jane Austen experts such as Linda Robinson Walker in order to come to a decision as to how I portrayed the building. Within Linda's document Why Was Jane Austen Sent away to School at Seven?
An Empirical Look at a Vexing Question there was this image of the land around the house which helped considerably in making that decision along with the logical explanation / view given by Linda Robinson Walker:


This image certainly helped place the building in the surrounding landscape and provided very useful information in regard to the outbuildings and garden. There may be further information available from the Jane Austen Memorial Trust and / or other organisations that would clarify this further, as it stands the look of the animated building has been created from the information found only on the web.

Many thanks to the organisations / people who have posted this information on the web, the sources mostly used were:

Jane Austen Society of the UK
Jane Austen Society of North America
Astoft
Jane Austen
Hantsweb
Pemberley

Visualisation

How many people I wonder, have spent a fair bit of the Christmas holiday watching the television or playing computer games as opposed to reading? How many have taken video footage of their family unwrapping presents as opposed to photos that catch just a moment in time? With the technology we have in our hands now, I wouldn't be surprised that most people have been watching / taking some form of animated image over the holiday. Even the way we display our 'still' photos on the computer or on digital photo frames becomes an animated process via 'slideshows' where even the transition from one image to another is animated.






Which of the images above holds your gaze the longest?

Are we really surprised that the majority are more stimulated by a moving image than a static one? Why? We have amazing works of art all around us from paintings to architecture, man-made sculptures to nature's own, we visit and look, ponder and exclaim on the skill of the creator and then move on, but the minute something moves it captures our attention and holds us there so much more. Would we really look at a painting for an hour or more?

Film, the moving image is a huge testament to this, and with the coming of the digital age, computer graphics and special effects allow us to see things in motion that we were only able to imagine previously. The 'dreaded' powerpoint presentation is a common example of how we seem to prefer to watch things move instead of static images. The times I have watched text, bullet point and goodness knows what else animate in from the left, right top or spiral out and zoom away. The audience is no longer looking at the presenter but at the presentation, wondering what it will do next.

So why does the moving image capture our attention so much more than a still image? Is it because we are intrigued as to what will happen next? Whether it will fall in line with our expectation or unfold the story we have imposed upon it? The moving image (animation) brings things to life helping to create a story that we can follow however short.

Evidence of this is seen in the following quote from James Robinson's article in the Guardian's TV Ratings page on 26th December:

'The BBC trounced ITV in the Christmas Day ratings war, with an average audience of 14.3 million tuning to watch BBC1's Wallace and Gromit film A Matter of Loaf and Death, the highest rating of any TV show all year.
The specially commissioned 30-minute episode of the Nick Park animated drama recorded an audience share of 53.3% last night, 25 December, according to unofficial overnight figures.'

Wallace and Gromit film A Matter of Loaf and Death drew 14.3 million viewers to BBC1. Photograph: Aardman/BBC

Why was this the most watched program on Christmas Day? Why are the stories of Wallace and Grommet so intriguing - is it the cleverness of the way it is put together, or the suspense of the story? This type of animation is probably the most relevant in highlighting the still versus moving image theory above. Stop frame animation - if we were to view only the static frames as individual images, we would become bored as there would be far too many images for us to take in, so we would move on. But process all those images into an animated sequence and it becomes immediately more appealing, easy to watch and assimilate. Rendering a computer animation into individual frames amounts to the same thing - understanding the story as individual frames is nowhere near as easy than watching them once pinned all together.

Is it the possible story that is about to unfold that holds our attention or purely the 'moving' aspect? Are we looking at an image and subconciously, or even consciously, creating a tale that we can then assimilate and learn by? Do our brains take information on board much more easily via a story that is being told by a sequence of images or from pages of text, or even the way it is told?

For instance, the funniest comedians (for me anyway) are the ones that relate observations, tales from everyday life that they replay in a different format which then become immediately hilarious. The comedian knows that we will recognise the observed stories in ourselves or in people around us and if related in an exaggerated way, with gestures and over emphasis, we will find it amusing. Once again, is it the story or the 'animated' telling that hits the button, or the way it is told?

This has always intrigued me and hopefully through observed research into the use of The Talking Walls pilot application at Beaulieu Abbey, I aim to discover more about our perception of the way people learn and assimilate information through images.