Bela Lugosi

This morning I spent a lot of time in my computer graphics class talking about Bela Lugosi. The reason is that I was teaching character animation.

As an example of beautiful character animation, I showed Chernabog, the dark god of Bald Mountain, from the 1940 Disney film Fantasia. That character was animated by the great Bill Tytla.

I had learned that Tytla had based his animation of Chernabog on the movements of Bela Lugosi in his role as Dracula. In that film, Lugosi moves in a very specific and hypnotic way — which you already know if you’ve seen his mesmerizing performance.

It turns out that we can approximate some of that style algorithmically in an animated character. One trick is to use sine functions with progressive offset phases for the movement of the character’s arms, from shoulders down to fingertips.

The lecture went well. I think the students really appreciated the beautiful clip from Fantasia that we watched in class.

But then — just now in fact — I found out that today is Bela Lugosi’s birthday. As I said in another recent post, I would like to think that somehow, in some way that I don’t yet fully understand, the Universe is speaking to me.

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