Holiday Over

五月七日（木曜日）雨
Yes, it's been raining for the past two days, which pretty much ruined the second half of Golden Week for some people I'm sure. Today saw some light drizzle, and hopefully the weekend will be fine again.

Anyway, the holidays are officially over, and everyone seems to be off to a slow start. Even the shacho didn't reach his usual speech duration of at least 30 minutes during the morning company meeting, and he was done in probably less than 15 minutes.

A.M. Game Producing - IPR (Trainer: Yamaji-shacho)
In our final instalment of Game Producing, we looked at Intellectual Property Rights - again. This time, the shacho gave the lecture from his perspective, which turned out to be a very different from the way Murase-san taught the subject.

Yamaji-shacho likes to give his personal opinions and experiences in his lecture, which personalizes his lessons in contrast to the other trainer's "by-the-slides" style. But he also leaves a lot of material to be covered by ourselves in our own time. In truth, we do get to learn a lot of things that cannot be gathered from just reading books or searching the internet. To me, this sharing of personal experience is both interesting and valuable, but should be not be taken as absolute authority. Come to think of it, neither should books nor the internet :P

Not A Single Pirate Bone
The shacho started off by explaining why he feels the Japanese creators have the common sense and moral culture to respect creative rights, even though very few people are taught IPR as a specific concept. Essentially, this arose out of 350 years of peaceful rule under the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo Period (江戸時代 1603-1867), which saw the rise of popular culture such as sumo and kabuki. For a change, cultural pursuits and commercial entertainment were no longer just limited to nobility, but any commoner with money can pay to enjoy them. During this period, poor people could get rich by publishing their artistic works or creative writings, as there were many wealthy patrons of the arts. As a result, the people developed a culture of respect for artists and creators.

Another reason the shacho offered, which was more practical, was that since the Japanese have a relatively isolated island culture, people caught infringing copyright laws could not easily escape to another country due to language and cultural barriers.

Boy Meets Girl, People Die
On the other side of the coin, many famous and historical works of art are often derivatives of other works. The example given was the 1957 Broadway musical, West Side Story, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1597), which was based on a poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written by Arthur Brooke (1562), which was in turn based on a novella Giulietta e Romeo by Matteo Bandello (1554), which also has it's root traced back to some earlier source.

We briefly went through the history of IPR, as well as how IPR is normally handled. IPRs typically last 50 years after the author's death, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. However, in the US, the rights got extended by 20 years to 70 years after the death of the author, thanks to the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) in 1998. For a work of corporate authorship, the term was extended to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is earlier. The Act is also called the Sonny Bono Act after the late Congressman Sonny Bono, and the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", since Disney maintained their rights to Mickey Mouse thanks to the passing of this Act.

On asserting our IP rights and protecting our IP, we were taught to avoid outside funding, since investors often like to lay claim to what they put money in. There are ways to get funding while retaining IPR, through special purpose vehicles.

P.M. Game Visual 2 - Facial Animation (Trainer: Kawashima-san/Matsuura-san)
The two key portions of facial animation are facial expressions and lip synching. These could be achieved using either blend shapes or bone deformers in Maya. We went through an overview of the basic process, and did a simple practical exercise making a girl blink using blend shape animation.

The art of facial animation is actually quite deep, and one lesson cannot possibly do justice to the subject. Though we barely scratched the surface, we did attain practical know-how, if not the artistic expertise, to do export simple facial animation to the PS3.