Clay’s Blog

Well, another SIGGRAPH is history. It’s been a terrific creative battery recharge. Thursday and Friday highlights include a really cool Production Session on how the various visual effects companies that made Speed Racer went about replicating the look and feel of anime in a live action motion picture, a very entertaining and interesting overview on the use of Adobe Flash for animation, and an absolutely fascinating class on transportation visualization.

I generally try to go to one or two of the large Production Sessions, where panels that worked on digital effects for Hollywood productions give a behind the scenes look at the technology and techniques that are used to make the latest year’s movies. The technical papers given at SIGGRAPH are directly implemented in these production pipelines with astonishing speed, so this year’s special effect was often last year’s technical paper at SIGGRAPH. This year I attended the session on Speed Racer, which I haven’t yet seen, and, as the panel joked, nearly nobody else in the room had either. The presentation was very interesting, and it was, in fact, one of the only sessions of this type that I walked away from with the thought I might be able to implement something from the presentation myself. There were two cinematic effects in particular that were used in the film that helped to give the movie a more anime-like feel. The production team used QuickTimeVR to create spherical camera movement effects and they used diagonally shifting composited backgrounds with a foreground chroma-keyed subject. Both of these effects worked with the kind of “unrealistic” camera perspectives which give anime productions their essential feel. I’m going to try to implement them the next time I work on editing my example piece for our Digital Storytelling project.

On Thursday I attended a Computer Animation Festival Talk called “Flash Forward: A forum on Flash’s Increasingly Vital Role in Games, Online Entertainment, Art and Academia.” There was a great panel for the talk that included Evan Spiridellis, one of the co-founders of JibJab and Cartoon Network’s Greg Araya who has worked extensively on “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.” It was a nice mix of demonstrations of great character animation, web interfaces, and entertainment, as well as an interesting peek into the Flash animation pipeline for major productions. It was really kind of pitiful, though, that nobody from Adobe was anywhere to be found either in the session or on the Exhibition floor.

And finally, on Friday, I attended an extremely interesting class on Transportation Visualization. The instructors for the class were Theresa-Marie Rhyne from North Carolina State University, Michael Manore of AEC Visualization, and Ronald Hughes from North Carolina State University. All three are members of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Visualization in Transportation. The instructors were very interested in starting a collaborative dialog with graphics professionals and to express the need for assistance from the SIGGRAPH community. Visualizations have taken the form of 3D models and fly-throughs for construction projects, abstract data visualizations using real-time graphics, and others. The class focused on a series of examples provided by the instructors. As an introduction to the current needs in transportation visualization, the class was very successful. There was a great discussion during the Q&A with a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon who was interested in developing Augmented Reality applications and asked about RFID tagging and available sensor data in current construction and transportation projects. I’ve been interested in data visualization in general for some time, but I will be working on a project next summer with Professor Paul Barron in the Law School (and current Tulane CIO) during which we will be working with approximately 5 years of peer evaluation data from his Negotiation and Mediation Advocacy course. I’m working on implementing Flash/Flex charting and learning Processing (an open source programming language aimed at visual designers). I’m looking forward to having a good time playing around with ways to visualize the data.