BSC at the dome

Boston Scientific sponsors Gopher sports which is great. As a part of that sponsorship they get a certain amount of advertising at events. Last month I was asked by HR if I might be interesting in creating animation for use at the Gopher football games at the Metrodome. Hell yeah!

This is a still from the animation. Click on it to see the full resolution version. Be ready to scroll!



Right off I hit on the idea of the long strip being a blood vessel so I thought blood cells would make a neat backdrop to the text and logo treatments. I also tried more 3D cells but the more graphic cells looked better and didn't screen blood!

The display it would play on is one of those wrap around LED displays between upper and lower desks. I've usually seen them as continuous bands all the way around but the dome display was just stand alone with the bizarre resolution of 2400 by 40 pixels. By contrast, a TV is generally speaking 640 by 480 pixels. The whole piece only 17 seconds long and designed to loop for as long as they play it during breaks in the action. Its so wide that it's hard to put onto the blog. But is you want to see it, right click on this link and down load it. Then play it in Quicktime.

Here is a photo at the dome. The animation is the blue strip in the middle and just peeking in on the right.



OK, so I have to come clean on the photo. It's a fake. I couldn't find anyone to take a photo at a game so with a little help from some nameless Gopher fan on Flickr, I was able to find a random game photo. It nicely shows the display - just not the right message. No problem. Here's how I did it. Click on the images for a zoom in.

Here is the orginal. With a little color and contrast adjustment.



I saved one frame (this one) from the animation. Then scaled it down and warped it slightly to the curve of the stands. I was kinda luck that it's mostly flat to the camera so I didn't have to correct for perspective.



The new display does not look like its lit up so I had to add some glare and boost the saturation.



Much better. I also added subtle things like noise to the new elements and grunged up the edges. The CG elements were too perfect.

UltiMed Animation

Last Summer I did a freelance animation project for a contract engineering company. It was to demonstrate a new product they designed for the dispensing and disposal of syringes. A version of the animation has become a part of the company homepage. UltiMed

They messed around with the timing of the animation and slowed it down - which makes it slightly jittery. I often run into this. Customers are always concerned that the viewer will not 'Get it' unless it's really slow. Yet one of the benefits of animation, and particularly web animation, is that viewers can stop it, rewind it, and generally watch it until they 'Get it'. I believe the concerns comes from a TV mentality where you get to see something once and then it's over.

Animation Examples Online

I recently noticed that a lot of animation I did at work last year has found it's way to the internet. They were all done for a CD that is given to patients to help them understand their condition and the heart in general. It was a great project and, from what I heard, well received. It's fun to finally share some examples because most of what I do is considered confidential and is not on the internet.

The fact that I didn't even know they were on the web is not surprising. Once I create them I rarely if ever get to know where they are used and if they were even successful. Sometimes I find out that they have a life beyond there original intent which is always gratifying to me because that means it was valued.

The whole library site

My favorites (animations, not conditions :-) ) are:
Heart Failure
Sudden Cardiac Death
Atrial Fibrillation

Techy notes;
The animation was created in Maya using the vector renderer for the simple cartoony look. We opted for that over a more realistic look because it seems less shocking. It's also impossible to have one cross section of the heart that shows all 4 chambers. Most illustrations are greatly contorted for clarity. The animation was exported as Flash animation and in some cases was actually tweaked in Flash. Even though it's 2d, by using Maya I was able to use much better animation controls thereby giving the heart more realistic and accurate motion. I've looked at a lot of heart animations on the internet and I think these have some of the best motion.

My REAL First Animation

In a previous post I talked about my first animation. It actually wasn't my first. The first piece we did in that class was a simple 10 second animation done the old fashion way on an animation stand. We had to draw everything then place each drawing under a camera, snap a shot, advance the camera one frame, then repeat. It was terribly boring even with just 60-70 drawings to photograph - imagine doing thousands. I think the lesson was to show us why computers are the way to go.

For a long while I only had a video tape of the whole class and the 4x6 cards I drew on as a flip book. But recently I scanned everything into the computer and used After Effects to assemble and make adjustments. Much easier then the Oxberry.
Down load Fisherman.wmv

First Animation

In 1999 I started taking animation classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I was already working in computer animation however I wanted to do something of my own as well as learn more. My first class was traditional 'cell' animation which was even more fun because it got me to draw - something I wish I would do more of. For our final project we had to create a 60 second animation. Usually that would mean 600 to 700 drawing but I decided to do what is called limited animation. Basically artists use one drawing and move it around or pause often on a still image. I ended up being a bit ahead of the curve because now most cartoons on Cartoon Network are done in this style.

'The Nissa' is an idea I still think about and would love to do more with. This project was done as if it were a trailer or advertisement of a movie. The Nissa is a troll that is assigned to protect a house. The main problem for him is the house itself and all it's annoyances like dust bunnies and electrical shorts (as briefly seen in the trailer). He flies around on a magical hammer that might just be smarter then the Nissa is. It helps him out. Oh, and he turns to stone during the day which accounts for all those ugly 'statues' in the gardens.
The narrator in the movie is me and the story I tell is not completely true, although my Dad did talk about the Nissa when I was very young. The Nissa (or Nisser) is a part of Norwegian folklore and is a very michevious troll. The most famous story involves the Nissa, a farm girl, and a bowl of oatmeal.
I did this project in Macromedia Director because that was what our Professor knew. Everything was first hand drawn, inked, then scanned into my computer. My friend Bryn Hendrickson (a comic artist himself) helped me ink the backgrounds. I would really like to redo 'The Nissa' in Adobe After Effects because I could do a little better job with the better tools. Would that make me like George Lucas? Should I leave it as is?
nissa_final.wmv

Photoshop Presentation

Last Thursday I did a presentation for the Twin Cities Photoshop Users Group. Photoshop, for those that might not know, is a software for manipulating photos or images. My topic was a new feature of Photoshop that allows the creation of high dynamic range images (HDR). For digital artists like me, HDR can be used to create very realistic lighing in 3D scenes. That allows us to combine computer generated (CG) images with photos or video.

The first image here is the orginal 'plate' photo of a room. The second is a shot of the CG objects in Maya (my animation software). The final image is of the CG and photo together. It's not perfect but it was only a demo. It's kinda fun to try to find the tell-tail hints that it's not real. Can you do it? (I'll post some hints in the comments.)







My complete PowerPoint slides can be downloaded. It's mostly graphics and not very self explanitory, but here you go. HDR_Demo.ppt