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General

Friendly Fire

Well, the war has been on for 5 days now and I can’t say I agree with it. The media were tripping over themselves to report about a chemical weapons factory this morning but have since toned down their coverage pending a proper investigation. The whole justification for the war is based on the fact that the Allies believe that Saddam has chemicals of weapons of mass destruction. If it turns out he doesn’t then they’ll surely plant some on him. ๐Ÿ™

College has been really busy over the past while and it continues with an AI test tomorrow morning. After that I’m pretty free to work on Orion for about a week and a half. I’ll have to get some major development done then. Till next time.

Categories
General

Chavez and war

Watched an amazing documentary about Chavez, the elected leader of Venezuela on Saturday. In April last year the opposition started a military assisted coup. The people weren’t happy at all so protested against it and Chavez was re-instated. There’s more info at this site. Absolutely fascinating.

It was also Patrick’s Day yesterday. Didn’t get up to much but thats mainly because I’m up to my neck in college work. This week is a real nightmare so I’ll be glad when its over. Not happy about the prospect of war in Iraq. Blair and Bush really don’t know what they’re getting into and I really think this war will backfire badly. ๐Ÿ™

Categories
General

Rag Week!

Rag Week kicked off this week in college with my team getting our arses kicked my many different teams. We’re not too happy that there was a pro side in it though who went on to win. It should have been the college people only. Anyway, twas great fun and yours truly made a couple of good saves (we won’t mention the rake of other goals). ๐Ÿ™‚

The rest of the week is looking good. Not gonna get involved in too much tomorrow cos I need to attend classes. Wednesday is pretty quiet too with the majority of people going on the Rag Trip to Athlone come Thursday. I’m working on a few CDs for it so we’ll see how they go down. Till next time…

Categories
General

Book Worm

Dropped into the library in college today to renew a book that they got from England for me. There were 2 other books waiting for me so I took them aswell. One of them seems very detailed so I’ll probably try and learn as much as I can from that. Also got chatting to the SU president about the Rag Week next week, looks like its going to be great craic.

Am up to my ass in course work at the moment with Distributed Systems, Strategic Management and E-Commerce all demanding a lot of my time over the next few days. Hopefully I’ll get through it all. That’s not to mention the fact that I have to speak to my editor about selling my ILM article to other newspapers. ๐Ÿ™ Maybe they’ll invent a new day….

Categories
Articles

Interview with Rob Coleman

Published in February 2003.

We all gasped and looked on in awe when Jurassic Park hit our cinema screens in 1993 but little did we know, or still do, about the process that goes into creating such complicated special effects. These days effects sequences are subtle in their execution so as not to overpower the audience but they are equally astounding considering the work involved. One company has continued to break new ground in the area of digital effects and that company is Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). George Lucas first formed ILM in 1975 to work on the original Star Wars trilogy. On the eve of the Oscars, Technology Correspondent Anthony Mc Guinness, spoke with Rob Coleman, Animation Director at ILM. Rob is currently nominated for an Academy Award for his work on โ€œStar Wars: Episode II โ€“ Attack of the Clones”.

One of the latest advancements in filmmaking has been that of digital sets. Pioneered by George Lucas on โ€œStar Wars: Episode II”, these sets are completely virtual. Many filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, argue that these sets cannot possibly hold up against a real set built on location. I asked Rob Coleman about the merits of digital sets and how he thinks they stack up against the real thing. โ€œWell, I think weโ€™re getting better. The real problem with creating digital sets is capturing the realism, getting the lighting and grittiness into it. In the virtual world we have to put a lot of care into ensuring it doesnโ€™t look โ€œdigital”. Computer generated sets can look too clean and polished. The audience will pick up on that, they may not be able to put their finger on it but in their subconscious theyโ€™ll notice it.”?

I then asked him how they test such effects to see whether they are up to standard. โ€œI use the term of โ€˜would my mother believe it?โ€™. If she would be fooled then we move on.”

With the summer blockbuster season fast approaching I quizzed him about the films ILM is currently working on. “Ok, well weโ€™re currently working on The Hulk, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Pirates of the Caribbean, Van Helsing, Peter Pan and Dreamcatcher.” With so many projects running concurrently how does ILM allocate staff? โ€œWeโ€™ll typically be doing 5-10 movies at the one time, and they can be small as in a small number of shots or enormous like Episode II where we had up to 2000 shots. There were only 6 animators here that worked on Jurassic Park in 1993 but we now have something in the range of 80 animators at the facility. Each person has a skill set that we are sensitive to in making the teams the best that they can be.”

Advances in leading edge technology have made it easier for special effects teams to create many effects but there are some areas such as fire, which still create a challenge for animators. I asked Rob how ILM models these difficult effects. โ€œThere are a variety of packages out there at the moment that can handle sophisticated particle systems which can generate water, smoke, fire and dust. If we find that the off the shelf software cannot get us the imagery we need in the timeframe we have, then the R&D team gets called in to write a custom piece of code”. Being able to write custom software has helped the company enormously throughout the years as off-the-shelf software hasnโ€™t always been available.

As someone who is about to finish college, I then asked him about the qualifications needed to join a company like ILM. “The best thing to do is probably look at our web site (http://www.ilm.com/) and the specs are listed there. Specifically for animation, we look for a demonstration reel about 3 minutes in length, which shows us that you have an understanding of the fundamentals of animation. From that, but we try to ascertain whether or not you have the raw talent.”

Digital sets and effects have evolved over the past few years but an area that is completely new to major budget films is that of digital photography. Traditionally, the picture has been captured on 35mm film but on George Lucasโ€™s latest Star Wars movie “Attack of the Clones”, high definition (HD) digital camera equipment was used. I asked Rob how this alters the process for inserting digital effects. “With digital, thereโ€™s a shorter turnaround time and the amount of iterations we can do is higher (making the performances tighter and more expressive). With High Definition we can just render it at high resolution and immediately send it to the main theatre for five minutes and make a quick decision.” With so much progress having been made in the past couple of years, I asked Rob whether he thought digital characters would become mainstream in the future. โ€œI think 2002 will go down as a big year because of Yoda, Gollum and Dobby because it has shown film directors and screenwriters that a digital character can sustain a performance on the screen. You may see a character such as Yoda take a more leading role opposed to a supporting role.”