Digital Artform

To Live and Thrive in LA by Bill Sasser.

Unlike most newcomers to Hollywood, Joseph Francis '85 found his work already in high demand when he moved from New York last year. Since graduating from Duke, Francis has worked in the burgeoning field of computer animation and helped create some of the most memorable examples of the new technology.

Francis, creative director of digital technology for R/Greenberg Associates, finds the combination of art and science the most fascinating part of his work. "The whole entertainment industry is embracing digital post-production technology," he says. "It's revolutionizing the way many films are made."

For decades, a device called an optical printer was used to create Hollywood's most spectacular effects, ranging from the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind to making Christopher Reeve fly in Superman. Actors shot in front of blank screeens were later superimposed over special effects images. A big drawback of the process was the loss of film generations as film is successively rephotographed. Digital technology not only turnsd this once physical process into something accomplished on a computer screen, but also solves the problem of lost generations by reducing all the visual information to magnetic messages encoded in the numerals one or zero.

"We take film and scan it digitally, reducing everything to the numeric language used by computers," says Francis. "We can create images many layers deep on a computer and record them back onto film. There is no generation loss because even if the signal fades somewhat, the sequence of ones and zeroes remains intact." The results are sharp, crystal-clear pictures even after footage has been processed and reprocessed and radically manipulated.

Through principles of art, mathematics, and computer engineering, Francis uses the technology to create convincing film realities. "You get to make up your own math and play with the laws of physics. But you're not trying to reproduce reality, you're trying to produce an emotional response."