January 14, 2006
Hollywood Hopes
In 1994, Duke Magazine did a series of profiles of five Duke alumni working in the Hollywood film industry. It's interesting for me to look at this snapshot of how I saw things then:
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."
Posted by digital artform at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2005
Frank Smullin: Analytic Constructivist
On an Autumn morning in my freshman year I walked into the Art Department at Duke University determined to combine Art and Computer Science into a program that would prepare me for a career in the emerging field of Computer Graphics. There I met a professor named Frank Smullin who had a great influence on me from then until his untimely death in 1983, just two short years later.
Duke at the time offered little in the way of a formal CG program. (I had heard anecdotally that the school had an arrangement with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that Duke would specialize in AI and cede high level CG work to UNC.) Apparently I was at the wrong school, so I was particularly pleased to meet Frank that morning, huddled over what looked to me at the time to be amazing and exotic computer-generated images of a sculpture he was contemplating creating.
I knew I could learn a lot from this man, and I worked for Frank Smullin as much as I could in various capacities: sometimes in a work/study position for pay; sometimes as an independent study for college credit; sometimes just on my own time. I helped him write some of his software in BASIC on a Tektronix Vector Computer and I helped him assemble some of his small scale CAD/CAM sculpture prototypes using pink construction paper, cardboard tubes, Elmer's glue and an X-acto knife.
As an artist Frank had many styles. He was a strong draftsman capable of great realism in sculpture and drawing, but he often worked in a modern art idiom, using mitered cylinders. When he did this kind of work he called himself an Analytic Constructivist.
I once asked Frank why he liked cylinders so much. He explained to me that he liked the dual nature of the cylinder: when it was tall in comparison to its radius, the cylinder's resemblance to a one-dimensional line emerged; when it was short in comparison to its radius, its quality as a curved two-dimensional surface dominated.
Frank's sofware was, in the parlance of the day, a CAD/CAM system. It allowed him to engage in both computer-aided sculpture design (CAD) and computer-aided sculpture manufacture (CAM).
In its computer-aided design aspect, Frank's software worked as follows:
The software allowed Frank to maintain a list of vertices. It also contained a scheme for maintaining a vertex connectivity list, a means for representing those connections as mitered cylinders of a given radius, and the ability to draw the structure from any arbitrary angle.
Frank used a pen plotter to create his vector drawings, and (as raster graphics were beyond the scope of his hardware and software) he hand colored the drawings to give them an air of solidity.
When Frank was satisfied with his computer-aided design, he moved into the next phase: computer-aided manufacture.
When Frank was ready to prototype a design, he used a pen plotter to output a number of sine wave templates onto contruction paper.
The templates were usually scaled to be wrapped around cardboard paper towel tubes. Each sine wave, when wrapped, became a perfectly mitered cylinder. We cut these mitered cardboard cylinders with an X-acto knife and attached them together with Elmer's Glue.
The software could accomodate multiple cylinders meeting at a common point. Each line pair generated its own wave form. For a given cylinder all relevant wave forms would be superimposed, and the final template would be bounded by whichever portion of whichever wave was lowest.
The software could also handle off-center piercings of one cylinder through another through a routine I worked on with Frank which he called the Peanut generator. The programming of this routine took us some time back in the early 80's. I've simulated its functionality with relative ease today using Maya to planar-project an off-center circle onto an unwrappable file texture.
When Frank was ready to build a full-scale sculpture he would enlarge his templates, cut them into sheet metal, and have them rolled into tubes by a sheet metal fabricator. Frank did his own welding.
Frank had a wiry athleticism which made his sudden death (from a cerebral aneurism) in November of 1983 so unexpected. He was 40 years old -- two years younger than I am now.
Frank Smullin was the kind of person I greatly admire: part artist, part scientist, and full of curiosity. Sometimes when Novembers come around again I find myself thinking about him. The computer graphics industry has come so far in the last two decades. I'd like to see what he'd have been doing now.
Some contemporary artists of note:
Carlo Sequin (cites Frank Smullin as an influence)
UPDATE 2/2/2006
Here's a cardboard CAD/CAM project Paul Haeberli did in 1977
Posted by digital artform at 12:26 PM | Comments (2)
July 05, 2005
First Broadcast TV Spot Produced on a Mac
On October 16, 1989, Bernice Kanner wrote in her regular New York Magazine column, On Madison Avenue, about how Nike and Reebok were duking it out for market share.
The real story, I think, is that for the first time a professional broadcast television commercial was about to be produced solely on consumer level computer hardware and software.
Chiat/Day came to R/Greenberg Associates to produce a campaign of three animated TV spots. The concept was to make them look like the pixelated, simplistic, side-scrolling (but at that time state-of-the-art) video games of the day. I was directing, and the brilliant Russell Calabrese (Pinky and the Brain) was supplying cel animation treated to look like it belonged in a 1989 Nintendo console.
Our plan was to use the usual high tech tools in order to produce the spot -- proprietary software -- sgi or sun workstations, but R/GA's director of interactive technology, Brian Loube, persuaded us that we could do the entire set of spots on a Macintosh running Macromedia Director.
Home computers at the time seemed more suited to hobbyist pursuits than to professional ones. In 1989 they hadn't made the penetration into the household that we take for granted today. (You might recall the huge laugh Woody Allen gets in Take the Money and Run (1969) when his character makes the absurd bluff on a job interview that he has prior computer experience because "his aunt has one.")
Nevertheless, we did a test, found the setup was well-suited to our purposes, and as far as I know, this Reebok Campaign became the first professionally produced, nationally broadcast TV spots ever produced on a Mac.
UPDATE 7/6/2005:
Jim Forster adds (link)
Oh my Goddess!! I remember working on that spot! From what I recall, Russell did the drawings on paper with animation punch marks, then they taped a punch bar to a flatbed scanner (so that everything lined up perfectly). Then it was my duty to scan in all the b&w artwork (fun fun fun!), clean it up & I think I did some of the coloring in Director too. Then Brian put the whole thing together in Director.
Damn I'm old!
Posted by digital artform at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
July 01, 2005
American Cinematographer Cover / Digital Filmmaking
In April 1993 I designed a cover for American Cinematographer magazine. The idea behind the image was to create a metaphor for digital filmmaking by using technology to blur the boundaries between the sound stage and exterior location photography. The cover story it illustrated was one of the first articles to introduce producers, directors and cinematographers to the then new concept of digital postproduction itself.
You might find it interesting to note the use of the term "digital domain" on the cover. That turn of phrase was in everyday use at that time in post production as a way of explaining new movie technology to clients. "Once we get your film into the digital domain..." was a common way to begin a sentence in the industry. When James Cameron (cleverly) named his company Digital Domain later in '93, everyone else by my recollection made a conscious effort to stop using the phrase for fear of giving free advertising to the competition. Now you never hear it except in reference to the actual company.
When this April 1993 issue of American Cinematographer hit the stands, Francis Ford Coppola called me to find out more about the creation of this image.
UPDATE 7/30/05
I feel as though I have just come from a real life version of this stage I envisioned back in 1993.
I attended the Directors Guild of America's DGA DIGITAL DAY 2005 today, a great program which culminated in a wrap party on the new "Smartstage" at Occidental Studios in Hollywood. A high-definition camera on a motion-captured boom arm photographs foreground figures on a 90' x 60' wraparound bluescreen stage. Fast computers generate match-moved 3D backgrounds and composite the two in real time.
Pretty nifty.
UPDATE 8/3/05
Some coverage of the DGA Digital Day event:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/03/auteurs_glimpse_digi.html
Posted by digital artform at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2005
Newsweek Interactive Cover
Here's something I'm pleased to have been a part of. I computer-generated the egg. (Hey, maybe it's just an egg, but it's an egg on the cover of Newsweek.)
This May 31, 1993 Newsweek cover story is one of the articles that introduced the general public to the concept of the internet itself. They hadn't even settled on a common term for it yet, instead putting it under the general rubric "interactive."
Kind of a cool bit of internet history, don't you think?
Posted by digital artform at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2005
How Magazine / Pandora Cover
Here's a cover I designed and art directed for the August 1993 issue of How Magazine. Concept, design and art direction by Joseph Francis. Producer Jimm Burris. Photography by Dan Wilby. Compositing by Robert Bowen at RGA/Print.
An article by writer Onno de Jong describing the creation of the image can be found here.
Posted by digital artform at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2004
History of Photo Mosaics
My work on a 1992 Kodak television commercial led me to invent the idea of assembling meta images out of mosaics of smaller, often thematically related images - Photo Mosaics.
The computer animation department which I ran at R/Greenberg Associates in Manhattan was called upon to create the illusion of a stadium full of "flipping cards" for a 1992 Kodak television spot. (dir. John Clive for agency Young & Rubicam)
Once I developed the necessary software, I became interested in pursuing other uses for it.
I was aware of the work of artist Chuck Close, who had been creating large faces out of arrays of swirling abstract images, and I wondered if I could do something similar, only with hundreds of actual photographs.
My goal was always to use hundreds or thousands of tile images. Initially, however, this option wasn't in the budget. We used highend Manhattan prepress agencies in order to acquire our images then, and they charged -- if you can believe it -- $250 per scan. Since getting a slide digitally scanned was so expensive, I was often limited in the beginning to a mere 6 or so images, at a cost of $1500! This is one of the disadvantages of being first.
With those kinds of budgetary constraints, I had to design the software so that if fed an insufficient number of source photos, it would cause each photo to do color-corrected "double duty" to fill out the larger photo.
Above is the first such image produced by my software. It was created early in 1993 as a poster for a then yearly event called Live From Bell Labs. In this whimsical composition designed by Ryszard Horowitz with additional photshop compositing by Robert Bowen at R/GA Print, Nobel laureate Arno Penzais juggles objects on the left while Penn Gillette of Penn & Teller balances the photo mosaic on his nose.
Each photo is mapped with transparency-controlling alpha channel onto a flat card, allowing for the off-axis 3D overlap effect you see here.
We could tell right away that the technique was going to be popular, and we started getting requests for "themed" compositions.
I created this custom image at the request of editor Rita Street for the Winter 1993 issue of Animation Magazine. Notice the coffee cups and reels of film (and giant floppy discs!) -- all tools of the trade for the animator of 1993.
This image was also reprinted in the November 1994 issue of Wired Magazine, p. 106.
Posted by digital artform at 01:46 PM | Comments (10)
November 12, 2004
Benoit Mandelbrot
I saw on boingboing that Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal geometry, turns eighty next week.
I was lucky enough to be part of the group at R/Greenberg Associates in New York that helped bring one of Mandelbrot's and Dr. Richard Voss's famous fractal terrains to popular attention by animating a fly-through of it in a 1987 IBM television commercial.
The commercial was popular, and went on to win a number of awards, including a Gold Plaque, Computer Graphics, Chicago International Film Festival; a Gold Award, International Film & TV Festival; a Certificate of Merit, Institutional/Corporate ID, Chicago International Film Festival; and a Gold Award, Computer Graphics, Houston International Film Festival.
Happy Birthday Dr. Mandelbrot.
Posted by digital artform at 09:25 AM | Comments (2)