In 'Up,' the new Pixar film due out Friday, the studio had to figure out how to animate the more than 10,000 interdependent balloons that hoist the main character's house aloft.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house.
That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday.
There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen.
In "Up," the story revolves around the main character, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, who, frustrated with his mundane life, ties the thousands of balloons to his house and sets off for adventures in South America. A small boy ends up marooned on board, and hilarity ensues.
The cluster of balloons is so central to the film's branding--it's called "Up," after all--that to promote the film, Pixar teamed up with two of the world's cluster ballooning experts for a nationwide tour involving a real-life flying armchair and dozens of huge, colorful balloons.
"You have a movie that's about a house that flies, which is a pretty far-fetched idea," said Steve May, the supervising technical director on "Up." "We all know, from kids' parties, how a bunch of balloons behave, so if we could animate balloons in a realistic way, the believability that the house could fly would sell."
For May, "Up" producer Jonas Rivera, director Pete Docter, and the many others involved in making the film, believability was key, even within the context of a story about a flying house. And while a major part of instilling that believability must come from a well-conceived and executed story and script, the animation is no less responsible for winning over potentially skeptical audiences.
Balloons, the mother of animation invention
May said that the animation department at Pixar never even considered hand-animating the balloons. But even standard computer animation wouldn't be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio's computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem.
"These are relatively simple physical equations, so you program them into the computer and therefore kind of let the computer animate things for you, using those physics," said May. "So in every frame of the animation, (the computer can) literally compute the forces acting on those balloons, (so) that they're buoyant, that their strings are attached, that wind is blowing through them. And based on those forces, we can compute how the balloon should move."
This process is known as procedural animation, and is described by an algorithm or set of equations, and is in stark contrast to what is known as key frame animation, in which the animators explicitly define the movement of an object or objects in every frame.
Procedural animation has been around for some time, but May suggested that even the most difficult uses of it in the past don't come close to what Pixar had to achieve in "Up."
Pixar fans may remember the scenes in "Cars" of a stadium full of 300,000 car "fans" cheering on a high-speed race below, each of which was independently animated. That, too, was done with procedural animation, May said, since creating so many cars individually would have been a non-starter. But even that complex computation problem didn't approach the balloon cluster issue in "Up": the "Cars" scene involved no interdependent physics.
Another animation challenge for Pixar was figuring out how to handle the feathers on Kevin, an important bird character in the film.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)Getting the simulator humming properly is no easy task, as one might imagine. May said it involves setting rules for how individual objects should behave, giving the computer these initial conditions, and then "let it run."
Oddly, because the simulator does indeed run with those conditions and rules and the peculiarities of physics, the animators found themselves without precise control of what would happen with the balloons--or other objects in the film animated using these techniques.
"If the (balloon cluster) is moving too slow, we increase the amount of wind, and then run the simulator again," May said. "Then maybe we turn the wind down. It's a little fun science experiment where sometimes, hopefully by the end, we're getting what we want."
Losing control of balloons
Sometimes, given the vagaries of physics and chaos theory, unexpected things happen. The computer team inputs the rules and because some of the initial conditions are random, "you get semi-random results." One of May's favorite examples is that early in the film, when the house first is hoisted aloft by the balloons, a small group of the balloons actually broke off of the main cluster.
May said that this breakaway group of balloons is actually visible--albeit very briefly--in "Up." Eagle-eyed moviegoers can see the escaped balloons in the upper right-hand side of the screen, he said.
"We didn't mean for that to happen," he said, "but (we said) 'It's cool, let's keep it.'"
Even being able to make such choices wasn't possible at the beginning of the film's production, however. May said Pixar's physical simulator, an open-source program called ODE, couldn't initially handle the complexity of modeling the behavior of more than 10,000 balloons.
"We could handle about 500 (balloons), and we knew we needed tens of thousands," he said. "We knew we needed to develop a new simulator software pipeline...to handle an order of magnitude more complex simulation."
Of course, at Pixar, adjusting to evolving computer needs on the fly is nothing new. In fact, May said the studio has done so in one form or another on many of its films. For example, he said that when the studio made "Monsters, Inc.," it had to figure out how to animate the movie's monsters' fur. Similarly, when Pixar made "Finding Nemo," the animators had to figure out how to simulate underwater scenes.
"We had to learn about (how light refracts under water), and murk and how particulates float under water," May said.
And in "Up," too, there were additional animation challenges. Among them were figuring out how to animate and render the feathers on Kevin, a bird that is a major character in the film, and how to make the cloth on (main character) Carl's clothes seem believable.
Carl's threads were "the hardest clothing we've ever had to animate here," said May, "in part because Carl's a (small) man in an oversized suit. That was another case of (using) the physical simulation, and of setting up rules for how cloth should behave. And the looser the clothing, the more it can behave badly."
Even Carl himself presented some animation difficulties, May said, because the character's head is shaped like a cube.
Even the face of Carl Fredricksen, the films main character, presented a new animation challenge. His face is presented in a cube-like shape, which represents his lifelong sense of being boxed in by soulless development. But for animators, making him smile was hard, since his mouth would have to curve around to the side.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)Like many other elements in "Up," the cube-shape of Carl's face wasn't a random whim of the director. Rather, it is a story element: May explained that Carl's character is based on someone who, as a young man, was vivacious and adventurous. But as he grew older, his small house became more and more surrounded by buildings, and "it's like his world has compressed him into a square."
Thus, a cube-like face. But May said animating his facial expressions, which must fit into this cube shape, was complicated. Smiles, for example, had to come up and wrap around his cheek.
Still, for the award-winning filmmakers at Pixar, the goal is to make even the hardest animation problems look simple on the silver screen.
As producer Jonas Rivera put it, "The audience looks at (the balloon cluster) and says, 'Oh, that's pretty.' But they have no idea how much work went into it. We worked on that for over a year. (Then) the kid takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair. My mother will never know that took 15 people six weeks."
On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman takes a ride in a flying armchair. The chair is suspended underneath what is known as a balloon cluster, and the ride took place at the Emeryville, Calif., headquarters of Pixar Animation.
(Credit: Raquel Baldwin)EMERYVILLE, Calif.--You might think sitting in a flying armchair would be a blood-pumping, adrenaline-rushing, and terrifying pastime. But I'm here to tell you that it's pretty darn smooth sailing.
I know because on Friday morning, I got a chance to take a ride on, yes, a flying armchair. And while I didn't crash it into power cables or cause a major blackout like Larry Walters, aka "Lawnchair Larry", I did take some serious air.
This was a rare opportunity to take part in what I suppose is the little-known sport of cluster ballooning. Ultimately, it was part of a high-flying promotion for the forthcoming Pixar animated film "Up."
"Up" hits theaters on May 29. As IMDB puts it, "By tying thousands of balloons to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn't alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior, has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip."
According to Disney spokesperson Raquel Baldwin, "Up," Pixar's tenth feature film, and the first done in Disney digital 3D, included 20,622 hand-animated balloons that Fredricksen uses to hoist his house aloft. Of course, Baldwin added, researchers at Pixar discovered it would actually take several million normal-size balloons to get much lift on a house.
Still, what better way to promote such a film than to hire two world-class cluster balloonists (Troy Bradley and Jonathan Trappe) to conduct simultaneous tours around the American West and East, respectively, giving local media rides in an armchair suspended from dozens of huge, brightly colored balloons.
I arrived at Pixar's campus here at about 5:15 a.m. Friday, just as a woman named Devony Corry, a longtime commercial hot-air balloon pilot, was holding onto one of the large, helium-filled balloons. It was clipped onto and tugging insistently at a belt loop on her pants. "This is what we need for guys who wear their pants too low," she joked, adding, "I'm just afraid it's going to rip the belt loop off my pants."
The armchair is seen in the early-morning light, before being rigged up to the balloon cluster.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Here in Emeryville, Bradley (who along with Richard Abruzzo, became the first two people to fly a balloon nonstop from North America to Africa) is in charge of a group of about 10 or so people who are rapidly filling the large balloons with helium and clipping them into a quickly-growing cluster.
"We're hoping we'll lose a few people for good footage," Bradley joked as I arrived.
At this point, with the sky still in its pre-dawn state, Bradley and his crew had gotten the cluster to just 13 balloons. But he said the ultimate goal was to reach between 64 and 70 balloons, which, combined, will contain about 8,000 cubic feet of helium and have about 500 pounds of lift.
For now, the 13 balloons (which quickly become 14, then 15, 16, and so on as team members clip new ones onto the cluster) are tethered to two giant helium tanks. A brown armchair rests on the ground next to the tanks, seemingly calling out to take someone skyward.
As the sky begins to take on a little color, it's clear we're going to be blessed with a spectacular day complete with what Bradley calls "absolutely awesome conditions." Read: no wind.
At the core of the cluster is a small set of 8-1/2-foot balloons, around which are being added a set of 7-footers. Later, the cluster will be filled out with a large number of 5-footers.
As she holds on to one of the 7-footers, I chat with Corry, who tells me she's been piloting hot air balloons for more than 25 years. She said she had learned about the cluster ballooning event here by reading an e-mail chain inviting qualified folks to "come out and crew."
After awhile, the cluster is getting too big to remain tethered to the helium tanks, and Bradley and a couple of helpers carefully clip it to the armchair. But because of the lift from the cluster, it's necessary to seat someone in the chair, and so a woman named Carol Bair takes the plunge. Still, the cluster of balloons is testing Bair's weight. "He (Bradley) said the chair tips forward and I don't have my seat belt on yet," Bair joked.
One by one, team members arrive from helium tanks arrayed around the amphitheater here where the event is being held, ready to help add to the girth and wild colors of the cluster. There's actually a queue, as it's faster to fill a balloon, it seems, than to clip one on to the cluster.
"I can't afford to lose any weight," Bair said. "I have to be ballast."
The balloon cluster begins to take air as it approaches completion. At its base is an armchair in which Carol Bair sits patiently.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Indeed, as a couple more balloons are clipped in, Bair gives a little shout and we can see the foot of the chair begin to move around on its own: Armchairs suspended from cluster balloons clearly have a need to take to the sky.
Carol's husband, Ray Bair, is another member of Bradley's traveling team. The three of them, plus two others, have come from Albuquerque, N.M., and have hit cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, Seattle, and St. Louis with the promotional balloon cluster on their way to Pixar. Bair tells me a cluster like this is intended to look like a lightbulb, though "it's a little different every time."
As the early morning sun crested the trees near the entrance to Pixar's campus, the balloons become brightly lit and, with the sky a brilliant blue and the balloons' various colors almost glowing, it looks absolutely glorious.
"It looks like a perfect morning," Carol Bair said.
"Oh yeah," Bradley answered, "You can't ask for better."
Taking air
The plan was that at 8 a.m., the balloon team would be done and could start giving journalists rides in the flying armchair. There were a lot of other reporters who had signed up for the privilege, but none of them had gotten to Pixar at 5:15. So I got to go first (see the video below).
I sat down in the chair and several people began strapping me in, even as two people sat on the arms to keep the cluster, the chair, and me from flying away. The wind began to pick up a little, and I could feel the chair sliding around a little bit underneath me. Just then, Baldwin handed me a waiver to sign. I joked I'd sign it when the ride was over.
Finally, we were ready, and the chair began to rise. It was smooth, almost surreally so. If I hadn't known what was going on, I wouldn't have known what was going on. They let me rise up to about 30 feet in the air, and then say a few words into a small microphone attached to my shirt, since they were filming the whole thing.
In fact, because there were already a bunch of other reporters lined up to take an armchair flight, the ride lasted just a few minutes. I would have liked to go up much higher--maybe not as high as 20,000 feet, what I understand is the rig's limit, but a little higher. But oh, well. Beggars can't be choosers.
I touched down, just as quietly and smoothly as I'd taken off, and then, just like that it was over.
You can call me "Flying Armchair Daniel." Or maybe something a little catchier than that.
On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
As part of a promotion for its upcoming animated feature, 'Up,' Pixar has teamed with cluster balloon pilot Jonathan Trappe to send a flying armchair around the country this spring.
(Credit: Jonathan Trappe/Pixar)Coming to a sky near you: a large cluster of multicolored balloons carrying a real-world version of the flying armchair featured in Pixar's forthcoming film, "Up."
The film, Pixar's 10th animated feature, focuses on the fate of 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, his house, and a wayward 8-year-old who happens by one day. Together, launched into the sky by a cluster of balloons tied to the roof of Fredricksen's house, the two set off on, you know, the adventure of a lifetime.
For most of us, we'll have to go to the theater to share in the skyward experience. But in 20 cities around the U.S. this spring, a lucky few will have a chance to take part in a real-world manifestation of Fredricksen's flying armchair.
That's because Pixar has teamed up with cluster ballooning expert Jonathan Trappe to fly the armchair around the United States, accompanied by "a team of FAA-certified balloon pilots."
"The armchair flights will consist of a five-story-tall cluster of colorful balloons carefully attached to the gondola," a site dedicated to the project states, "allowing Media VIP aeronauts to ascend to tethered altitudes above the city and experience the world of lighter-than-air flight in a very unique way."
Even if you can't ride the armchair itself, Pixar and Trappe are offering some people the chance to be involved as volunteers. In each of the 20 cities, teams will gather at two in the morning to set the balloons off into the sky, and the project is taking applications now.
"Cluster ballooning takes a team of volunteers, all coming together to send the system aloft," the site says. "It is awe-inspiring to see a cluster system come together in the early pre-dawn hours. To be one of the people that send one of these rare systems aloft is something many people will remember their whole lives."
Lighter-than-air pilot experience, the site cautions, or some kind of ballooning crew experience, is preferred.
I don't know about you, but I do know that I'm going to do everything I can think of to be a part of it. I wouldn't miss it for the world.
At Worldport, UPS' air-distribution facility in Louisville, there's 5.1 million square feet of space and 30,500 conveyor belts comprising more than 170 miles.
For more photos from Worldport, click on the image above.
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--I grew up in a household with two subscriptions to The New Yorker. How could we not? My father and my stepmother both needed their own copy of each issue.
With that as part of my background, how could I not become a lifelong fan of the magazine?
In 2005, New Yorker writer John McPhee published what instantly became one of my favorite pieces of all time, "Out in the Sort," a long treatise about the United Parcel Service's Worldport air-distribution facility here. Among his many detailed descriptions of this gargantuan operation, and the one that stuck with me ever since, was of being on an observation deck high above the countless conveyor belts on which packages of all kinds were whizzing by in every direction as some of the belts rose and others fell. He said it was like looking down into the Grand Canyon.
From the moment I read that, I said to myself that someday, I had to see that for myself.
Well, very early Friday morning, as dozens of UPS cargo jets were streaming into Louisville International Airport, where Worldport is located, loaded to the rafters with boxes and letters and odd-shaped packages, I finally got my wish.
I was here as the latest visit on Road Trip 2008, my journey through the South in search of the best destinations the region has to offer. And as we walked close to the observation deck that I'm sure McPhee had been looking down from, my eyes began to get very wide.
We approached the edge and I looked down. Before me, it was just like I had read--a deep chasm out of which conveyor belts ferrying packages of every imaginable size and shape were climbing up out of the floor while others plunged down from above to the floor far below. Some were going north-south, others east-west, and some were changing directions as they went around corners (see video below).
There are several reasons Worldport is here in Louisville. But perhaps two most convinced UPS brass at the company's Atlanta headquarters to pick this city.
First, it is fairly centrally located and within striking range of all of UPS' hubs around the world. Second, the company was able to build its 5.1 million-square-foot facility directly between two parallel runways of the airport here, allowing it to land a plane about every minute during each night's peak arrival period, when packages from just about anywhere you can imagine arrive to be routed to their eventual destinations.
It turns out--who knew?--that UPS operates its own airline. In fact, with 264 heavy jets--including dozens of Boeing 757s, a number of Boeing 747s and many others--it is the world's ninth largest air carrier. It just doesn't cart many passengers around. At least not of the sentient kind.
And each night, about 90 of those jets arrive at Worldport, up to 70 of which can dock at any one time, during a mad rush of package distribution and re-distribution that lasts about five hours. If you're not able and ready to stay up until at least 3:30 a.m., then you're not fit for a Worldport visit worth your time.
Of course, simply being able to handle up to 900,000 next-day air packages each night--and another 300,000 to 400,000 second-day air parcels during the day--isn't easy. In fact, being able to do this is the special sauce that makes Worldport one of the biggest masterpieces of industrial wizardry that I've ever seen.
Imagine: During the course of moving off the 90 aircraft they've come in on and are immediately heading back out on, each of those 800,000 to 900,000 packages are touched by human hands just twice, once at each end. In between, Worldport's automation process performs its magic, keeping a stream of parcels moving steadily in a manner that is hypnotic to watch.
A UPS 757 unloads a cargo bin, otherwise known as an "air can."
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Here's how it works: Each package shipped by UPS is affixed with what is known as a "smart label." You've seen them. They're the white sticker with a bar code, a tracking number, your name and address, and other pieces of information.
When a package is taken off a plane, a UPS worker places it on the first conveyor belt with its smart label facing up and to the left. Over the next 15 minutes or so, it will travel belt to belt, making it from the dock where it arrived to the dock from where it will be put on the plane that will take it to the distribution center closest to its destination. Along the way, it will go through as many as five scanners, each of which reads the smart label and then uses the information it gleans to direct the package onto the right conveyor belt to get it closer to the right dock.
One fascinating element of the system is the minute timing that allows the packages to move seamlessly along their route, switching from belt to belt without ever needing to stop.
To watch it in motion is confusing. How, you ask yourself, can so many packages make their way through such a complex system without countless mistakes and without needing to slow the belts down to switch the boxes or envelopes from one belt to another.
A package runs through one of the five scanners it will encounter on its way from arrival to departure. Each scanner helps route the package closer to its final destination.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)The answer is timing. The system is designed so that, based on the scans, it knows the exact distance between each package and how long it takes each of them to move through the process. When a box gets to a point where it's necessary to shift it to another belt, the system knows, because of how long it's taken to get there from a previous transition point, and a little device pops out to shove it toward where it needs to go.
Here are some numbers about Worldport.
It can handle as many as 416,000 packages an hour. It has 30,500 conveyor belts that comprise 170 total miles of belts. There are 326 different positions for unloading packages and 1,480 for loading. And there are 8,372 tilt trays sorters, each of which delivers a package into the hands of the person who will ultimately place it into the bin that will then be put onto an airplane.
In truth, it's hard to really explain Worldport. This is, after all, a $1.1 billion facility that employs thousands of people and is currently being expanded to be able to handle nearly half a million packages an hour.
But what is clear, when you look deep into the guts of the Grand Canyon here, is that the planning and implementation of the systems involved are one of the most impressive pieces of engineering in modern industrial history.
I kept looking at the massive numbers of packages zipping by, at the miles of conveyor belts and the vast open space in the building and thinking that it was kind of funny that I'd come all this way to complete a wish I'd had for more than three years.
But watching Worldport in motion, hearing the jets landing and taking off, seeing constant motion everywhere you look and knowing that this is what is behind the delivery of the many UPS packages that get sent to me, I know that my delivery needs are in pretty good hands. And so are yours.
A "secret agent" works on repairing a laptop at Geek Squad City, the company's giant facility near Louisville.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)BROOKS, Ky.--At Geek Squad City, it's no accident that everywhere you look are well-groomed young people in dark pants, white shirts, and narrow black ties.
Since its founding by Robert Stephens in Minnesota in 1994, Geek Squad has always been run on a very stylized kind-of-Mormon-missionary, kind-of-G-Men motif. That's why my host for a tour of the Geek Squad City facilities was Anthony Hadfield, who bears the job title "deputy director for counterintelligence."
I've come to the well-known computer repair company's giant facility just south of Louisville as part of Road Trip 2008.
Employees' cute job titles aside, Geek Squad City is an extremely impressive operation. More than 700 technicians work in two shifts from 5 a.m. until midnight to take the more than 3,000 computers a day that stream in from nationwide Best Buy locations (Best Buy bought Geek Squad several years ago), turn them around in a single day, and then get them back to their owners within a week.
Geek Squad City is organized with a municipal theme: the giant repair warehouse is called "downtown," its executive suite is known as the "city council" area, and within downtown, each aisle is called 1st Ave., 2nd Ave., and so on.
While Geek Squad is headquartered in Minnesota, the Geek Squad City facility is located here because it's just a few miles away from Louisville, where UPS has its world distribution center. That makes it possible for Geek Squad to expedite the receiving and then return shipping of the thousands of computers that come in each week, with the first machines arriving at 5 a.m., and the last ones going out at 9:30 p.m.
These racks are used to sort--by brand--laptops for delivery to technicians who will attempt to repair them within a day.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)According to Hadfield, what really differentiates Geek Squad City from other computer repair facilities is its parts center, which stocks a $7 million supply of everything needed to fix just about any computer model that comes in. It uses a specialized delivery system--which I wasn't allowed to photograph--and the goal is to get technicians' parts orders to them within 15 minutes.
On each "avenue" of downtown, you see rack after rack after rack, known as "bread racks," of laptops, sorted by brand, just waiting to be repaired by the white-shirted so-called secret agent repairmen and women. In fact, each aisle, or avenue, is divided by brand of computer, and each technician specializes in one brand or another.
Hadfield said the most common repair needs are broken DC jacks and hard drives.
"The more you move (a laptop), the more problems you can possibly have," Hadfield said, "and the better the chance of error."
The "downtown" area of Geek Squad City is organized with a municipal motif. For example, the executive suite is known as the "city council" section and the manager who runs the facility is the "mayor."
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Once a computer is fixed, it is loaded onto one of several conveyor belts, which all merge with a single larger belt that carries the machines into the shipping department.
There, workers take special boxes, load the computers into them, and pop on a UPS mailing label. Within minutes, the machines are in a stack of completely indistinguishable brown packages, all of which are expected back in the hands of their owners within a couple of days.
One thing Geek Squad agents do that's probably well-appreciated by computer owners is include a sheet of paper that explains exactly what was wrong with the machines and what the technicians did to fix them.
"They really want to know what happened and why they had to be without" their computer, Hadfield said. "So we explain, 'Your hard drive was replaced.' Or 'your motherboard was replaced,' and what that means so that they can prevent it" in the future.
In Geek Squad City's shipping department, an "agent" stacks laptops that have been repaired and boxed and are now about to be sent back to their owners.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)
Spaceport America, located near Las Cruces, N.M., said Lockheed Martin has committed to conducting operations at the spaceport.
(Credit: Spaceport America)The New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which runs Spaceport America, announced Tuesday that Lockheed Martin has committed to conducting operations at the facility near Las Cruces, N.M.
According to the release, Lockheed has been involved with Spaceport for some time already, having tested new launch technologies. It said that last December, Lockheed and launch provider UP Aerospace carried out a "small demonstration launch to test proprietary technology."
Now, Lockheed has entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Spaceport to conduct ongoing testing at the facility.
Sony Pictures' animated surfing penguins documentary, 'Surf's Up,' was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar this year, certainly in large part because of its work on creating realistic waves.
(Credit: Sony Imageworks)
CULVER CITY, Calif.--One of the things that struck me towards the end of the animated surfing penguin mockumentary, Surf's Up, is that I had forgotten that every bit of water in the film--mainly loads of lovingly rendered surfing waves--was digitally animated.
Even after that realization, I looked at the water in the film and thought the animators had done a remarkable job at recreating one of the things that, like making human hair look realistic, has always been hardest to recreate.
Others must agree, because last month, Surf's Up was chosen as one three nominees for the best animated feature Oscar. And while the film would have to be considered a big underdog, since it, and its fellow lesser-known nominee, Persepolis, are going up against Pixar's juggernaut, Ratatouille, a huge critical and commercial success.
Still, when Sony Imageworks, the Sony Pictures in-house visual effects studio behind the imagery in films like Spider-Man 3, Beowulf and I am Legend, invited me down to L.A. to talk about Surf's Up and the animation wizardry behind it, I readily agreed.
Walking into Imageworks' offices in Culver City, just a couple blocks down the street from Sony Pictures Studios' gargantuan facilities, one of the first things that struck me was how dark and quiet it was. All the better to keep glare off of animators' computer screens and to get work done, I was told.
Soon, I was ushered into a small screening room where the brains behind Surf's Up, producer Chris Jenkins, co-directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck, and visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow had gathered to talk to me about the film and about those fantastic waves.
Lest you think that creating waves for an animated surfing film starring penguins is a simple job, let me assure you that it isn't.
Imageworks' special sauce begins with its wave animation control system, a proprietary technology the company developed to create the waves for Surf's Up, and which was a modified version of the system it used to make the water effects for the Tom Hanks film Cast Away.
Waves are "essentially modeled one section at a time," said Bredow. "They start flat, turn into a swell, and then flip over and turn into classic crashing waves....We modeled (them) on what real waves would look like."
The film's story, Bredow added, called for three main types of waves: simple spilling breakers, classic tube waves modeled on Hawaii's famous Pipeline, and the kinds of huge waves found at Northern California's celebrated Maverick's.
"We had a bunch of surfers, guys who loved surfing, on the movie," Bredow said. "They'd go through hours of (surfing films) and find waves" they liked and which the Surf's Up team could model the film's waves on.
Looking at what seem like schematic still images of the structure of the waves, one sees what looks like the shape of a big wave with a grid of criss-crossed wire frame lines superimposed on it. The vertical lines, Bredow explained, segment the different sections of the wave, each of which can be controlled individually.
The point with that system is to be able to simulate the rolling effect of a wave crashing, left to right.
And in order to make that happen, the animation system revolves around a series of blue vertical control rings superimposed on a wire frame wave that the animators can "pull" forward.
We "put a ring around key points in each wave," Bredow said. "As we grab the ring and pull on it, or rotate the ring, the corresponding section of the wave will evolve forward and crash."
Imageworks designed a wave animation control system that was used to create realistic wave motion and evolution. The vertical rings are used by the animators to pull the various sections of the waves forward.
(Credit: Sony Imageworks)
Bredow said that the basic system for creating waves involves modeling each one from flat water to swell to rolling over to crashing down, and then blending through all those shapes into a single, animated effect.
Then, once the wave animation is created, it's time to add the water texture to it.
For that, Bredow said, his team takes a smooth plane that doesn't look at all like water, and adds many different levels of "noise."
"We simulate thousands of water ripples interacting with each other to simulate the texture," he said. "Basically, we use millions of interfering water ripples to create the wave texture."
Then it's time to add the proper lighting effects, a combination of many different techniques, Bredow explained.
"We made sure the water had all the (right) properties using different photo techniques," he added: "reflection, refraction, and the specular highlights that bloom the right color, and the surface foam on the surface of the water."
Finally, the animators worked on the way light goes through a wave.
Bredow said that when lighting a breaking wave, his team would break a wave down into individual wave "zones," perhaps eleven per wave, and then light each zone individually. They'd use different hues of greens or blues, depending on the need, and voila, a wave.
And as I said above, the results were spectacular. Without commenting on the overall quality of the movie, I will say categorically, that it is beautiful, and the work Bredow and his team did to create the many waves was nothing short of amazing.
One of the choices the filmmakers made when proceeding with Surf's Up, according to co-director Brannon, was to deliberately try to give each wave "character."
"The look of the movie was determined by the water," Brannon said. "We wanted believable water, not necessarily photorealistic, but not stylized, either."
One of the reasons for that is that Surf's Up, as mentioned above, is fashioned as a surfing documentary, focused on Cody, the main character, a young provincial penguin longing to join the glamorous world of pro surfing.
The point, then, was to make the film feel very much like a documentary. And that meant a slightly rougher edge to the texture, including a slightly shaky camera, as well as water on the lens and other such artifacts that wouldn't show up in a normal movie, but which are unavoidable in documentaries.
That's why, when I was watching Surf's Up, I noticed during one surfing scene that there were a couple of drops of water on the lens. At first, it had escaped my attention because it is such a realistic detail that your eye doesn't quite pick up on it. But then I realized that that was intentionally placed there. I had to go back and look again in appreciation of the thoughtfulness behind it.
Another important element in the making of Surf's Up, then, was the incorporation of the live-action camera, something that might not be entirely intuitive in a fully animated movie.
But use a live-action camera they did.
After leaving the screening room and saying goodbye to Bredow, Brannon, Buck and Jenkins, I was taken to Imageworks' layout room, a single room a couple of stories below where, it turns out, the filmmakers shot much of the film.
There, James Williams, Imageworks' head of layout, explained and demonstrated how live-action had been incorporated.
As I mentioned above, the purpose of doing so was to make the texture feel like a documentary. And that meant simulating the kind of slight movements that come when a cameraperson is working with a hand-held camera on location.
To do this, Williams explained, the animators designed a system where they programmed the animation of the many penguins in the film and then turned to their live-action camera, an ancient Sony camera--bought off eBay, no less--that was somewhat like what surfing documentarians would have used a decade or so ago.
Sony Imageworks utilized a special live-action camera to build in the kind of realistic camera movements found in traditional documentaries.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)
The camera was fitted with a special sensor that emitted signals picked up by a grid of hundreds of sensors on the room's ceiling in order to translate the camera's exact real physical movements onto the animated scene.
The result, Williams demonstrated, is that when he moved the camera a little bit from side to side, the animated penguins on screen would shift in the camera's view.
It's an odd concept, and one that took me a little while to understand, but it actually makes a lot of sense, and is a pretty elegant solution to the problem of how to build in the little imperfections in a documentary that the filmmakers wanted to see in their fully digital movie.
All of this was done, said producer Jenkins, so that the desired effect of a surfing documentary felt real to the audience.
"If something's not quite right, even within a tenth of a percent," Jenkins said, the audience sees it. "It has to be just right."
Did it work? Well, as I alluded to above, I think the filmmakers succeeded in making many of the details of their movie work exactly as planned. Things that seemed totally authentic struck me later on, particularly because I realized they were, in fact, totally digital and totally fabricated. And that's the sign of amazing attention to detail.
The film wasn't much of a commercial success, however, perhaps because the story was a little bit predictable and standard. So much of the Imageworks team's labor was missed by the moviegoing public.
But they surely tried hard to make a film that stayed true to the look and feel of the classic surfing documentary. And for that, they deserve their Oscar nomination.
"If you're going for perfection, you fail," said Brannon. "We were going for humanity, and that comes through in the final product and gives it an organic feel."
It's a small step for mankind, but a giant step for Spaceport America.
According to a release from the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, UP Aerospace ("Space is 62 miles away, Getting there is just a phone call away") successfully launched a "test flight vehicle" on Wednesday.
The Spaceport, which is near Las Cruces, N.M., is the future home of Virgin Galactic, as well as the XPrize Cup.
Spaceport America, near Las Cruces, NM, is home to the XPrize Cup and Virgin Galactic, among others. On Wednesday, it hosted a successful low-altitude test launch by UP Aerospace.
(Credit: Spaceport America)UP Aerospace, according to its Web site, is in the business of selling cargo space on launch vehicles.
The release said that the Wednesday launch was private, and reached its intended altitude of 2,500 feet. Which, if you're counting, is a wee bit short of 62 miles high.
Still, any progress at the Spaceport is good news for its directors and tenants and for the entire concept of passenger space travel and low-cost payload delivery.We can only hope that news will be soon forthcoming about successful launches of test passenger vehicles from the spaceport.
Until then, stay tuned for word announcing a mile-high test launch.
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