American Cinematographer - February 1990 - 72

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touch-ups, and - voila!

-

no

artifacts

remain.
In

a

third suite

an

old man's

face is

being shape-shifted into that of a
youth. The transformation is essentially
a digital dissolve between shots of two
live actors. What makes it unusual is that

the features of the actors are being
moved around to coincide with each

other, and different parts of the faces will
change at different times. The animator
aligns the two sequences (which were
carefully filmed so the actors were tilt¬
ing their heads and smiling with exactly
the same timing) and starts to work,
marking the centers of the pupils of the
eyes on all frames of both sequences. He
then draws ovals around the eyes of the
old man on the frame in which the effect
is to begin, and then around the eyes of
the teenager on the frame where the
transformation ends.
The animator pushes a button
and the old man's eyes - higher than
the boy's - start to move down, with
localized stretching accommodating the

displacement. As the dissolve starts we
see that the youngster's eyes have
moved up to coincide with the oldster's,
and they move down together with their
pupils in lock-step as the dissolve pro¬
gresses. But the differences in their
eyelids need work. So the animator iso¬
lates small sections and stretches them
around until they meld together also. It's

starting to look creepy! Then, using the
same color-changing trick as the colorist
in the other room, the animator makes
the old guy's brown eyes turn blue like

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mated skeletal-muscle systems derived
from CAT-scan data! The capability/
speed/price equation has reached a criti¬
cal mass. By mid-decade, computer
grahics will have revolutionized movie
making just as is now being predicted.
When the revolution matures,
the

unexpected thing will be computer

effects that are used less to do science
fiction tricks than to do more conven¬
tional things, such as Hamlet's castle or

eagle that can follow a script to the
letter. Of course, science fiction will have
a field day with the magic - make no
mistake!. We're rapidly reaching the
an

point where any environment or object
imagined can also be imaged.
As the astounding "pseudo¬
pod" water tentacle that ILM created last
summer for The Abyss proved so spec¬
tacularly, synthetic imagery really works!
That effect will probably come to be
regarded as the turning point in film his¬
tory when computer imagery went from
being a freak technique to being re¬
spected as a serious tool. Think of what

that can be

in the DataSuit could do if
she were transformed into a water being
our woman

or an insect, or a dragon, or a scintil¬
lating three-dimensional pattern of light.
The DataSuit and its predeces¬

-

sor the "DataGlove" (a motion detector
for the hand which has fiber-optic stress

dreds of individual strands at various
times. In the end the metamorphosis is
so natural that one could almost believe
in the fountain of youth.

synthetic hand on the screen moving
exactly as your gloved hand does, and
which can pick up and manipulate other
computer generated objects in the virtual

on

Sizes, 10 Colors

on a

sized piece of silicon. Today's hardware
is so powerful that "wireframe" anima¬
tion previewing is being phased out in
favor of real time solids. Today's cutting

boy's, prior to the dissolve. He goes
modify the other facial features.
The emergence of the youth's hair is the
most tedious part of the job. To do that
he enlarges the scalp area ten times and
paints animated mattes that reveal hun¬

the

CABLE
WRAPS

million transistors

to

Meanwhile, back in1990: Pre¬

sensors

in every

joint)

are

made by VPL

Research, in Redwood City, CA. The

glove is widely used for research into
"virtual realities," in which you see a

environment.

But, oddly enough, such tools

dicting the future is always risky busi¬
ness, and writing about it as if it were
already true may be a punishable of¬
fense. But nothing described here would

have yet to be adopted by the computer
animation studios, which seem reluctant

be considered too far off the mark, tech¬

knobs. However, at

nology-wise, by any computer graphics
insider, although the timetable is subject
to the uncertainty of the marketplace.
Computer chips are getting
outrageously powerful, with more than a

February 1990

to abandon their xyz-space

positioning

Rhythm & Hues, a
cutting edge Hollywood computer anima¬
tion facility founded in 1987 by John
Hughes (who was Robert Abel's leading
technical director) and Charlie Gibson

(who

was a

wunderkind programmer/
American Cinematographer - February 1990

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 1990
