BGSU students created a 3-D animation to showcase the highlights of the Emerging Technologies venue at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles.

BGSU students’ video promotion to be shown in L.A., internationally

It’s only fitting that a video showcase of the world’s most exciting examples of emerging technology should be of equally high quality. Thus, it was a coup for BGSU students to be chosen to produce the piece for this year’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Technologies (SIGGRAPH) conference, to be held in Los Angeles later this summer.

The annual event draws visitors from more than 30 countries. People from industry, the arts, research labs, universities and other organizations, as well as the general public, come to the five-day conference to get a look at what’s new in the field. About 45,000 attendees are expected this year, said Bonnie Mitchell, chair of digital arts. Mitchell has been involved with SIGGRAPH since 1990.

Because of Bowling Green’s long association with the conference and its reputation for producing quality work, Donna Cox of the National Center for Applications of Supercomputing and chair of this year’s Emerging Technologies (ETech) portion of the conference, welcomed the opportunity to work with Mitchell’s students to produce the ETech promotional video.

Five BGSU students—two from the School of Art, two from the College of Musical Arts plus a narrator from the Department of Theatre and Film—took on the task of producing the video showcase for Emerging Technologies, which features innovations in robotics, virtual reality, human-computer interfaces, creative projection systems and more.

Junior Joshua Fry and senior Patrick McPeck, both digital arts majors, created the animation, and graduate student Seann Flynn and senior Sean Hagerty, music majors, handled the sound. Megan Grandstaff, a theatre major, provided the voice-over. “It was a great team and they did great work,” said Mitchell, the project manager and art director.

Their video piece is being distributed internationally as a promotion for the conference and is included in the SIGGRAPH Video Review, which is sold year-round and collected by libraries and individuals. “It’s probably the most comprehensive historical collection of video graphics available,” Mitchell said.

The finished piece was so good that it was also selected for inclusion in the conference’s Electronic Theater, attended by about 30,000 people at $60 per ticket. The Electronic Theater features the year’s best animation from around the world, in such areas as art, scientific visualization and Hollywood special effects. “It’s the cream of the crop, and for our students’ piece to be chosen is very impressive,” said Mitchell.

For the students, it was an opportunity to participate in a real-world project, she added. “Learning how to juggle schedules and work with other people provided valuable experience,” she said, as did the chance to have feedback from professional 3-D editors and sound engineers as the project progressed.

“We are really breaking down the boundaries by having students from three different departments working together on a single project,” Mitchell said. “It couldn’t have been done without the synergy that happens between these students.”

Creating a digital world
To produce the Emerging Technologies showcase, McPeck and Fry, who were in Mitchell’s Collaborative Multimedia class, chose to integrate clips from the exhibits into a 3-D animation. The main “character,” a digitally created robot, was modeled by McPeck, who then worked with Fry to animate it. Fry compared the process of animating the figure, and “rigging,” it, to creating a puppet in which you have to supply the “bones” with which to make it move.

“We didn’t sleep for almost a month,” McPeck, from Dayton, said. In addition to carrying 18 credit hours plus an internship in his final semester, he worked with Fry all night many nights on the SIGGRAPH promotion.

“We worked well together,” McPeck noted, adding that each had different strengths, Fry in 2-D animation and compositing and he in modeling, or building 3-D objects, and animation. The two had to pull together material from hours of movies and videos and combine it, he said.

Fry also focused on the editing process, supplying the special effects and bringing together all the 3-D layers, or “compositing” the piece, so that the colors, positions and other elements were cohesive and in the proper position.

Despite the hardship of the long hours and pressure to succeed, McPeck said, “It’s the greatest thing. You learn so much. We learned many new tips and styles from the feedback we got from other people in the industry.”

Fry, from Cuyahoga Falls, agreed. “It was an amazing experience and a good thing to have gone through.” He plans to attend the conference and, as president of the BGSU SIGGRAPH chapter, will meet with other chapter leaders. He said “having my name out there at SIGGRAPH will be great. All the people in the industry I’d ever want to work with will be there.”

His involvement will continue next year as SIGGRAPH student chapter president and president of the Computer Art Club.

Matching sound to visuals
When their work on the video was nearly done, McPeck and Fry gave it to Flynn, from North Olmsted, and Hagerty, from Kettering, to develop the audio. The two had collaborated before and enjoyed working together.

Flynn, a jazz and ethnomusicology major with a minor in recording technology, was the sound engineer and Hagerty, a composition major and violinist, composed the background music.

“Seann (Flynn) is really good at understanding the aesthetics to create effective sound effects,” Mitchell said. “He understands that there is an emotional impact to sound.”

Flynn said he was guided by the robot image in his choice of sound—“Are you looking for a gentle or a harsh sound? A lot of highs and lows? Is the movement herky-jerky or smooth? Once you’ve decided, you look at the stock sounds you have to work with and then you can customize them a bit.” He added some sound from other movies he had done and recorded other sounds, manipulating them to unify the overall effect.

“People don’t understand the amount of work that goes into sound,” he said, adding that “if the sound is doing its job well, you often don’t even notice it.”

Likewise, in writing the background music, Hagerty said, he had to decide “what quality the robotic arm had and find the musical equivalent. You have to have matching quality so you have overall cohesion.” He thought of the robot sounds as the solos, he said, letting the music drop back as the robot sound came up.

Working within the confines of the already-created animation with its set time structure and character format “was a very different creative process,” he said. Yet it offered nearly total freedom to create, he added. “Working in the digital world lets me combine whatever elements I choose.”

A long affiliation
BGSU faculty have played many roles in SIGGRAPH, from serving on panels and subcommittees to chairing sections of the conference. Mitchell, who will chair the 2006 Art Gallery, has coordinated the production of promotional materials for the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery and ETech, is a member of the education committee and served on the executive board from 1992-95. Dr. Dena Eber, digital arts, chaired the Art Gallery at the 2001 conference, and Heather Elliott-Famularo, digital arts, was chair of the ETech venue last year. Numerous BGSU students and alumni have been involved as well, both as artists and in producing materials for the conference.

“It’s really put BGSU on the map,” Mitchell said. “Our name is all over SIGGRAPH.”