BOWLING GREEN, O -- When you already have a "Mission: Impossible" to your credit, a computer reconstruction of a historical site might seem simple by comparison. But Larry Bowman, a Bowling Green State University graduate student and former Hollywood special-effects artist, figures it took three months of work-five hours a day, seven days a week-to complete his computer model of Perrysburg's Fort Meigs as it looked in 1813.

Adding time for research and other preparation, Bowman says he's been "eating and sleeping" the project since last September.

The resulting re-creation has "all kinds of potential" as an educational tool, says Dr. Larry Nelson, site manager at Fort Meigs, which was built 190 years ago to defend the Ohio Country against British invasion in the War of 1812.

Nelson envisions Bowman's work on a computer in a kiosk in one of the fort's blockhouses or in its museum. All or part of the reconstruction could also go on the fort's Web site, and it could be broken down to correlate with Ohio history curriculum standards, with teachers then directed to the site. Possible uses are "almost limitless," Nelson says.

For his part, Bowman suggests the computer model could be put on compact discs and sold to schools, museums and bookstores. But profit wasn't his prime motive for doing the re-creation. It's a project for his master's degree program in career and technology education at BGSU's College of Technology.

The Sandusky native earned a bachelor's degree in technology from BGSU in 1980 and returned in 2001 after a 20-year career in Hollywood. During that time, he helped bring the Energizer bunny to life, and his film credits included "Batman Returns" and the first "Mission: Impossible" movie, which used spy gear and headsets that Bowman built. He also worked on "Babylon 5," one of the first television shows to use computer animation.

Life was good, Bowman says, but a few years ago, he decided Los Angeles wasn't where he wanted to raise his son and that he wanted to share his experience "with the new breed of visual communicators" as a teacher. So he came back to northwest Ohio.

When the time came to settle on his major master's project, Bowman chose to wed his previous vocation-high-tech computer animation-with his avocation-history. He already had a library of historical figures and history-based fantasy figures built during his robotic prop-making days.

Although he considered a project about mound-building cultures in southern Ohio, Dr. Edmund Danziger Jr., Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at BGSU, suggested Fort Meigs, citing the proximity of both the site and fort experts, and its local significance. "

Any historical site would have fascinated me, so it didn't matter," says Bowman, who started by taking digital photos at the fort and building models of its picket wall and blockhouse-the two-story structures from which the Americans fired guns and cannons at their British attackers during two sieges in the spring and summer of 1813.

He sent pictures of the models in an email message to Nelson, who describes Bowman as "driven by passion" for history. From their first meeting, "we were on the same page," adds Nelson, who earned a doctorate in history from BGSU in 1994.

A main source of information for the reconstruction was an Army Corps of Engineers map from 1888, 73 years after the fort was abandoned. Bowman also worked from two unpublished documents: a 1966 architectural study which preceded the fort's restoration and opening as a state memorial in 1972, and a report written in 2000 by Nelson, who used maps, diaries and other documents to create a verbal history. "

There are remarkably few drawings of the (original) structure," says Bowman. He did have a map that showed the location, though not the alignment, of the 300 or so tents that housed the roughly 2,000 men who lived inside the fort. To estimate the alignment, he applied an 1812 military doctrine with regulations for tent set-up.

Because he already had a digital camera, computers and necessary software, there was little cost beyond travel-and that was also minimal for the Maumee resident. He's creating a three-dimensional walkthrough of the site now, and is hoping for funding to add other features, such as supply facilities just outside the fort's walls and British artillery across the Maumee River, as well as people.

Animating people would be a project equal to creating the fort, notes Bowman. "Whatever you do, the first thing you need is a fort," he says.

(Posted July 02, 2003)