Medical imaging, automated animation and cool new independent anime steal the show at the recent Swansea Animation Days event.

Over the four years since its inception, the Swansea Animation Days event has kept on expanding. Originally focused exclusively on special effects, SAND now covers such topics as videogames, medical visualisation and film animation, and is aimed at professionals and students alike.

The second day focused on animation and video games, with two presentations of particular interest. Nick Perrett from Image Metrics demonstrated the company’s impressive computer vision technology (which could be described as automated rotoscoping) that can extract animation files from any kind of video sequence.

The last day was a screening day, with classics like Ghost in the Shell as well as the soon-to-be classic Belleville Rendez-Vous (Les Triplettes de Belleville). Voices of a Distant Star, a poetic 30-minute anime, was particularly inspiring to animation artists of all genres as it was created by a single artist, Makoto Shinkai, on his own computer with off-the-shelf software.

Events like SAND are without doubt enriching experiences; whether you learn a little or a lot, they offer the opportunity to be taught by, and meet, experts face to face, and to discover how they work.

Show report courtesy of Benoit Guerville

One of Blade Runner’s many classic futuristic set-pieces is the scene in which Harrison Ford uses a computer to ‘look inside’ a photographic image, and uncovers hidden clues about the Replicants. While this scene has always appeared unrealistic, many of us still remember it vividly. It seemed fascinating to be able to go behind the surface of a picture and unveil a part of the past, a past that was forever frozen in the flattened world of a 2D image. But this fantasy is becoming a reality.

Nick presented Image Metrics’ computer vision technology, which can derive animation files from any kind of video sequences. Basically, if you want to animate something (a face, a crowd, sea waves, etc.) just shoot it with your camcorder, and boom, you’ve got an animation file that can give life to any 3D object. As an example, Image Metrics used the videotape of a talking man to animate a Michael Jackson still. The result was something truly amazing, because it didn’t look like CG imagery, and was believable to an unprecedented degree.

A trip to Swansea for this year’s SAND event. Last year, robotics and effective 3D modelling were the focus. This time, the event exposed the technological link between leisure and science, between computer games and medicine.

Wales as we imagine it is not very attractive: black clouds high in the sky, a regional cuisine as ‘original’ as the rest of Great Britain, old abandoned mines, a rugby team beaten by England at the last World Cup… But once you are actually there, the prejudices become blurred. Nevertheless, Wales can make you feel somewhat morose. Nowadays, the old coal regions of France are plagued by extremely high rates of unemployment. Fortunately for the Welsh, they enjoy one of the lowest rates in Europe.

So what is the miracle cure? A political-economic choice which rests largely on providing significant assistance to businesses, extremely low taxes, the most modern telecommunications network – so good that almost everyone benefits from ADSL, even in the depths of the countryside. Moreover, the country benefits from tremendous communication tools, such as the creation of a direct broadband link with the east coast of America. And many big names have fallen for the place. Last July, Airbus, for example, opened a factory producing the wings of the future A380. And that is not all. A great number of high tech industries (biotechnology, electronics, multimedia, medical photography…) set themselves up here day after day. The Welsh Development Agency is at the root of this economic revival. Working in close collaboration with the Minister for Economic Development, this agency liases with those corporations wishing to establish themselves in the region. And each year this same institution sponsors the SAND conference (Swansea Animation Days), in Swansea.

The Computer in the Service of Medicine

If on the first day the speakers were more doctors than gamers, the vocabulary was nonetheless the same: motion capture, real time, virtual reality and the ‘visible human project’. Do you remember the ‘visible human project’, which was in all the papers about 10 years ago? It involved freezing a cadaver and then cutting it into fine slices. This surprising project brought immense benefits to many scientists, notably to Simon Barrick, from Primal Pictures. For several years this British company has been reconstructing the human body in 3D. But not in the way that animators would. Their model includes every detail – the bones, the muscles, the blood vessels… Unfortunately, Simon feels the task will never be over: “One can always go into more detail”, he explains. Not only that, but when he finishes the model he plans to animate the body in a similar way to characters in a video game. The difference will be his attention to detail.

Whereas in a video game, the skeleton of a character “contains only about 20 bones”, his is composed of tens of thousands of elements. This work could one day be used in the creation of on-screen characters in video games, or to make cinematic special effects even more believable. At this point you may recall certain scenes in Hollow Man, a film by Paul Verhoeven in which Kevin Bacon gradually becomes invisible. His skin disappears, then his muscles…

From the human body in general, the conference then turned its attention to a more specific and more serious problem: breast cancer. Peter Waggett, who works for IBM, has, over the years, become a technological specialist in breast cancer screening. He explained that the greatest problem with mammograms was related to storing the data. This data is so important and so voluminous that it takes up an enormous amount of space. So much so that 10% of it is lost. By compressing the data to computerised format, it becomes much more practical. This method provides trainee doctors with access to thorough medical archives, enables doctors to identify areas where tumours are more numerous than elsewhere and, eventually, to diagnose cancers with the assistance of a computer.

Will all this computerisation bring about a better world? Perhaps. But a part of the discussion could seem quite worrying. An example. With the help of his PDA, a patient could alert his doctor about his illness. The doctor, who would receive the information on his PALM, could then send a message to the pharmacist. In the same way, a device would remind the patient when to take his medication. Somehow this all comes across as cold and dehumanised… That said, such a system could bring about great progress - the intentions are certainly good.

Will all this computerisation bring about a better world? Perhaps. But a part of the discussion could seem quite worrying. An example. With the help of his PDA, a patient could alert his doctor about his illness. The doctor, who would receive the information on his PALM, could then send a message to the pharmacist. In the same way, a device would remind the patient when to take his medication. Somehow this all comes across as cold and dehumanised… That said, such a system could bring about great progress - the intentions are certainly good.

But there is more. When he described the process of carrying out an operation from a distance, it was much more spectacular. And this has already taken place! In effect, a robot reproduces the gestures made by the surgeon, who is situated at a distance. Of course, the equipment must be very powerful: elaborate graphics processors, high-tech peripherals (joysticks, gloves…), a reliable network, scans that are realistic in every detail…

Derek Gould, consultant radiologist, was the next to take up the story. Virtual reality offers many advantages in the field of radiology, particularly to trainees. It allows teachers to increase the difficulty level of the exercises presented to trainees, and therefore produce better radiologists who are able to handle more complex cases. Dr Gould talked us through some of these complex cases, and showed us some unbearably gory photography. It is not difficult to find parallels with video games here: what appears on the screen is a representation of reality.

“Science” in the service of gamers.

Happily, the second day was more playful. Richard Hince, motion capture specialist, demonstrated recent advances in his field. To give you some idea, the big thing at the moment is to capture the movement of the eyelids, the humidity of the eye, the elasticity of the skin…

Up next was Nick Perrett. He seemed somehow different from the other presenters, but his techniques were relevant to everyone. On the screen were three images: a golfer, a railway, and sperm. Nick was addressing himself to three types of people: computer gamers, technicians and doctors, and his concept proved to be devilishly effective. It is possible to take a real image and analyse it on a computer to extract global data from it, and then use the computer to spot abnormalities. The golfer will see his movement corrected, engineers will be able to see when there are pieces of the rail track missing, and doctors will be able to reveal abnormal activity in sperm. The guiding idea is clearly to understand images better. And all the astonishing possibilities for this technology arising from this conference had this in common. The demonstration began with an apparently comic animation of Michael Jackson’s face. One of the project directors from Image Metrics, wearing no sensors on his face, was able to make the face of the American star on the screen repeat everything he said. The computer analysed the researcher’s face and gestures and “copied” them in real time onto the face of the singer. There are as many useful possibilities as playful ones for this tool. Imagine, for example, an online game in which your virtual character moved his lips in sync with the words you said, and imitated your gestures as you sat in front of your computer.

Next in line were all the representatives of the studios: Shelley Page from Dreamworks (Shrek, Spirit…), Bruce Steele from GlassWorks (a special effects studio specialising in music videos and adverts), and Willi Geiger from ILM (who worked on Terminator and Star Wars). Unlike the doctors, they had no need for more powerful machines (perhaps they are better equipped: 800 Linux machines, 300 petabytes of archived data every year at ILM…). They all agreed that the most beautiful computer generated image was nothing without an effective plot.

Shelley showed us the trailer for Shrek 2, 40 seconds of pure pleasure, with Puss in Boots, Cendrillon and a stormy relationship between the ogre and his in-laws. Bruce Steele presented the latest Massive Attack music video, in which the singer turns into a butterfly. Sublime! Finally, Willi Geiger presented us with some special effects from Hulk. On the screen, a puzzle: One eye was real, the other CG, and it was impossible to know which was which. Incredible!

In conclusion, it is difficult not to make the comparison between the needs of the scientists and the desires of the animators. They are all advancing in the same direction. By improving technology in the domain of entertainment, the medical world also benefits. And the same is true for gamers, who will see more and more realistic computer games appearing on the market.

by Xavier Allard                                     View pdf...

Rounding off the year in style, Swansea’s Taliesin Arts Centre became a hotbed for digital talent as major Hollywood FX studios showed face at the prestigious SAND 2003 exhibition.

The annual event, staged by the Swansea Institute and sponsored by the Welsh Development Agency, offered presentations, workshops and seminars covering the hottest emergent skills in the fields of movie special effects, feature animation, games development and medical science.

“SAND is simply one of the best and most valuable animation conferences I have ever attended,” said best-selling 3D author Ed Hooks, presenter and workshop leader at the show. “It gave me and others perhaps our first opportunity to see how computer animation is being applied to a diverse array of disciplines".

From the 26th to 29th November, SAND 2003 (Swansea Animation Days) took place in Wales, UK. Since the first event four years ago, SAND has not stopped developing. Initially focussed exclusively on special effects and animation, this year’s event welcomed representatives from the worlds of computer games, medical visualisation, anime, advertising and cinema. Held in the grounds of the University of Wales, Swansea, the event appeals as much to professionals as to students, who came in great numbers to attend presentations by the big names in the CG industry.

Despite the technical prowess that goes into this type of special effect, we are so used to it that we forget what it does to our perception of reality. And, as Ed Hooks pointed out in his Acting For Animators workshop at SAND 2003, “3D is about 20 years old – not so much younger than the emergence of speech in films”.

And SAND 2003 showed us just how little we know of what 3D has in store for us in the years to come….

Nick Perrett, marketing director of Image Metrics (www.image-metrics.com), presented new motion capture technology that could revolutionise the world of animation and 3D in general. Thanks to a system of movement analysis and image recognition, Image Metric’s software is capable of extracting animation data from any video file (which is obviously 2D) and applying that data to a 3D environment. In a particularly impressive example, Nick showed a photograph of Michael Jackson’s face, which had been animated using data extracted from a video file of another actor speaking. The singer’s face came to life and spoke, and it was one of the most realistic 3D animations we have seen up until now.

And this software has even greater potential. Nick Perrett explained that it would be quite possible to film the waves on beach rolling in and out, to extract totally realistic animation data from that video and then to apply that data to waves in a 3D scene. Any element of the real world could be filmed and transformed into 3D data.

“Yesterday evening,” Ed Hooks told us, “I came across a documentary which reconstructed the assassination of Kennedy with the help of computer graphics. Until now, only one film of that assassination existed, captured by an amateur filmmaker at the moment of the drama. Thanks to computer graphics, I was able to pass around the other side of Kennedy’s car and see the events from a point of view that could never before have been shown and which transformed my understanding of the event.”

Having seen the ghostly face of Michael Jackson come to life as realistically as if he were speaking in a news clip, it is difficult to talk about this in terms of simple reconstruction. It calls into question our perception of the world and of reality.