It's an assignment that might daunt even Steven Spielberg: Make a
movie that spans billions of years, from the birth of the cosmos to the
present day, and that illustrates in breathtaking detail the rise and
development of life on Earth, down to the intricacies of a DNA
strand--all in 35 minutes.
Next to this, bringing a few velociraptors to life seems like a piece
of cake.
"We definitely had some bad moments when we wondered if we could do
what we said we could," admits Bayley Silleck, the writer, director, and
co-producer, with Jeffrey Marvin, of Cosmic Voyage, the newest
film made in the giant-screen IMAX format. On the 6-year journey to its
premiere this year at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and
Space Museum, Cosmic Voyage ended up breaking new ground on
several fronts. That's only fitting for a film that uses the most
up-to-date scientific theories about the Big Bang, quarks, and black
holes to provide insight into the age-old question: What is humankind's
place in the universe and in time?
Ironically, Silleck and Marvin found their inspiration for Cosmic
Voyage not in the latest scientific journals but in a 40-year-old
Dutch science text called Cosmic View , written by schoolteacher
Kees Boeke to help his students understand their place in the cosmos. It
begins, Silleck says, with a picture of a girl sitting in front of a
school, and then it looks at the scene from 10 meters away. It continues
enlarging the field of vision tenfold, and before long the picture
encompasses the universe. Then the book goes in the other direction,
using the same approach, to shed light on the tiniest elements of the
universe--protons, neutrons, and eventually quarks, the smallest building
blocks of matter. Cosmic Voyage takes the same tack, employing
what came to be called a "cosmic zoom" to whisk viewers to the edges of
the universe and into the heart of an atom.
Once you've tackled space, what's left except time? The second half of
Cosmic Voyage recreates some of the major events in the history of
our universe, starting with the Big Bang. Viewers hitch a ride on a comet
that streaks through the young solar system and slams into the developing
Earth, where life begins to grow and evolve toward Homo sapiens.
For students of movie-making, though, the most extraordinary aspect
may be the high-tech tools used to bring this production to life.
Supercomputers on the Set
When they came up with the idea for Cosmic Voyage in 1990, Silleck
and Marvin conceived of it as a film that would blend the visually
stunning IMAX format with computer animation, which was just beginning to
make its mark in Hollywood. IMAX creates a picture so vastly different
from conventional film--incredibly sharp and so large that it must be
projected on screens up to eight stories high in custom-built
theaters--that most directors treat it as a special effect.
Marvin and Silleck, however, perceived IMAX as the perfect medium in
which to present the most complex, fascinating, and technically demanding
computer-generated effects.
Almost half of the 35-minute film consists entirely of computer
animation, and 4 minutes of that is spent painstakingly bringing to
virtual life supercomputer simulations based on the most current data on
the Big Bang, how galaxies condense, and what happens when galaxies
collide. In charge of this "data-driven visualization" was Donna Cox,
president of Creative Visualizations Unlimited and professor of art and
design at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA), who brought to a production teeming with innovative
technology perhaps the most intriguing tool of all.
The Virtual Director, developed by Cox and NCSA colleagues Bob
Patterson and Marcus Thiebaux, lets filmmakers look at computer animation
a new way--from the inside--and then guide the camera's movement through
the sequence. Instead of viewing the animation on a small desktop
monitor, directors can literally immerse themselves in THE SCENE by
entering NCSA'S Computer-Assisted Virtual Environment (CAVE). A small but
very high-tech room, the CAVE has computers controlling each of its walls
and its floor. The computer graphic scene is rear-projected on each of
these surfaces, putting the director smack in the middle of it all.
Able to see the "big picture," so to speak, the director can decide
how the audience should see it. Wearing 3-D goggles and a headset, the
director carries a wand that both represents the camera and takes the
place of a computer mouse. As the animation scene plays, the director
moves the wand to control the focus and perspective of the camera.
Meanwhile, Virtual Director stores various camera paths so that the
director can decide among them later.
"Directing" computer-animation sequences in the conventional
manner--viewing the animation on a desktop computer monitor and using the
mouse to navigate through it frame by frame--can be tedious,
time-consuming, and frustrating for the director and the animator, who
must move and click the mouse thousands of times during every animation
sequence. Patterson, in fact, left the film special-effects field after
suffering computer-related injuries.
Cox reports that she and Patterson have talked to major film studios
about applying Virtual Director to Hollywood features. There is great
potential for the technology both in computer-animation and live-action
sequences; a director could model the set on the computer and then use
Virtual Director to try out various camera angles and paths long before
the set is built or the actors arrive.
The Technology Behind Toy Story Drives the Cosmos
Although Cosmic Voyage would have been significantly more
difficult to make without the Virtual Director technology, it would have
been downright impossible without the massive strides made in
computer-animation software and computer technology in the last 5 or 6
years. In 1992, Cox and her team created 45 seconds of simulation-based
computer animation illustrating galaxies colliding to show to potential
Cosmic Voyage investors. (The Motorola Foundation eventually
contributed most of the funding, along with the National Science
Foundation and the National Air and Space Museum.) Although the image
resolution in that footage was only a tenth as sharp as that of the
animation in Cosmic Voyage , each frame took a mind-numbing 12
hours to compute--and movies run at 24 frames per second. "We didn't know
how we were going to do this," Cox recalls. "We had to get the frames
down to 10 or 15 minutes."
Fortunately, between 1992 and the spring of 1995, when the computer
simulations for Cosmic Voyage were run, Silicon Graphics Inc.
developed powerful new computers and Pixar, the company behind Toy
Story , created versatile animation software. Making Cosmic
Voyage was possible--if far from simple.
The massive amounts of data for the three-dimensional computer
simulations of the Big Bang, colliding galaxies, and condensing galaxies
came from some of the members of a Science Advisory Committee formed to
ensure that the science depicted in Cosmic Voyage was sound. But
even they weren't prepared for just how much data was needed to create
visual simulations detailed enough for the IMAX format, with its
extremely high resolution--about 4,000 by 3,000 pixels as opposed to 640
by 480 pixels for conventional video resolution. "IMAX is such an
unforgiving format," Cox says. "When we told the scientists that even the
largest simulations they'd run were too small, they gasped."
So the researchers (including astrophysicists Frank Summers of the
Princeton University Observatory and Chris Mihos and Lars Hernquist of
The University of California at Santa Cruz) drafted huge new simulations
for the film. How huge were they? The production team logged 950 hours on
a Cray C-90 supercomputer just to run the simulation of the colliding
galaxies. Storing the data presented a whole new problem: "We started
stuffing disks with data into empty spaces in closets," Cox says with a
laugh.
Data Deluge
When the thousands of frames of simulation-based computer animation
were finally completed for Cosmic Voyage , they had to be sent from
the NCSA in Illinois to Santa Barbara Studios in California for film
reading. Founded by Cosmic Voyage visual-effects supervisor John
Grower, who oversaw the film's remaining 10 minutes or so of computer
animation, Santa Barbara Studios had to translate the data to the IMAX
film format. Although the production team had employed the Internet
extensively to trade data back and forth while finalizing the images, the
amount of data to be filmed was so massive that it would have brought the
Internet to its knees, Cox says. The disks had to be loaded in special
anvil cases, similar to the ones musicians use for their instruments, and
shipped air cargo. As fate would have it, the airline lost some of the
precious cases on the return trip (Cox eventually tracked them down in an
airport hangar), and for safety's sake, Cox hand-carried the disks on the
next trip to Santa Barbara Studios--even booking an extra airplane seat
for them.
The gigabytes of data have created more than pretty pictures on a
giant screen. "Some of the scientists have told me that we're finding new
science here because of the resolution," Cox reports. "They were actually
quite surprised at some of the things they saw."
"What we're hearing from people is that Cosmic Voyage is a
spectacular science-education film," Silleck says. "It'll bring more kids
into science, and that's one of my goals, especially inner-city
kids....If we can get them excited about science, they'll be able to
overcome their obstacles."
Narrated by acclaimed actor Morgan Freeman, Cosmic Voyage will
reach IMAX theaters around the country in the coming months, after an
exclusive engagement at the National Air and Space Museum as part of the
celebration surrounding the 150th anniversary of the Smithsonian.
