Growing Demand for Computer Animators Spurs a New Program at U. of Washington

By PETER MONAGHAN

Indeed, computer animation is now so heavily used that the entertainment and advertising industries need all the able bodies they can get. With demand for computer animators soaring, colleges' traditional animation programs can't turn out graduates fast enough.

David H. Salesin, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington here, saw where computer animation was headed in the 1980s, while he was working at Lucasfilm and Pixar, two of the industry's giants. Three years ago, he started a two-quarter, interdisciplinary course in computer animation, working with colleagues from his days in the animation industry and with faculty members in the university's schools of art and music. Silicon Graphics and other technology companies equipped a state-of-the-art multimedia laboratory.

The course covers the basics of computer animation, including script writing, art design, editing, character development, set modeling, shading, motion, lighting, rendering, and sound. Professional animation artists come up regularly from California to lecture.

Thirteen students recently completed the latest offering of the course. Most of them are computer-science or art majors, but others are majoring in music, architecture, or other disciplines. During their first quarter, the students worked on the building blocks of computer animation, familiarizing themselves with commonly used programs like Alias/Wavefront and Power Animator, both made by Wavefront, a Silicon Graphics subsidiary. In the second quarter, class members worked in teams to cobble well over two gigabytes of data into a two-minute film about the misadventures and eventual triumph of a confused chameleon named Leon.

The students began the film project by pitching story ideas to one another, trying to decide which was the most plausible to attempt with limited time and resources. In the story they settled on this past quarter, Leon is failing in chameleon school because he cannot properly change colors to protect himself -- instead of blending in with green leaves when a raptor flies overhead, he turns himself bright orange. Fleeing the predatory bird, he spots a bright-orange object below him, leaps for it, and lands on what turns out to be a school bus en route to a city. There he encounters an artist who is fascinated by the way Leon displays weird colors and patterns. The artist uses Leon as a motif, and together the pair become famous.

The amount of work that goes into even so simple an animated film is enormous, so that every student had to work on several teams at once. "The labor is incredible to produce each shot," says one student, Daniel Johnson. "Each frame takes time to render." Three teaching assistants were on hand to help with computer programs and offer advice.

Once the story was agreed on, some students sketched out a storyboard -- a series of captioned illustrations that summarize the story -- while others discussed the project's overall "look." Another team began setting up the animation programs to produce that look. Yet another began creating the necessary characters, objects, and scenery. Only the storyboards required much real drawing, however. For the film itself, images of objects -- leaves, for example -- were digitized and entered into the animation software using a standard flat-bed scanner.

Another step -- modeling the characters -- entailed creating digital skeletons that defined the limits of how far and how fast joints and limbs would move. The movements had to be able to complete the actions, and suggest the emotions, that the story line called for.

A layout team began moving digitized shapes around to determine, for example, how characters would relate to scenery. Other students worked on the texture of images -- on Leon's skin, for example, as well as on the skin of other chameleons and of the artist who befriends Leon. The class also had to determine how much to strive for photographic realism and how much to aim for the look of a cartoon.

Mood was important, of course, so a lighting team took computer files of moving images and added light and shadow to them -- again, using nothing more than computer programs to achieve the effect. Meanwhile, students working as motion animators played back segments of the evolving film in low resolution, without shading or coloring, to see whether characters moved naturally. The motion animators constructed key frames, working out important poses that conveyed certain actions or emotions, such as Leon's look when he hits the city sidewalk after leaping off the bus: His limbs are limp, and his body is slightly compressed, but then he picks himself up and looks around. Once the key frames were set, in-between frames were completed by the computer programs, and were tweaked by a student designer as needed.

Music students in the class added musical accompaniment and sound effects in synch with key events and moods in the animation. Finally the whole production was transferred to tape.

Describing the process makes it sound orderly. But as the quarter progressed and the deadline approached, students and teaching assistants spent countless hours in the computer lab -- even though the resulting film is only two minutes long. To attempt a project any more ambitious, an animation-design team would need deep pockets and much more time, says Cassidy J. Curtis, the course's instructor. "Here, we concern ourselves with a sort of triage. You're never expecting to do it perfectly. We try to eliminate all the things that aren't important."

In any event, Mr. Curtis says, the animation field has few practitioners of true photo-realism. It might be used in high-end films, such as Titanic. But it requires enormous energy, time, and resources, so striving for realism would not be an efficient use of students' limited time in a two-quarter course, he says. "Their project focuses on putting enough realism in there that it's not distracting."

The course's brevity is unusual: Computer-animation training usually takes place in highly specialized four-year courses. Some of the better-known programs include those at the Ringling School of Art and Design, in Florida, and at the California Institute of the Arts, where animation courses have long histories and are given substantial resources. Their graduates are heavily recruited by entertainment and advertising companies.

But in the course here at Washington, "the most important thing we can do in 20 weeks is to show them what the skills are they need to learn," says Mr. Curtis, who spent two years as a technical director at Pacific Data Images, a leading animation studio based in Palo Alto, Cal. "Twenty weeks is not enough for mastery, unless a student is exceptionally talented."

Even so, he adds, "students are generating top-notch work in a short amount of time."

To make the best use of that time, Mr. Salesin and his colleagues created a course that imitates professional studios' team-based approach, in which one person's strengths compensate for another's weaknesses. In a typical animation-training program, by contrast, students work alone on individual projects.

In the industry, says Mr. Curtis, no one works alone. "We try to give them that experience, or at least a simulation of that experience, so they're not so surprised when they go out to work." He says the course aims to teach students to be "clear and expressive" with computer-animation tools.

Because the course is offered at a university rather than an art school, the instructors have broadened it to teach more than just the technical aspects of the craft. Says Mr. Salesin: "We talk about principles that have been around for decades, so that when the next software package comes along, it won't be a big deal to use it." Students may learn less about current technology than do graduates of four-year programs, he says, "but maybe they'll be better-prepared for the long run."

In any case, the specialized programs at other universities have been unable to keep up with the growth of the industry, which Mr. Salesin says is now doubling in size every several years. Mr. Curtis notes that help-wanted advertisements often seek animators with seven or more years' experience. "Seven years ago, there weren't enough people doing this that they'd now have that much experience," he says.

Since the early 1980s, three-dimensional computer animation has swiftly progressed from rudimentary images to landmark, full-length feature films like 1995's Toy Story, an animated movie generated completely on computers. It established the current benchmark.

The 1988 animated hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit? had earlier combined computer-generated images with live-action footage, leaving the distinction between real and animated images apparent. By contrast, the 1995 animated feature Babe blurred that distinction, so that viewers could not tell what was real and what was animated.

With studios like Lucasfilm and Pixar in the lead, many film-production and advertising companies are rushing to put the latest technologies to commercial use, and several students who took the course here have already gone on to top animation companies.

Brad West, who completed the animation course here and is now working on Toy Story 2 for Pixar, praises the team approach. "You can't understand the real production process without a team project," he says. "In production, it's rare that one person does it all in terms of building models, shading scenes, animating characters, and lighting shots. So to achieve the necessary level of quality and consistency, there's a great number of interdependencies fundamental to the production pipeline."

Jobs at film studios aren't the only ones that students here aspire to. Some are interested in creating computer games, for instance, or in using animation in architecture.

Susan Tanney enrolled in the animation course, she says, to pursue her interests in architecture and psychology. Like animation, she explains, "a lot of architecture is about psychology and the way people interpret space." Ms. Tanney is also working part-time at the university's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, where she helps to develop virtual-reality programs that permit even more graphic illustration of human environments than animations can summon up. Have a house designed nowadays, she says, and you might get to visit it, in three-dimensional animation or even virtual reality, before the first earthmover arrives on the site.

Students like Ms. Tanney aren't the only ones eager to push animation further. Both Mr. Curtis and Mr. Salesin say working on the course here gives them opportunities to think about, develop, and put into practice their research on animation techniques.

Mr. Salesin, for instance, is studying ways of rendering that are realistic but not overtly photographic, creating a painterly style. "That's a nice way to tell stories," he says. "By having things be less precise, you have more room for viewers to insert their own associations." He is also working to improve animated renderings of human faces to achieve more-convincing expressions.

"This is much more exciting than teaching a regular computer-graphics class," adds Mr. Curtis, "because of the creative and human side. You have a dozen or more students all negotiating intellectually and emotionally the process of creating a film. It's wonderful to see the process happening, especially when it really works."

• A two-minute animated film, "The Art of Survival," created by students at the University of Washington. Real Video 28.8 (length, 2:44)