CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

When most people think of animation, they probably think of cartoons — a rabbit outsmarting a loud-mouthed prospector or a coyote trying to drop an anvil on a bird. But at the Redstick International Animation Festival on Wednesday, the focus was on science. And animation meant something more akin to how Merriam-Webster defines it: the act of creating “apparently spontaneous lifelike movement.” While there were screenings of cartoons and animated films, the first of the five-day festival primarily consisted of lectures from some of the leading experts in medical and scientific animation, scientific visualization and animatronics. Most people, however, have seen their work at their local movie theater, on the Discovery Channel or on a trip to Disney World. Steve Gatesy, considered one of the world's leading authorities on the evolution of locomotion in dinosaurs and birds, talked about how he used animation to figure out, as best as we can, how creatures that lived millions of years ago moved. After showing what would pass for many as a perfectly serviceable representation of how a Tyranosaurus Rex's leg would move, he pointed out that as far as science is concerned, it's not quite good enough. “It's fun to make things move,” he said. “I love it, too. But we can't really call it science.” He then proceeded to run through the process of whittling down all the possible positions achievable by a three-jointed leg from a starting point of six million positions. He also showed how he has used fossilized dinosaur tracks, the study of how a turkey makes footprints in the mud and the movement of crocodiles to create animation that depicts how dinosaurs likely moved. Gatesy, according to the bio provided by festival organizers, has set “the standard for new uses of imaging software for the generation of evolutionary hypotheses.” Similarly, Sony's Walt Hyneman talked about the work that has helped make him a pioneer in developing human imaging systems that surpass those in the medical industry, as well as his work in “Hollow Man,” the envelope-pushing science fiction film starring Kevin Bacon. Werner Berger of LSU's Center for Computation and Technology, which founded the annual animation festival two years ago, did a presentation on how he has used animation to represent elements of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He showed the audience his pioneering work in visualizing what it looks like when two black holes collide and how gravity bends space. David Bolinsky, once Yale University's chief medical illustrator and founder of the medical imaging company Xvivo, talked about the creation of his company's movie “The Inner Life of a Cell.” The eight-minute piece won critical acclaim among computer animators and those in the scientific visualization community. He talked about being approached by Harvard University to come up with a way to change the way biology is taught, something the university felt necessary for a more visual generation. But Bolinsky also talked about how he became who he is, professionally. He said he first decided to become an animator after seeing the Disney movie “Fantasia,” and decided a few years later that he would do so using computers after reading in a science fiction novel that one day computers would be used to illustrate the human form. He decided this, he noted, despite the fact that all he knew of computers was the primitive video game “Pong.” Asked after the presentation about his mention of the moment he decided to quit his job and start Xvivo — a company that would go on to do work for pharmaceutical giants and museums — he said, “It's essential that you don't listen to people who's imagination can't encompass what it is that you want to do. They're saying, ‘I can't see myself doing it, so I can't see you doing it.'” He added, however, that it took many 100-hour workweeks and a host of talented people around him. Festival attendees Rhitt Growl and Brian Gough approached Bolinsky after his presentation. They asked him about what lessons his work in using animation to recreate life at the cellular level could be applied to something they've been trying to do at the Satellite School in Luling. That's where Growl teaches digital media and Gough teaches Web design. They've been charged with figuring out a way to use animation to teach Louisiana history and said their chance meeting at the festival could help them do so. It was an example of the festival's organizers' hope of creating yet another kind of animation: convincing people to get into the hard science that goes into creating animation. Blake Landry and Dane Caro are two University of Louisiana at Lafayette students who attended a lecture by Doug Griffith, the animatronics wizard whose work has been seen by almost anyone who has gone to Disney World. Landry and Caro, both 23, are studying computer animation and ultimately see themselves working in the business of creating video games. They'd like to get a summer intership at Baton Rouge video game developer Nrgyze. Landry asked Griffith several questions about his work at Disney and found there was much in common theoretically between computer animation to animatronics. He said he never would have considered the two as linked as they were. “It opened my eyes that an animator can do so much more than just what's on the screen,” he said. “I never thought about it that way.”