https://scienceblogs.com/ en https://scienceblogs.com/sb-admin/2026/06/09/world-cup-monte-carlo-says-winner-will-be-151473 <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:41:26 +0000 sb admin 151473 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/sb-admin/2024/02/01/crowdsourced-geospatial-data-will-mean-seismic-shift-151462 <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Fri, 02 Feb 2024 03:10:51 +0000 sb admin 151462 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/sb-admin/2020/02/10/first-artificial-enzyme-two-non-biological-groups-created-151440 <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Mon, 10 Feb 2020 18:34:27 +0000 sb admin 151440 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/sb-admin/2020/01/29/ai-will-revolutionize-dna-evidence-once-we-can-trust-results-151428 <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Wed, 29 Jan 2020 18:23:20 +0000 sb admin 151428 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2017/10/18/the-hubble-space-telescope-is-falling-synopsis <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Wed, 18 Oct 2017 05:09:00 +0000 esiegel 37136 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2017/10/13/5-nasa-photos-that-changed-the-world-synopsis <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Fri, 13 Oct 2017 05:00:50 +0000 esiegel 37130 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2017/10/01/double-comments-of-the-week-178-from-point-particles-to-the-very-first-galaxies-of-all <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Sun, 01 Oct 2017 05:48:31 +0000 esiegel 37117 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2017/09/30/ask-ethan-why-dont-we-build-a-telescope-without-mirrors-or-lenses-synopsis <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Sat, 30 Sep 2017 05:06:44 +0000 esiegel 37116 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/digitalbio/2017/09/29/what-is-biotech <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Fri, 29 Sep 2017 20:51:40 +0000 finchtalk 69987 at https://scienceblogs.com https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2017/09/26/future-farms-will-be-run-by-robots <span>SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JEFF KLEISER</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><div id=":xr"> <div id=":sj"> <div> <p><strong>By Stacy Jannis</strong></p> <p><em><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">T</a></em><i><a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html" target="_blank">he Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest&nbsp;</a>challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.&nbsp;<strong>Follow&nbsp;#SciInSciFi on twitter &nbsp;for contest updates</strong>.</i></p> <p><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/files/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-2185" alt="Jeff Kleiser" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Jeff-Kleiser-300x280.jpg" width="180" height="168" loading="lazy"></a><i><strong>Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser</strong>&nbsp;is president and co-founder of the visual effects studio&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">Synthespian Studios</a>. His pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. He has contributed to films with groundbreaking visual effects including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/" target="_blank"><em>Tron</em></a>,<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111282/" target="_blank"><em>&nbsp;Stargate</em></a>,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/" target="_blank">Judge Dredd</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119707/" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat Annihilation</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120903/" target="_blank">X-Men</a>,</em>&nbsp;and<em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290334/" target="_blank">&nbsp;X2</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/" target="_blank">X-Men, the Last Stand</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/" target="_blank">The One</a>, &nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204313/" target="_blank">Exorcist The Beginning</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362165/" target="_blank">Son of the Mask</a>&nbsp;,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/" target="_blank">Fantastic Four</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362120/" target="_blank">Scary Movie 4</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1562871/" target="_blank">&nbsp;Ra One</a></em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/" target="_blank"><em>Robocop</em></a>.&nbsp;Kleiser&nbsp;serves on the board of the Visual Effects Society, the Williamstown Film Festival, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.</i></p> <p><i></i><strong>When did you first become interested in visual effects and computer&nbsp;animation?</strong></p> <div> <div>I was a computer science major at Colgate University in 1972, and one&nbsp;of the requirements was that we take a computer course. I was lucky in that&nbsp;Colgate offered the first Computer-Generated Music course offered in the US &nbsp;(which Dexter Morrill acquired from the late Stanford professor Leland</div> <div>Smith). This course piqued my interest in creative computing, and when I was&nbsp;doing a work-study for IBM in Syracuse, I happened to live below a professor&nbsp;making CG films at the Newhouse School of Communications. I eventually&nbsp;became partners in Digital Effects, Inc. in NYC with the professor, Judson&nbsp;Rosebush.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of tools did you first use, and what tools do you use now?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At the beginning we had to write the software from scratch. We had some&nbsp;FORTRAN routines for calculating perspective images and driving a plotter&nbsp;and a CRT for shooting on 35mm film, using an IBM 370/155, and we were&nbsp;writing graphics code in APL, a language long lost in the history of</div> <div>programming.</div> <div></div> <div>These days its Maya/MentalRay/Arnold/<wbr>Renderman/Softimage/Photoshop and a&nbsp;bunch of other tools for tracking and compositing like Nuke.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What kind of skills do you need to excel in this field?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>It's that combination of art and science that make CG people so&nbsp;interesting. It's what drew me to SIGGRAPH beginning in 1977...people who&nbsp;embrace both art and technology, typically very bright, well-educated,&nbsp;artistically and musically talented, and usually with a great sense of&nbsp;humor.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How does an understanding of&nbsp; science enter into the visual effects&nbsp;design process?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>If we are calculating pixel values to create a scene, one needs to at&nbsp;least appreciate the physics of light and color to design visual effects.&nbsp;Also, we frequently simulate real-world physics in terms of fluids, smoke,&nbsp;fire, cloth, explosions, skin, muscles, facial expressions, and just about&nbsp;anything and everything you've ever seen.</div> <div></div> <div>SEE AN EXAMPLE OF&nbsp;JEFF&nbsp;KLEISER'S VISUAL EFFECTS IN THE &nbsp;SCIENCE FICTION SUPER HERO FILM "RA-ONE".</div> <div><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2200" alt="Ra-One foot assembly" src="http://scienceblogs.com/usasciencefestival/files/2014/02/Ra-One-foot-assembly-300x157.jpg" width="300" height="157" loading="lazy"></a></div> <div> <div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><b><b>In this sequence, electronic "smart cubes" self- assemble to build up an antagonistic video game character in the real world.</b><br> </b></span></div> <div><em>Click on the photo</em></div> <div><span style="color: #0000f0; font-family: Arial;"><b><i><a href="http://youtu.be/fMis7LPZE9M" target="_blank">&nbsp;</a></i></b></span></div> </div> <div> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fMis7LPZE9M?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> </div> </div> </div> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Should science fiction be based in science?&nbsp;</strong></p> <div> <div>What for? If a compelling story can be told without real scientific&nbsp;underpinnings, why shouldn't it be embraced? I personally am more drawn to&nbsp;storylines with their basis in a believable scientific back story, but there&nbsp;are many examples of more free-flowing projects that have been successful.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What have been some of your biggest challenges?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Survival as an independent visual effects company working out of&nbsp;Western Massachusetts. From a technical standpoint, the Spider-man Ride for&nbsp;Universal required us to pre-distort stereoscopic dome footage to compensate&nbsp;for the moving audience (traveling on a moving motionbase simulator on a&nbsp;track). That was some hairy math that was solved by our longtime tech buddy,&nbsp;Frank Vitz, whom I met at Robert Abel and Associates in 1985.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Do you have a particular favorite visual effects scene?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>The opening of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments knocked me out and&nbsp;inspired me to make effects in films.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Tell us about&nbsp; virtual humans, digital human models, and synthespians.</strong></div> <div></div> <div>At my first company, Digital Effects, we had experimented with a crude&nbsp;form of motion capture in which we shot an actor with ping-pong balls&nbsp;attached to a leotard in 35mm film, then projected each frame down onto a&nbsp;platen on an animation stand and traced the position of the balls onto paper&nbsp;cels. These cels were then digitized on a tablet to acquire 2D points of the&nbsp;moving 3D image. We connected those points with a simulation of electric&nbsp;bolts to create a moving "electric man" animation as a test for a feature&nbsp;film that never made it into production. We dabbled in character animation&nbsp;after that, until I met Diana Walzcak at SIGGRAPH '85 in San Francisco, who&nbsp;was a sculptor interested in CG.</div> <div></div> <div>Working at Omnibus in LA, Diana and I&nbsp;created Nestor Sextone, our first Synthespian, and our first film, "Sextone&nbsp;for President" was shown at SIGGRAPH '86 in Boston. This film featured a&nbsp;character created as a series of clay sculptures by Diana that we digitized&nbsp;and reordered for interpolation using a program written by our old friend&nbsp;and Poser creator, Larry Weinberg. We followed that up with "Don't Touch Me"&nbsp;featuring motion capture by Motion Analysis of a female synthespian singing&nbsp;and dancing to an original song. Later, we created a CG Mystique character&nbsp;to match Rebecca Romjin's makeup as Mystique in the X-men Trilogy, and&nbsp;created all the transformations from Mystique into other characters. Also,&nbsp;we used a cyberscan of Bruce Willis and motion tracking of his performance&nbsp;to make him appear 30 years younger in "Surrogates".</div> <div></div> <div><strong>How do you see these technologies being applied in the near future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Since we can now render photorealistic humans, more and more stunt work&nbsp;will be accomplished with the aid of synthetic characters, and creating&nbsp;characters that look many years younger than the actor will become&nbsp;commonplace. Actors from the past will be exhumed and cast in new roles,&nbsp;accompanied by the inevitable moral, legal, and ethical chaos that will&nbsp;follow.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What inspires you in your work?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>I am thrilled to see a project into which I have dedicated a lot of&nbsp;time released to the general public with good reviews and appreciation.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What is your vision for movies and movie technology in the future?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Gaming will likely continue to grow as an entertainment medium,&nbsp;particularly with the coming ubiquity of immersive display equipment like&nbsp;the Oculus Rift, and retinal projection. An unfortunate downside of this&nbsp;will be the tendency toward isolated experience inside a heads-up display&nbsp;and away from the common experience we share as an audience in a theater.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>What advice can you give aspiring visual effects designers and&nbsp;</strong><strong>science fiction movie directors?</strong></div> <div></div> <div>Hold onto your hats, because it will continue to be more and more&nbsp;elaborate and expensive to "wow" the public with great effects. The large&nbsp;companies enjoy a major advantage in that they can afford to maintain large&nbsp;R&amp;D teams that will continue to push the envelope and raise the bar each</div> <div>year. Definitely do NOT recommend starting a small company in the field of&nbsp;visual effects.</div> <div>Good luck to All!</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out&nbsp;Jeff&nbsp;Kleiser's visual effects work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.synthespianstudios.net/" target="_blank">here</a></strong></div> <div></div> <div>Remember there are only four weeks left to enter your video into the Kavli "Science in Fiction" Video Contest! <em><strong>The deadline is March 21, 2014</strong></em>!&nbsp;Enter the contest&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2014-festival/2014-contests/kavli-video-contest-2013-2014.html%0A" target="_blank">here</a></div> <div></div> <div>Does science fiction inspire you? So far, our student entrants have explored the science in robots, light sabers, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, time travel, holography and more.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>Check out &nbsp;video contest entries&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_tzkPTqfBgNNUa6zLoAEaxG_k3Ihjc4" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div></div> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" lang about="https://scienceblogs.com/author/carlyo" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype>carlyo</a></span> <span><time datetime="2014-02-21T11:33:37-05:00" title="Friday, February 21, 2014 - 11:33">Fri, 02/21/2014 - 11:33</time> </span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/kavli-science-video-contest" hreflang="en">Kavli Science Video Contest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/academy-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences" hreflang="en">Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/jeff-kleiser" hreflang="en">Jeff Kleiser</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction" hreflang="en">Science Fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/science-fiction-0" hreflang="en">science in fiction</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/synthespian-studios" hreflang="en">Synthespian Studios</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects" hreflang="en">Visual Effects</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/visual-effects-society" hreflang="en">Visual Effects Society</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/tag/williamstown-film-festival" hreflang="en">Williamstown Film Festival</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="https://scienceblogs.com/channel/physical-sciences" hreflang="en">Physical Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"></li></ul> Tue, 26 Sep 2017 09:45:51 +0000 gregladen 34534 at https://scienceblogs.com