Computer Graphics World

April 2009 45 Education n n n n "ey contain movement and are so rich with gesture that you wouldn't know how he would have approached the movement itself," Berezina-Blackburn says. "is proj- ect offered students the chance to deal with a unique subject. It is not the typical photoreal- istic 3D animation process they are used to." Setting the Tone Another unique challenge the artists had to face was the music—in particular, animat- ing the dogs to the music. As Palazzi points outs, each drawing did not necessarily have a full-length story written for it. So, the stu- dent artists interpreted a single drawing and came up with a story line for it. "e music allowed us to imagine a story," she adds. In fact, that is what the composer had done when writing the music, though he only used a single drawing for his inspiration. "We listened to the music and imagined what was happening during the pieces," Palazzi says. "at inspired different types of designs for objects and movement. e animation fused together what urber and the composer were expressing." Conceptually, the group was working with music that would be performed live, so there was no way to perfectly synchro- nize the animation to the music. "You would think that classical music is per- formed with great precision, but some- times the music would fall behind during the performance, and then get ahead, but it always ended perfectly," says Berezina- Blackburn. "So, we were not trying to match a specific 'Bam!' with a visual splash. We had to make a semi-loose structure for the animation." Had the group been given more time, Berezina-Blackburn says she would have liked to have stylized the dog movements even more, and added more stylized defor- mation to the body in motion. "Looking at the drawings, when a dog is jumping for- ward, the limbs are sort of curling backward, doing something not anatomically possible. We didn't quite go there because we didn't have the time to figure it out," she says. Nonetheless, Berezina-Blackburn found the project fun and different. "We wanted things to be simple, because that is the quality of his work. But with 3D, you have to make it more complicated than it ap- pears," she adds. "One lesson we will take with us is how to streamline our own work. You don't always need to make something function like a real object." Often, it's the more simple things that are the most treasured. And perhaps that is why urber's work was so captivating. n Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World. Extracurricular Activities When Charles Csuri founded the Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG) at Ohio State University (OSU) in the early 1970s, his goal was to realize the potential of computer animation across a number of disciplines, offering the op- portunity for scientists and artists to collaborate on projects. "He believed that both sides (the arts and sciences) needed each other if CG was going to come into being," explains ACCAD director Maria Palazzi. CGRG eventually evolved into ACCAD, but the spirit of uniting the disciplines remains today. And the cooperative nature of the program extends to the outside, too, as ACCAD offers students a chance to work in a real production environ- ment. And with the Thurber project, it became a perfect opportunity to link current OSU students with a famed past student: Thurber. For former OSU student Beth Albright, working on an outside project such as Thurber's Dogs augmented lessons learned in the classroom. "We had several production-based classes where you are in a class environment working on a class assignment. But a class like this [independent studies class], where you are doing a production with others, really does emulate the work environment where you work alongside others, have deadlines, restrictions, and specifications, must meet the outside client's needs, and have to find a way to get it all done," she says. "Sometimes you have to give up your personal aesthetic and goals to ac- complish the aesthetic and goals of the group and the project as a whole." And that is not a lesson that is usually taught in the classroom. Albright notes that for Thurber's Dogs, the team had to complete the work in 10 weeks, teaching them the value of a deadline. "You can't not get it done," she adds. "It was going on stage on a certain date." The project also offered the chance to learn and grow by giving the team a chance to try different roles and new things. Iuri Lioi, another student, also found the project experience invaluable. He was completing a thesis on the process of creating an animation, from design to final product. "I was studying that on my own and writing the thesis, but for the first time I was able to see and experience the whole process," he adds, "analyzing how big the project was, assigning tasks, coordinating, communicating, organiz- ing…things we never had an opportunity to do in class. We talked about it and studied it, but there was no chance to put those things into practice." Lioi says he will take the practical knowledge he gained on Thurber's Dogs with him when, this summer, he begins his job at DreamWorks, where he in- terned last summer. –Karen Moltenbrey

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