Posted by David Dobbs on February 2, 2007 Now we know what Harvard’s doing with all that money.
Here’s an amazing look at the state of the art in biological illustration and animation: a sort of cell’s inner life, with extremely high production values. Takes a few seconds to load on broadband; don’t think I’d try it with dial-up.
But this is some serious eye candy. Wish I knew what half the stuff was.
Did you see the special, “Multiples” on, I think it was The Learning Channel, a couple weeks ago? Great stuff. I’d love to see the point in the production process where the scientific content advisor turns to the animator and says, “Hey, try to make this cell a deeper, more sky blue,” and, “How about we set it to this little keyboard number I’ve come up with.”
‘The Inner Life of the Cell’ clip is amazing. Equally amazing is that the state of digital animation is now so advanced that merely three people (the two scientific advisors and the one animator credited at the end of the clip) can create such a detailed and visually stunning piece of animation. I mean, granted, the clip’s not the longest in the world, and they ARE from Harvard, but it wasn’t too long ago that George Lucas needed 1000+ staff members and a multi million dollar budget to get a picture of a clay model to move jerkily across a star-strewn backdrop. Now Harvard’s all sub-atomic and shit.
It also wasn’t too long ago (five years) that I graduated from a high school where the most current set of encyclopedias on campus had a brief description of the USSR and absolutely no entry for AIDS. These Harvard boys sure got the jump on me: wish I had just stayed home and watch Discovery Channel instead of going to school.
This is interesting, i can’t believe that Harvard is spending its money like this.
February 5, 2007
February 22, 2007