Motion Picture Sciences « Making the Movie

21Feb/060

Motion Picture Sciences

The other half of the Oscar equation occurred yesterday, the Scientific and Technical ceremony, hosted by Rachel McAdams:

Some of the winners were honored for work developed decades ago. Demetri Terzopoulos and John Platt shared a 2006 Academy Award for pioneering computer-generated techniques to simulate cloth in motion pictures: how a garment folds, a sheet tears, or a flag might billow in the breeze.

Their winning research was published 20 years ago. Terzopoulos says he and Platt have since shifted focus to an even more complex scientific challenge.

"We're working on modeling the human brain, so we can develop artificially intelligent virtual actors," Terzopoulos told Wired News.

Thirty years ago, talk of autonomous software actors would have sounded more far-fetched. But in the mid-1970s, another new moviemaking technology was introduced -- the Steadicam, whose inventor Garrett Brown was honored at this years' tech Oscars.

Rocky was one of the first films to use Brown's camera-stabilizing device in 1976. In the years that followed, Brown went on to develop a flying camera system called Skycam, for which he received a 2006 Academy Award.

The 25-pound Osborne Computer Brown used to control prototype Skycams in the 1980s was touted as the world's first portable computer.

"It seems prehistoric now," Brown told Wired News. "The electronic toothbrush I use has more smarts than an Osborne -- we used it to talk over cables to motors at a speed of around 1200 baud. You could run around those motors faster."

--Wired News