In 1997, Kevin Mack and I were comissioned to create the
closing animation for the L.A. SIGGraph's Electronic Theatre. The
piece we came up with, "Annihilation Becomes Creation through a Stretch
of the Imagination", was an exploration of a volume rendering technique
we developed, and of various methodologies we devised to transform radically
different visual spaces smoothly from one to the next. These are
some stills extracted from the 66 second filmic piece. We designed
the techniques together, and then I implemented a toolset which Kevin used
to find visual spaces which appealed to his aesthetic. These selected,
I developed transitions between the spaces, and rendered the frames.
Being an unoptimized system, there was a total of about a year's CPU time
to render these frames, and I babysat the render for fourteen days solidly.
Wall of Fire: The piece opens on black, which explodes.
Flying stuff: From the blast are thrown items representative
of the history of computer animation.
Pure Psychedelia: The stuff fades to Aurora Borealis,
and then to pure acid trip colour funky.
Volume Crossfade: From destruction, through imagination
to a new world of floating islands.
Skywhales: Creation manifest - a new world of beauty
and novelty.