Graduate students in the Texas A&M Department of Visualization’s 2008 summer production class, which was taught by visualization lecturer Jill Mulholland and visiting instructors from DreamWorks Animation, beat a tight schedule and a sharp learning curve to create three videos that brought robots to life.
The 30-second student short films so impressed DreamWorks that the studio, makers of animated blockbusters “Shrek,” “Kung Fu Panda,” and “Madagascar,” premiered the work at their educators forum during SIGGRAPH, the world’s premier computer graphics and interactive techniques conference, held last August at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“Not only did they master the technical parts of this, but with help from each of the experts, they made the videos quite beautiful. They blew DreamWorks right out of the water,” said Mulholland, who served as a sort of producer for the class, keeping students aware of the many deadlines and responsibilities that faced them.
“It’s a killer class,” she said. “It’s pretty impossible, what they did in 11 weeks.”
Each of the three groups of five students in the class, VIZA 627, were tasked with making a fully computer graphics-generated short film within parameters determined by DreamWorks computer graphics supervisor Dave Walvoord, who led his portion of the studio with Tim McLaughlin, head of the visualization department, and Mulholland.
Walvoord, a former Aggie Vizzer, earned a Master of Science in Visualization Science degree in 1996. He supervised the computer graphics in last summer’s blockbuster “Kung Fu Panda,” and has animated other DreamWorks hits like “Over the Hedge” and “Shark Tale.” He is also a member of the College of Architecture’s Dean’s Advisory Council.
Walvoord asked the students to place the robot on a conveyor belt where they get sprayed with something wet, something electrical, and something smoky to give the students a chance create different types of animated effects.
“We chose a robot because metal is a lot easier to do than skin,” said Mulholland. It was the only break the students would get all summer long.
Each week, a different computer graphics artist from DreamWorks came to help the students with different aspects of the animation workflow such as rigging, in which a character’s “bones” are drawn; surfacing, where a character’s surface and texture are created; and animation, where the movie’s creators make the characters move.
“For each of those processes, they had to learn one, and sometimes multiple, computer programs, and they had to write the code for it, which is really hard to do,” said Mulholland.
In the videos, the pings, whooshes, bangs and booms of the robot factory are heard in crisp, detailed 5.1 surround audio — but audio wasn’t even part of the project’s requirements.
“I told them they didn’t have to do sound, and they did it anyway,” said Mulholland. “It’s an example of the dedication and the high quality of the work the class performed.”
She said Valvoord’s contributions were key to the class’ success. In addition to helping come up with the video concept, he checked students’ progress through each of the class’ 11 weeks.
“Hard work, determination and great attitudes can produces stellar results,” said Mulholland. “They worked their tails off, and the results are amazing.”
The videos are available for viewing on the Department of Visualization’s website.
Video 1 - Team foo
Video 2 - Team WTF
Video 3 - Team Fort
