File:Telling NASA's Tales With Hollywood's Tool - Washington Post pg1 (2345088245).jpg

Space Center Uses Pixar's Palette To Artfully Explain Scientific Data By Michael S. Rosenwald Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 21, 2006; D01

[We are lucky to be working with world class data visualizers and animators. This article in the Washington Post is one of the best print stories I've seen on the folks who are on the front lines of translating our science and making it accessible to our many audiences.] www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/20/...

Every once in a while when a new movie with mind-blowing special effects or oh-my-gosh-it-looked-so-real animation opens, a nondescript office at NASA Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt will mysteriously empty of employees during matinee hours.

Before an investigation is launched into the whereabouts of these workers -- particularly, say, around last year's opening of "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" -- understand that they are not blowing off work. The absentee employees are animators, NASA staffers and contractors who use the same software Pixar Animation Studios uses to tell stories about talking cars to instead tell stories about the Earth. They just want to see what their counterparts in Hollywood have been up to.

There is the occasional did-you-see-that elbow nudge, but in their case it's about craft, not cinematic delight, said Horace Mitchell, project manager at the space center's scientific visualization studio. Mitchell is a NASA employee, but the studio is staffed primarily by animators working for Global Science & Technology Inc., a government contractor in Greenbelt. The company uses the Hollywood software, including Pixar's RenderMan and Autodesk Inc.'s Maya, to translate complicated data into animated movies that illustrate what is happening in and around Earth. The videos often end up on the evening news.

The crucial difference in NASA's use of the software is that Hollywood uses it to spin inspiring, happy-ending stories about love and courage and friendship and hope, while the animators in Greenbelt are often telling stories about bad things happening in the atmosphere, such as last year's hurricane season. In their chilling short film "27 Storms: Arlene to Zeta," set to Vincenzo Bellini's eerie music, viewers can watch the ocean heat up, helping fuel one storm after another -- thanks to the same Pixar software used in the upcoming version of "Charlotte's Web."

NASA oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman frequently collaborates with the Global Science studio. He studies the ocean from space.

"Visualization is that link between the flood of data coming down from space and the ability of the human mind to interpret it," Feldman said. "That's the crux of the story. Better than most other groups in the world, they are able to take this fire hose of data coming down and turn it into images -- visual animation -- that then allows the general public to see this data in ways their brains can interpret and study."

The Hollywoodization of NASA data is in part the result of Pixar's success in creating real-life worlds from fantasy stories. People have come to expect that even the most fantastical of ideas -- a talking, curmudgeonly Mr. Potato Head -- can look and feel exceedingly real. "They don't expect to see crudity," Mitchell said. "They expect to see sophistication because they see it everywhere. In order for us to tell the story, we have to be sophisticated about telling stories and we have to use sophisticated technology to tell them."

Pixar was spun off from George Lucas's film company, and its early days were spent selling animation software and hardware -- a way to pay the bills until computer technology caught up with the firm's vision of making the incredibly life-like films that it produces today.

Today, anyone can purchase versions of RenderMan online, for $995 to $3,500.

Global Science, a private company that employs about 250 people, is definitely not a movie studio. It was founded in 1991 by Chieh-san Cheng, a former employee of an aerospace and technology company with advanced degrees in technical management and meteorology. Global Science provides services in applied science and research, geospatial standards, engineering services, and information technology. The firm's contract with NASA is a small part of its business, contributing about $650,000 a year to about $45 million in revenue.

Global Science and Pixar know about each other, but interaction between the staffs is generally limited to animation conferences and trade shows. But the Global Science staff does feel a strong bond with Pixar, particularly when watching one of its movies.

Jim Williams, a Global Science animator, said, "I'll go into it thinking I'm going to look at the technical stuff and then I'll get completely sucked into the story."

This happened during Pixar's recent hit, "Cars."

"I'm watching it, I'm totally into the story, and they get to the end and they go into that stadium, and there's tens of thousands of cars in there and I drop out of the story and think, 'Wow, that must have been a pain in the butt to get that right.' And then I'm back into the story," he said.

The difference between the storylines is that Pixar is trying to get laughing cars right and Global Science is trying to get the atmosphere right. The way in which Global Science uses RenderMan is not easy. Here's one way of looking at it: This article has been typed on a word processor. The computer received the data -- in this case, they looked like letters -- and displayed them on a screen. The lines were long, containing dozens of words. Those words needed to appear in the newspaper, and to do that a graphic designer used another program to render and squeeze the words into narrow columns of newsprint, with black type, a font, and italics , and so forth so the words appear in the paper as they do now. That's essentially what RenderMan does for data -- whether it be information about Buzz Lightyear's appearance or atmospheric models of hurricanes. RenderMan is the mechanism by which data are translated. Another program, Maya, acts as the word processor.

Global Science translates scientific data this way. Recently, one of its animators sat behind a computer monitor in a dark room with an image that could have appeared as a backdrop in a Van Gogh painting. But it was a depiction of aerosols moving across the atmosphere, a way of illustrating air quality. Yellow represented dust, the green was sulfates produced by humans, the blue was sea salt. Altogether, it was sort of beautiful but apparently not good news for the atmosphere.

Like their Hollywood counterparts, the Global Science animators typically refer to their finished products as releases, but the scripts are composed of data and the script writers are some of the world's most brilliant scientists. The creative process generally works like this: A scientist or a public affairs officer will ask the animators to illustrate a concept or data set. It can be as simple as ocean temperatures or as complicated as a collection of satellite images. A discussion with the scientific team and public affairs officer ensues over the best way to illustrate the data, and the animators get to work.

Feldman, the NASA oceanographer, studies oceans from space because, as he said: "Oceans are really, really, really big and they change very, very quickly. You can't track that from a ship. What a satellite sees in a minute would take a ship a decade." Feldman is particularly interested in the relationship between the changing environment and ocean life, which he pursues by studying the first level of life in the ocean, or microscopic plants, through ocean color.

The only problem is that satellites collect a very large amount of complicated data. The visualization studio helps him make sense of it. Feldman has made animations of what happened to the ocean during the transition between El Niño and La Niña -- "it was the biggest phytoplankton bloom in the world ever observed," he said. He has animated Lake Michigan's microscopic plant blooms and a dust storm the size of Spain that blew across the ocean in the past few years. He has animated autumn in Boston, which roughly translates into, as he put it, "how life follows the sun."

If Cheng, chief executive of Global Science, has his way, NASA scientists wouldn't be the only people relying on his firm's handling of Hollywood software to explain complicated subjects. Cheng would like to use the software to better explain the human body to doctors. He said the company is finalizing plans for a medical-imaging division and is exploring the possibility of a partnership with Maryland universities.

"What we could do is use movie techniques to give the doctor and medical staff more dynamic and accurate images to make a diagnosis," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company