New Dimensions

A state-of-the-art class in computer animation teaches students to blend modern technology with good old human creativity.

"WHY?" THE LONE WORD RINGS OUT across the computer lab again and again, like frogs croaking in a swamp: "Why? Why? Why?"

Computer science research assistant professor Lorie Loeb wends her way around the room, helping her students, following the calls of "Why? Why?"

It isn't that she has the most inquisitive class ever, or the most childish. The voice is coming out of a dozen Macintosh GSS as Loeb's computer animation students manipulate a face on screen to mouth the word "why." The students are too focused to notice each other, but they all silently mouth the word over and over, feeling their lips go from closed to open to closed as they guide a black circle to make the same motion.

This is the lab portion of Loeb's lesson on lip synch. It's an important skill in animation. When voices don't keep time with speakers' mouth movements on screen, the result is irritating to watch. A day earlier Loeb had the students passing around a mirror to watch their lips as they spoke words such as "pebble." The letters P,B and M are the most critical for believable lip synch, they learned, while one by one proclaiming "Mama mia!" to a hand mirror.

By this, the eighth week of the CS13 course, students have come a long way. Their first assignment was to use old-fashioned pen-and-ink techniques to animate a simple line falling through space. For some, the line behaved like string, falling slowly, landing lightly. Other students gave it the physical properties of a pencil, bouncing around as it hit the ground, or like a log hitting with a thud. "I don't want them to get stuck in the technical stuff and fail to realize that animation is in the spacing, the change between each drawing," says Loeb. "It always comes down to that, whether you use a pencil or a computer."

From there, many of the lessons convene in the computer lab. In the next two weeks Loeb teaches how to create, shade, texture, light and animate a 3-D ball. For their weekly projects some animate a bowling ball zooming down an alley. For others it's a billiard ball on a dimly lit pool table or a ping pong ball casting a shadow on a green table as it zooms over the transparent net.

The software the students use isn't some simple training program. They learn on Maya, a state-of-the-art 3-D animation program used to create animated features such as Shrek, The Incredibles and Toy Story, along with special effects for Lord of theRings and the Star Wars prequels. Surgeons, fighter pilots and NASA astronauts train on simulation programs created with the same program. The rule of thumb these days is if it moves on screen and it's not real, it was probably made with Maya.

Loeb, now 48, didn't always use such sophisticated tools. She started out as a classic pen-and-paper animator, drawing for hours hunched over a light box. Her first job out of graduate school was an episode of Captain Kangaroo. It was an auspicious start—the episode won an Emmy. Since then her animation work has included short films, commercials, music videos and even a guest logo for Google. Since 1990 she has combined that hands-on animation with academic research alongside computer scientists on topics including motion capture, the animation technique that brought Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings and created an animated Tom Hanks in Polar Express. She also taught at NYU, the Rhode Island School of Design and Stanford before coming to Dartmouth in 2002.

Framed on her office wall is one of Miss Piggy's lavender gloves, bought at an art auction Loeb organized while at NYU. Curiously, the glove has only four fingers. "Most animated characters have four fingers," says Loeb. "It makes them easier to animate."

Jessica Glago '08 demonstrates why animators crave simplification. Working on her weekly project in the Sudikoff lab, she is trying to make a 3-D character called Package Man walk with four natural-looking steps. Everything about the task is more difficult than it seems. Package Man, a bulbous-headed man wearing sunglasses, briefs and knee socks, is hardly a fancy model, but the mathematics used to create him is well beyond the scope of the course. He, like most of the sophisticated objects the students animate, is free software found on the Web. Glago adjusts and readjusts settings in Maya, but her Package Man still lopes along, herky jerky. If she asks him to move in ways his software deems too unnatural, he'll fall down. She opens up a previously finished assignment where she animated Package Man to crack his knuckles and throw a dart at a dartboard. The animation lasts for 10 seconds—and took her 30 hours to complete. She watched her own arm throw a phantom dart so many times that her shoulder muscles were sore the next day.

Parts of the class are technical—Loeb teaches some geometry, physics and computer programming—but it satisfies the art distribution requirement. (Two of the five computer science majors sheepishly admit that's why they took the course.) Animation is, after all, creative, and elements of the class include learning to develop and pace a story, using subtleties in a characters facial expression to convey emotion and telling a story through pictures. For the final project, the students work in groups to create an animation lasting from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Last fall Loebs class met during the presidential election season and impressed her with their strong political convictions. She asked the class what they thought of using a political theme for their final project. "They practically jumped out of their chairs and were so excited," she laughs. Hundreds of hours of work later—several students spent the last 72 hours before the deadline in the computer lab—one depicted a tug of war between red and blue figures while another showed a father and son watching TV coverage of the election with growing ire, finally announcing how proud they are of their country (pan to Canadian flag).

Loeb will teach CS13 again this winter, but she has a vision that extends beyond the snow and mud seasons. In the plotting and scheming stages is a digital arts minor within the computer science department that would combine classes in computer science, film studies, theater and studio art. In animation terms, Loeb is developing the characters for the minor, story boarding the plot and shading the details. Soon, she hopes, it'll be time to animate.

Motion Capture Jessica Glago '08works with animation software underProfessor Loeb's guidance.

JULIE SLOANE is a writer and editor at Fortune Small Business magazine.

Lorie Loeb recommends the following computer animation sources: 1. The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams (Faber & Faber, 2002) "A great book on everything from traditional to cutting-edge animation techniques." 2. www.brownfish.com (founded 2000) "A Web site loaded with animated shorts by students, independents and professional animators." 3. 75th Annual Academy AwardsShort Films (Questar DVD, 2004) "Academy Award-nominated animated and live-action shorts from 2003."