animation

With her team, Kathy Vandiver, director of the Community Outreach and Education Program at MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences, creates eye-catching animations of cellular processes like meiosis, mitosis, and DNA translation and transcription, using Legos. These sophisticated simulations of what is going on in the cell are used as teaching aids for both school-aged and adult students, mainly to pique their interest in the subject matter at the beginning of a class.

Popular Science spoke to Dr. Vandiver about her Lego creations.

As with every year, a tuxedoed crowd huddles in the dark to honor the luminaries of the film world with Academy Awards. However, this ceremony didn’t feature Hugh Jackman’s dancing or Queen Latifah’s singing. No, this time we’re talking about the Science and Technology Oscars. And even though the SciTech Oscars only got a brief mention during Sunday’s larger ceremony, Popsci.com dives deep into the achievement of the scientists who make the movies possible.

Remember those weird ghoulish souls coming out of the Arc of the Covenant in the first Indy flick? Well, Hollywood has come a long way since then. And while Indiana Jones himself may have lost a step since he last appeared on the big screen, the effects backing him up this time promise to be a vast improvement. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fedora-wearing adventurer will encounter strange creatures, including an army of monkeys, race through some wild jungle scenery and face-down thousands of man-eating ants - thanks to Industrial Light & Magic.

San Jose State University is soon going to start offering a class called "Physics of Animation," that aims to teach future animators the proper way to render a leaf falling to the ground or a person walking with a realistic gait. Or a kung-fu fighting panda getting launched into the air by a furry little creature.

Physics is a key element of realism, says the course's professor, physicist Alejandro Garcia. Any movie-viewer can spot bad physics, though they might not always recognize what's bothering them. And for all the progress that has been made in animation in the last decade, and all the science homework that effects experts say they do prior to creating scenes, most movies still let through a glitch or two that makes the attentive viewer wince.

I just found this most excellent stop-motion short film, The Art of Motion, on Google Video. It employs a clever, albeit low-tech, approach to animation, and the way each snippet syncs with the soundtrack is pretty remarkable. Think: Gumby meets The Matrix. —Megan Miller

Dept.: Tech Lesson
Tech: Machinima moviemaking
Base Cost: Free
Time: 1 hour and up
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