Reading 06: Indiana Jones and Graphics

Review of the movie: I thought the movie was fantastic. It was an action packed thriller with a little bit of mystery. The search for the Holy Grail is a tale almost as old as time, but Steven Spielberg brought it to life with a daring Indiana Jones racing the Nazis to find it. The graphics work in the movie was also flawless. I had to research the movie to notice the places it was used. Once scene that used it heavily was the hot air balloon/dog fight scene. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) built an eight-foot foam model of the Zeppelin to use as Indiana and his dad take over the biplane. A biplane model with a two-foot wingspan was used when the biplane separated from the blimp (Wikipedia). Stop motion animation was used for the shot of the German fighter's wings breaking off as it crashes through the tunnel. The tunnel was a 210 feet model that occupied 14 of ILM's parking spaces for two months (Wikipedia). It was built in eight-foot sections, with hinges allowing each section to be opened to film through. Graphics were also used for the three challenges scene at the end when Indiana gets the grail. The one that was most impressive to me was the leap of faith where Indiana appears to step out over a void but he actually takes a step onto bridge drawn to look like the abyss. Indiana was also represented with a puppet (Wikipedia). Another challenging scene in a similar part of the movie is when the character Donovan dies from drinking the wrong grail. He rapidly ages and becomes a corpse in moments. ILM had to morph both physical machines (facial swelling and hair growth) with the graphics that changed the color of his skin and turned it into a skull (Wikipedia). I was pretty impressed with the level of graphics given this movie was filmed in 1989. 

Graphics Discussion: The goal of the medium is to be immersive. In many pieces of art graphics aide the ability of the material to capture the audience in a separate world for a while. Like all things there is a happy medium for the amount of graphics used. The amount your imagination is taxed when watching a movie can be draining. If Star Wars was a low budget play you would not fall in love with the intense battle scenes. On the other hand when every object is touched by computer aided design it can remove a sense of reality from the subject. I think for the most part 3D graphics are preferred to 2D sprites because the world we live in is 3D and it promotes a higher level of realism. However, if the material is a cartoon and the artistic objective is to make the content simplified then 2D sprites would be preferred for that rhetoric. Graphics have pushed Computer Science forward. A movie like Avatar needs a complex motion capture algorithm to track the movements of the actors to create the appearance of fluidity of motion. It has also pushed computing companies to work on faster processing so that rendering speed can be increased to an imperceptible speed to the human eye.