What can character animators learn from those who render microscopic worlds in 3D? Plenty.

The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, won't draw the kind of box office crowds that more ferocious—and furrier—digital creations did last Christmas. But it will share a place along side them in SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theatre show, which will run for three days during the 33rd annual exhibition and conference in Boston next month. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli. , an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, won't draw the kind of box office crowds that more ferocious—and furrier—digital creations did last Christmas. But it will share a place along side them in SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theatre show, which will run for three days during the 33rd annual exhibition and conference in Boston next month. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

Nuclei, proteins and lipids move with bug-like authority, slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space. "All of those things that you see in the animation are going on in every one of your cells in your body all the time," says XVIVO lead animator John Liebler, who worked with company partners David Bolinsky, XVIVO's medical director, and Mike Astrachan, the project's production director, to blend the academic data and narrative from Harvard's faculty into a fluid visual interpretation. "First, we couldn't have known where to begin with all of this material without significant work done by Alain Viel, Ph.D. [associate director of undergraduate research at Harvard University], who wrote and guided the focus to include the essential processes that needed to be described to complement the curriculum and sustain an interesting narrative. I've been in the medical animation field for seven years now, so I'm a little jaded, but I still get surprised by things. For instance, in the animation there's a motor protein that's sort of walking along a line, carrying this round sphere of lipids. When I started working on that section I admit I was kind of surprised to see that it really does look like it's out for a stroll, like a character in a science fiction film or animation. But based on all the data, it's a completely accurate rendering."

"I was impressed by the ability of the XVIVO team to transform all the structural information and the very detailed sequence of molecular events that I assembled in a storyboard into a visually pleasing work of art," adds Dr. Viel. "This is because the XVIVO team combines artistic talent with a good understanding of biology."

Liebler says the team worked hard to give the final animation the kind of dramatic heft you might find in a longer project with more stirring plot lines. "It's one of the reasons we were brought into this project in the first place," he says. "There are plenty of others in the academic community creating these kinds of animations to illustrate concepts for students and their peers, but they tend to look and feel, well, very academic. The idea with this was to make something different, and there was definitely an effort to make it as cinematic as we could." In some instances, that meant sacrificing literal accuracy for visual effect. "What we did in some cases, with the full support of the Harvard team, was subtly change the way things work," Liebler says. "The reality is that all that stuff that's going on in each cell is so tightly packed together that if we were to put every detail into every shot, you wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees or know what you were even looking at. One of the most common things we did, then, was to strip it apart and add space where there isn't really that much space." Because of the sheer volume of structures that needed to be visible and functional in each scene, XVIVO was given a longer development cycle than a typical commercial project, to transform the molecular data and storyboards supplied by Dr.Viel, and Dr. Robert Lue, the director of life sciences education and creator of Harvard's BioVisions computer-based learning program for undergraduates. "In a lot of cases, the animation had to be worked out more thoroughly than we would have done on an ordinary project so that we could understand what was going on," says Liebler. "Even though David has a medical background, Mike and I come from art and graphic design backgrounds. We needed to get a grasp of the actual objects and things that were involved by making them; only then could we understand what was happening. But we also continued working on this project while other projects were coming in and out. The Harvard job was a constant that we were building and refining until we had satisfied its unique academic and aesthetic requirements." Luckily, Harvard's Dr. Lue and Dr. Viel were receptive to the animators' questions along the way and always came back with good advice and relevant resource materials. "The revision process was more organic than a typical job, where we'd have a simple review and revision schedule after we received the storyboards," says Liebler. "In this case, they needed to describe these unseen processes for us and then we went back and forth with what we thought we could show and what we thought we couldn't show. As we did this, we'd discover things that, surprisingly, we realized we could show. It was much more flexible than an ordinary project." Dr. Lue says the animation has received a "tremendously enthusiastic response from students in both freshman biology and sophomore cell biology courses. Furthermore, preliminary evaluation shows that using animations as a part of their study resource enhances performance on questions requiring data interpretation followed by hypothesis building in the cellular context by almost 30 percent." Through a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant awarded to Dr. Lue, Harvard has contracted XVIVO to create several more animations for the same classroom series. "Both the quality of the final product and my experience working with XVIVO has reinforced my interest in a long-term collaboration with this team," says Dr. Viel. Liebler is already at work on the next one. "In the past couple of days I've been digging into the material to once again get my head around the scientific concepts and figure out how much we can carry over from the previous project to make the next one go even more smoothly," he says.

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