In a small, utilitarian office outside Los Angeles, California, Ron Henderson methodically jots down equations for Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion on a whiteboard next to his desk. The equations, the physicist explains, are the mathematical building blocks for constructing a three-dimensional, bubble-like sphere.
Henderson could easily be preparing a lesson for the university where he once was a faculty member. Instead, he is at DreamWorks Animation’s campus, doing his part to bridge the divide between art and science.
Henderson is explaining the maths behind a fluid-simulation technology that will help artists working on the upcoming movie Home draw soap bubbles inhabited by a race of diminutive aliens called the Boov.
To give them visual references, Henderson and his team began by studying drawings and photos of soap films and bubbles last year. He invited a physicist colleague to give a lecture titled ‘‘Bubble Science’’.
The physicist, Alejandro Garcia, took a low-tech approach. He arrived at the studio with boxes of liquid soap and party bubbles, using a plastic wand to fashion large bubbles for an audience of artists and technicians gathered at an outdoor amphitheatre.
‘‘He did cool things that we’re not doing, like what happens when you make a soap bubble out of hydrogen and set it on fire?’’ Henderson chuckles. ‘‘What does that look like?’’ (The bubble made a loud boom and burst into a fireball when an assistant lit it.)
That’s the kind of thing that happens when the scientific set makes the move to the movies.
‘‘What we’re doing here is creating tools for artists,’’ Henderson says. ‘‘I think it’s going to be a success.’’
Henderson, 47, is part of an expanding group of high-level physicists, engineers and other scientists, including many former NASA employees, who have left careers in aerospace and academia to work in the movie business.
Demand for their services has grown as animated movies, once created by hand, push the boundaries of what can be created on a computer screen. Artists at DreamWorks, Disney-owned Pixar and other studios increasingly rely on the services of people such as Henderson to create complex algorithms to simulate realistic-looking water, fire, dust and other elements in movies packed with action and special effects.
‘‘The physics behind what’s happening in these movies is incredibly complicated,’’ says Paul Debevec, a computer scientist and chief visual officer at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. ‘‘You need real scientists to understand what’s going on. These are PhD-level folks who could have been publishing papers in Physics Today. Instead, they are working on Hollywood blockbuster films.’’
Scientists who leave academia for Hollywood risk losing some prestige among their peers. ‘‘My advisor at Caltech got some flak from Princeton, saying, ‘How come you guys let him leave?’’’ Henderson says.
Although they typically get paid more in the film business, Henderson says money isn’t the main draw. It's more about the excitement of working on movies and the challenge of finding solutions to technical problems.
DreamWorks has one of the largest contingents of scientists.
‘‘We have sculptors and painters working side-by-side with software developers and particle physicists,’’ says Dan Satterthwaite, one of the studio’s human resources directors.
The company’s research and development group has about 120 members with master’s and doctoral degrees in such fields as cognitive science, astrophysics, aeronautical engineering, chemistry, mathematics and computer science. Nearly a dozen of them are former employees of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The studio has even hired biologists to advise animators on how to correctly illustrate the branch structure of a tree.
‘‘This whole company is a very interesting mix of left brain and right brain,’’ says Jim Mainard, head of digital strategy and new business development for DreamWorks. ‘‘Often we end up at the same place, but from different directions.’’
Mainard, himself a computer scientist, used to work for a NASA contractor involved in the Hubble Space Telescope. He also created film simulations for the Navy before DreamWorks hired him to help the studio build its own pipeline of computer-animated movies.
‘‘When I came out of college, I never thought I would work in the entertainment business,’’ Mainard says. ‘‘For me it was just a great time to make the transition. We were having our first child and I just liked the idea of making animated films. I thought that would align with having a family. Making people laugh is a great legacy.’’
Part of Henderson’s role is to foster a culture of collaboration between workers from disparate backgrounds. Artists and engineers hold biweekly meetings and also work on the same floor so they can interact more easily.
Much of their focus is on what Henderson calls improving the ‘‘scale of production’’. Because there are so many shots in a single movie – one film might have 700 scenes with fire, for example – Henderson and his team spend much of their time trying to devise more efficient ways of simulating effects through improved software and hardware.
Then there are the specific technical challenges of creating something visually unique to the look of each film, such as the frost in Rise of the Guardians, the stylised cannon fire in Kung Fu Panda 2, or the ice-breathing dragon in How to Train Your Dragon 2.
His latest challenge was creating the bubble-like spheres in Home, which would provide the unique look to spaceships in the movie.
Turns out, creating a computer animation image of a bubble on a flat surface is one thing, but wrapping that image around a floating soccer-ball-like sphere is a much trickier problem of math and physics.
Using a variation on a numerical weather-prediction model, Henderson tapped into his knowledge of fluid dynamics to devise a new way to simulate flow on a sphere.
Even if few moviegoers will appreciate the technical achievement, Henderson doesn’t mind. ‘‘I can go work for an oil company or I could go back to academia,’’ he says, ‘‘but the personal gratification of doing something where you can clearly see the results of your work, and where you feel you are providing a unique benefit to the artists – that’s what keeps me coming here every day.’’
Los Angeles Times