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Cell-ebration of life

Cell-ebration of life
Atoms leap into starring film roles to share minute science secrets

By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer
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First published: Friday, July 11, 2008
Troy
In a sneak preview of the as-yet-untitled Molecularium Project film, a tiny oxygen atom named Oxy leaps about her spaceship, debating with her computerized pilot, Mel, whether to go to Earth to "discover the secret of life."

When she arrives, she meets, among other oddities, a bickering couple of nitrogen atoms and a monocled argon atom who looks down on the "common elements."

For the past two years, filmmakers V. Owen Bush and Kurt Przybilla have worked with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors to imagine what matter too small to see would look like on the big screen.

Once you see a film about nanoscale material, "you see the whole world with fresh eyes," said Bush, head of Nanotoon productions in Troy and director and co-writer of the movie now in post-production. "After people see the show, they'll be able to visualize the air."

Expanding on their earlier film, the Molecularium short "Riding Snowflakes" that plays at the Rensselaer Children's Museum as well as other digital dome theaters, Nanotoon Productions' feature-length cartoon brings back such characters as the long-lashed Oxy and the mischievous hydrogen siblings.

FACTS:An RPI boost

Bush created the production company Nanotoons after he was commissioned by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to make the short film and then the feature length. He moved to Troy from New York City, and invited old friends and collaborators Przybilla and Chris Harvey to join him. RPI has provided the infrastructure, including money, work space, computers and scientific consulting.

The filmmakers had previously worked with MTV and other producers on youth-oriented videos and graphics. Bush was recommended to RPI by a friend who had seen "Sonic Vision," a film he made for the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The new film is aimed at large-format theaters such as iMax, and Nanotoons has been working with a distributor to show the film around the world. The company has also been talking to public television stations to show the film on TV. The movie will also eventually be released on DVD.

FACTS:Stunning animation Even shown on a small projector screen in a conference room of the sterile biotech building where Nanotoons has its offices, a short clip of the movie is stunning, with bright pastel colors and cutely animated molecule characters bouncing around innerspace. While some elements and characters of "Riding Snowflakes" return, the upcoming film also features new characters, songs and jokes. And while the dome film was aimed at a very young audience, the new movie was written for all ages.

"It's sort of using the Warner Bros. formula of characters for kids with jokes for adult thrown in," said Bush, 35.

Nanotoons art director Chris Harvey used drawings of living cells by artist David Goodsell to begin the process of visualizing what objects would look like on a molecular level. From there, he created images to evoke the object the molecules are meant to represent, such as copper, food wrappers and ice crystals. For example, grape chewing gum molecules are purple in the film when in real life, molecules and atoms are so small that they are below the wavelength of light so they do not emit color.

"It's real information and imaginary visualization," said Harvey, 50. "Fact and fiction."

In the beginning

RPI chemical and bio-engineering department head Shekhar Garde was motivated to work on the project by the desire to get American kids interested in science. He and a few other RPI professors made a crude short film in 2001.

"We had the idea that a molecule would be your guide," said Garde. "It was sort of like 'Fantastic Voyage.' We tested kids before and after they watched it, and they had learned something."

Garde and his colleagues then asked the National Science Foundation for funding for a longer film.

They used the money to bring in Bush and Przybilla to create "Riding Snowflakes." The 23-minute digital dome film premiered at the children's museum in 2005.

A few months after "Riding Snowflakes" was completed, RPI commissioned Bush and Przybilla to begin creation of the feature-length film.

Laws of physics

Nanotoons, which has contracted with dozens of filmmakers and animators, spent hundreds of hours making sure the characters were lifelike and followed the laws of physics.

"The eyelashes and the facial movements needed to look real," said Garde. "It took a lot of large-scale computing to get these molecules and atoms to move like they'd move in real life."

The attention to detail worked: Oxy's lively smiles and pouts make her look like a precocious seventh-grader.

The majority of the film concentrates on the makeup of inanimate objects, but toward the end, the characters stumble upon the wonders of biology.

"Molecules in the inorganic objects are so simple," said Bush. "Molecules in living objects are really wonderful machines."

The film production is completed, but it will still take several months for post-production, including about five hours to render each 70 millimeter frame to a final format that can be displayed. At 30 frames per second, a 100-minute movie would be about 180,000 frames. That's 900,000 rendering hours.

Luckily, Nanotoons has one of RPI's supercomputers at its disposal. In a hot basement room in RPI's Low Center for Industrial Innovation, the computer Nanotoons will use to render the film whirs and flickers. The machine, which is typically in use by the bio-chem department but will be loaned to Nanotoons, has 144 processors, all of which can separately render frames at the same time.

Even with all those processors, rendering will take more than six months of nonstop computer processing.

Danielle Furfaro can be reached at 454-5097 or by e-mail at dfurfaro@timesunion.com.



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