Reference: StudentFilmmakers Magazine, June 2007. One from the Heart: Anatomy of an Animation Enhanced Video by George Avgerakis. Pages 50 – 52.
One of the best competitive advantages a video production company can offer a client is the advantage of providing in-houseproduced 3D animation elements. The efficacy of animation is almost always substantiated in medical productions, TV commercials, high tech demos and educational productions.
Animations can easily be offered as an option in the bidding process. Often, clients will be reluctant to offer their target budget during a bid session. Producers are wise, therefore, to write proposals that offer a basic, “bare bones” budget, with a collection of easy-to-understand options. Each option may have its own package price, which gets added to the basic price. In this way, the producer gets in low bids, but allows clients to inflate their final prices according to their often-secret desires. Animation is a popular secret desire.
Case Study
My firm recently won a very competitive bid for a physician’s education DVD on the topic of intra aorta balloon catherization.
Basically, we were contracted to produce a video showing how a thin, folded balloon is inserted into the patient’s thigh artery, pushed up into the aorta, and then periodically inflated to assist the heart in healing itself. While the majority of the film would be shot in a specialized operating room called a “cath lab,” a great deal of the educational
material would take place within the chest cavity. To provide the client and her audience with a view within the chest, animation was highly indicated. In my bid proposal, I described how the animation would work, included a few rudimentary drawings and offered a price that would add about 25% to the basic budget.
The client subsequently requested a meeting to review my firm’s animation capabilities. New to the field herself, the client invited her company’s art director who did have significant animation contracting experience. Knowing that the upcoming meeting was going to require a nice DVD with medical animation on it, I sat down at my edit station and called up my “medical animation show reel” on the Harris/Leitch DPS Velocity editing system.
Making sure the edit had all my recent medical animations in the order I wanted to show them at the meeting, I patched the output of the NLE to the input of my Pioneer DVD recorder. This recorder works just like a VCR. You press the Record button, play your NLE, and when you’re finished playing, you press Stop on the DVD recorder. It digests the recording for a few minutes and then sets itself ready to record anything else you want. If you press Record again, the DVD recorder copies the input stream to a different, clickable button on the final DVD. It’s not fancy, but you can title each button and show the results with any DVD that has control capability. I recorded the Medical Animation Show Reel and the General Medical Reel that had all my medical work nicely presented. Then I hit the “Finalize” command on the DVD recorder. This locks out the DVD from further recording and makes it playable on almost any DVD player in the world. I popped this into my briefcase and made tracks for the meeting.
I highly recommend taking a DVD capable laptop and a show reel on DVD to every client meeting. Often the client will not have a way of playing your show reel, be it on VHS or DVD, so if you bring the laptop, you’re in like Flynn (whoever he was).
At the meeting, I opened my laptop computer and showed off my medical animation on the laptop’s DVD player. The client was impressed as was her graphics design expert. From the conversation I gathered that the client did not have any other bidders who could produce both the video and the animation inhouse.
This was good, because it narrowed down the possibilities of losing the project to another bidder. Keep this in mind: If you’re the only bidder who can offer a service, you don’t have to bid against anyone. That’s called having a corner on a market, better known as a monopoly. Let’s all say that together, “mo-no-po-ly.”
At the end of the meeting, the client asked me for a proposal including the animation option. A few days after I sent the proposal, the client informed me that I’d won the bid and we began the process of storyboarding the animation to her notes.
The Process
Animation projects always, always begin with a storyboard. I have many interns pass through my shop with the idea that you can begin elsewhere, with character sketches, landscapes, etc., but real pros only begin with a storyboard.
Our boards for this project were derived from anatomical diagrams copied from the Internet. It’s really easy to use Google’s “image” search capabilities for this. Once we had an accurate anatomical diagram, we drew in the various stages of insertion of the catheter. Reading some client-supplied literature, we were also able to illustrate several “catheter gone wild” scenarios (that is, where the procedure for one reason or another, goes awry). Such scenarios are always included in any responsible medical instruction media.
Storyboards for animation usually include only 3-4 frames per 8” x 11” page size. These can be scanned in color and easily faxed to a client using Adobe’s Acrobat software, which reduces each scan to a PDF file that clients can print on their own computers.
Animation storyboards often include both the narration, music notes and, most important, running time references, so the animator and client can agree on scene duration.
Most animation houses require the client to literally sign off on storyboards. This creates the first “milestone” of a production.
Often, producers bill projects in thirds – one third of the budget on contract, before any work begins, one third after the animation scenes are approved and the final third after the work master has been delivered.
Our client approved the storyboards with some minor revisions and then our team sat down to design the objects and camera moves.
The Animation’s Objective
Our client wanted to demonstrate how an intra-aorta balloon catheter is placed and how it works. That means we, as animators, also had to know – about as well as any surgeon! In consultation with the client’s technical advisor while watching fluoroscopic videos, we began to see how things actually work.
One of the major causes of heart disease is the inability of the heart muscle to obtain sufficient blood. This might seem strange, when there’s so much blood inside the heart, but the muscles of the heart are nourished by small “coronary” arteries that surround the outside of this vital organ. When these arteries get clogged or get stiff, the heart suffers.
One of the methods of temporarily assisting the heart so that it can become strong enough for other curatives to be applied is to place a remote controlled balloon in the aorta. The aorta is the largest artery in the body, coming out of top and turning past the left side of the heart. When the balloon inflates, the rushing blood is impeded. The increased pressure above the balloon forces blood into the heart’s coronary arteries, thus nourishing the vital heart muscles. It is this process of balloon implantation, inflation and the resultant blood flow manipulation that our animation was to describe.
Designing the Animation
Our animation team consisted of two Maya animators, Renzo Signori and Sophie Rodriguez. As Director, I decided to acquire the basic heart object from Digimation, a company that specializes in archiving, maintaining and selling 3-D objects on the Internet.
Most of Digimation’s objects are configured for 3ds max, but the superb heart model that we acquired for under $600, easily converted from 3ds max to Maya in about two minutes.
Our studio is equipped with two HP WX8000 workstations, equipped with dual Pentium 4, 3GHz Xeon processors, and two Dell Precision 650 computer workstations with dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors all networked through a Linksys router system. We have found the reliability of the HP equipment and the relatively low cost of the Dell equipment to make a compatible solution for our in-house render farm.
Once we had a fully modeled heart, Renzo began adding the veins and arteries, which suggested the volume of a human torso.
Meanwhile Sophie started to design the guidewire, the catheter and the balloon that would be pushed into the femoral artery and up into the aorta.
Maya is an animation program, which is well known for its facility in dealing with characters. While characters may be trolls, princesses and goblins, they can also be objects over which, you would like to have great control.
Navigating a balloon catheter from a hole in a patient’s thigh, up through a “Y” connection beneath the abdomen and further up, into the chest to a specific area in the aorta, just left of the heart itself is a tricky bit of animation. At the same time, the heart is beating in a rather complex series of contracting motions, which must, at a particular time in the animation, be synchronized with the inflation of the balloon. Sophie correctly surmised that the balloon and the attached catheter were best thought of as a character, or as she described as, “a long thin snake with an inflatable head.”
Working closely together at side-by-side workstations, Renzo created the artery through which Sophie manipulated the balloon. Frequent test renderings were made, converted to Real Video format and emailed to the client for review.
Another “character” in the animation was the heart itself. When animating any complex solid object, such as a character face, the Maya animator is offered a vast array of controls which may be manipulated in 3-D space using on-screen sliders or an outboard control interface, such as a midi keyboard with dial controls.
With an M-Audio Radium midi keyboard connected to the HP WX8000, Renzo was able to “dial in” specific positions of the heart’s muscles.
These positions, marking the extremes of contraction and expansion, are called “key frames.” Once entered into Maya, the software is able to create any amount of “in between” images, thereby creating frameby- frame animation.
When animating a face or a heart muscle, the surface must be distorted according to specific instructions. A smile,
for instance, might require a distortion of the cheeks of a character on both sides of the mouth. This is accomplished by manipulating the vertices of the object’s surface. In order to accurately control the surfaces of the heart, Renzo had to paint it with “control vertices” or CVs. Maya makes this task easy by offering the animator a special CV brush, which is used to “paint” the surface you wish to manipulate.
Various colors can be assigned to the CV brush to create any number of “channels” of control. Using this brush, Renzo could, for instance, paint the surface of each lobe of the tricuspid valve (a valve within the heart that has three, triangular lobes that join together to regulate blood flow). Using a different colored CV brush for each lobe, thereby creating three channels of control, Renzo could then dial in separate key frames for each lobe, effecting a very accurate opening and closing of the valve.
Colors and Light
Once the motion of the heart, the navigation of the catheter and the inflation and deflation of the balloon were executed to client satisfaction, Renzo and Sophie began to color and light the ensemble.
In a surgically opened human body, the color differences between major arteries and veins are subtle. In order to clearly distinguish each for the viewer, Renzo applied stronger tones of blue to the veins and red for the arteries.
Using actual video scenes from open-heart surgery that I had filmed, Sophie artistically colored each area of the heart.
Maya offers sophisticated 3-D paint tools that provided Sophie with an incredible array of brushes, textures and spray effects that could be applied directly to the 3-D shape on her computer screen, producing instantaneous results appearing on a video monitor.
Again, the results, now shown in approved motion with full color, were sent, daily to the client for review.
Blood Flow
One of the hardest problems we encountered in this animation was to address the actual blood flow through the
aorta as it first passed the deflated balloon and then, impeded by the inflated balloon, gets directed with higher pressure to the coronary arteries.
The simplest way to illustrate this is to first show the blood vessels empty and then to show the blood flowing into them in appropriate order, first the left side of the heart, then the aorta and, after the balloon inflates, the coronary arteries. With the exception of the coronary arteries, however, this would be anatomically incorrect, since the aorta is never devoid of blood.
We tried several tests of different forms of blood, using the “particles” objects offered by Maya. Particles are a specific form of object, which is composed of – well – particles, of any definable size, from one pixel to big blobs. The beauty of particles is that they can be controlled as one would control a general mass or amorphous object. Particles are superb for creating smoke, streams of liquid and clouds.
Renzo tried rendering the blood in the aorta as a stream of particles, but once again, the client rejected the result because anywhere there was a lack of particles, the aorta appeared empty. If we joined all the particles together, there was no apparent motion. We finally suggested using various tones of red moving through the aorta and
heart.
George Avgerakis is the co-founder and VP Creative Director of Avekta Productions, author of three books including Digital Animation Bible: Creating Professional Animation with 3ds max, Lightwave and Maya and Desktop Video Studio Bible (McGraw-Hill). He has lectured in universities and professional seminars, chairs the Business Track of lectures at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, and lectured on the Ethics of Editing at the last Avid Master Editors seminar.