Multimedia and modeling (long)

[Gary David Bouton]

Fellow dimensionalists--

From my recent sticking of the nose into threads here...

I think we can agree that it all comes back to:
1.)What works best for you, and
2.)What it is you are trying to communicate.

I wrote a Netscape Press book on multimedia back when Netscape was a real company, and I sort of tore apart the term "multimedia" as a vague buzzword for anything that animates, is the least interactive, and plays sounds. This dysfunctional definition would leave Director as the perfect multimedia creation tool, would it not?

Let's do a reality check here. A lot of us are into 3D simply because of the fun and wonder of it; the same goes for 3D animation. We often replicate stuff from around the house or parked in the driveway due to a need to see how far we can push this virtual creation thing. Can we really fool the viewer into thinking that's a real human ("Shreck" comes darned close)? Later this year, director Nicole (his first name escapes me, but he directed "Gattica" with Ethan Hawke and Ula Thurlman) is going to release a movie called "Simone", where for the most part, the actress is played by a bevy of Silicon Graphics workstations. I wish him luck.

PIXAR comes from the other school that says if something is impossible to make look real, don't try. So "Toy Story" has Gumby-like people, perfect plastic toys and realistic outdoors scenes (on par with Bryce, right?)

Here comes the point (FINALLY!): "Multimedia" means "many media". To my way of thinking, that means exactly, "Explaining something with different kinds of media." Suppose for example, you wanted to explain a paperclip (NOT Clippy...MS is killing him off, thank goodness<g>) to someone who had never seen a paperclip. First, I guess, you'd use words and hand gestures. Failing that, you'd draw a picture on a piece of paper. But the drawing doesn't tell the ignorant guy here that the paperclip is shiny metal. So you do a model of it. Finally, to give ignorant person an idea of what it's tensile characteristics are, you play a wav or aiff file of a paperclip being dropped on the floor.

One medium might do it for explaining a paperclip, okay? But it takes many media to replace the act of showing something in real life.

I really like what Alvy (co-founder of PIXAR) Smith has to say of modeling. He says it's a "visualization solution."

Think about that for a moment. Isn't that what we're here for? Isn't that a noble kinda definition?

Kindest Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
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