Thursday, March 5, 2009

Benjamin Button's Producers ARE Scientists!

Have you watch the movie Benjamin Button? And did you know that the head of Benjamin was made using technology, but not a real head?
There's a TED talk that Ms. Smith showed us during our Science 10 class that talks about how they used computers to animate the head of the Benjamin. They followed the Scientific method!!
The sequence of scientific method:
1. Purpose: Their purpose was very clear. "How do we make a computer animated head that will look the best?"
2. Hypothesis: This was their hypothesis, if we put censors on a human head and record the shape of the face, then we can animate a perfect human head using computer because we have the movements.
3. Materials: There are many many materials needed in this and I can't list that many so you know....but my main point is, they HAVE used some materials.
4. Procedure: They followed the way that they had in hypothesis.
5. Observation: They played the computer animated face and determined which it was good or not..
6. Analyze: They realized that the computer animated face that they made wasn't good because it's too not detailed and doesn't look like a human at all because there were too less polygons which means the surface is not round like a human face.

They had to go back to number 2, hypothesis to figure out a new way to solve that problem.
This time they got a wide range camera that analyze the human face movement for them in like 100x the polygons.
7. Conclusion: The result was really really good using the second procedure. It is actually a human face movement when they played it, with round face instead of a face made out of lots of squares. In conclusion, they are going with this wide angle camera.

They went through the scientific method while making the Benjamin's face!!