The Interface
In order to animate Gollum’s face, lead animators of the film, Bay Raitt, Jason Schleifer and Tom Kluyskens designed an unique interface, which allowed for a maximum of control within a minimum of space. Each animator could create various “poses” of the entire face for easy emotional manipulation, while still maintaining absolute control over each muscle motion. There were more than 800 individual sculpts used in the final facial system.

“With Gollum, we wanted the audience to believe he was real. We worked intensely to ensure the fact that the audience would suspend disbelief and not think, “Wow, what a cool digital character.” But, “Wow… what an amazing actor”

A few months before delivery, Jason Schleifer lead his team in remodeling Gollum’s face (left) to closely resemble Andy Serkis. In addition, Raitt re-worked the edge flow in order to allow for the incredibly complicated skin and muscle motion. Gollum’s original facial structure was based off a model built by Weta Workshop. The edge flow doesn’t quite follow the muscle structure in an animatable way. Some of the other noticeable differences from the final design are larger eyes, a more pronounced muzzle and more pug-like nose.

Andy Serkis
Serkis had initially been hired just to perform Gollum’s voice, and the animators were asked to animate to that performance. It was soon quite apparent that in order for Andy to actually play the voice, he had to embody the character emotionally and physically.

Throughout principal photography, Serkis had to be in a skin-tight suit and all his scenes with fellow-actors, Sean Austin (Samwise Gamgee) and Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) were shot conventionally.

“Then they'd always shoot two versions – one with me on camera acting, literally on camera with Sean and Elijah, and then I'd do a version stepping off camera. Sean and Elijah would act to the void where I once was – having encoded the scene that we'd just done – and I'd do the voice off-camera, giving as much vocal energy, and also I'd kind of show them the moves so that they could mime exact moments.”

This was a huge boon for the animators and motion editors, as now even though there were more than 20 visual designers working on Gollum, there was one psychological base to start from. Either they would take the motion capture Serkis performed and tweak it as necessary, adding the facial animation, or they would take the emotional connotation that he had projected and animate to that.

“It's basically kind of acting as a virtual puppeteer. You wear a suit with dots all over it, cameras pick up all the dots, and in real time I could see this computer generated image of Gollum – which if I moved my right arm, then Gollum in real time would move his right arm. So a year later, really – after the principal photography – I'd be on my own in the studio, redoing all the scenes... every single scene, doing it. That's when we really got to hone the performance, physically”

It certainly wasn’t just the performance that made Gollum so believable; it was everything about him. The lighting and texturing was so spot-on, people were second-guessing the fact that he might be a silicon mold. The interaction with Sam and Frodo and the environment around them took a talented team of roto/paint artists and compositors months to do.

The Transition
“Not only did we work to enhance Gollum’s acting between The Two Towers and The Return of the King, but we also worked quite a bit on his appearance.”

In The Return of the King, Gollum’s wretchedness and addiction come to the forefront of his personality. His desire to separate the two hobbits and his obsession for the ring become paramount. The stress of the journey and this constant battle between his two selves takes its toll and you can see it etched onto his face. In order to demonstrate this deterioration, the animators made a number of changes.

First,  minor modifications were made to his body to make him appear more emaciated. Then the creatures department re-worked the muscle model to fix some of the issues they found while working on The Two Towers, including his shoulders and hips. Most of the work, however, was focused on Gollum’s shades and textures.

Throughout the film you can feel everything that’s happened to Gollum throughout the journey simply by looking at his face. Cuts and bruises, scrapes, road rash and lots of dirt and sweat.
“One scene, in particular, that is stunningly executed occurs on the windy stairs when Gollum is telling Frodo that the Fat One (Sam) is going to take the ring from him. Both Gollum and Frodo are face to face, directly in-camera, and they’re dirty, sweaty and exhausted. And it’s absolutely beautiful.”

Because of the mutual understanding, the breadth of Gollum’s character, the subtlety in the acting, the ability for the audience to sympathize with him grew between The Two Towers and The Return of the King.

Without a doubt, Gollum does not belong to any one person, department or company. He was conceived in J.R.R Tolkien’s mind; characterized and developed by Phillipa Boyens, Walsh and Jackson; designed by the amazing team at Weta Workshop, performed and analyzed by Serkis and brought to life by every single department at Weta Digital in New Zealand.

To read more information click HERE

Prof. Wong Lim Soon is a professor at the School of Computing. He is interested in computational biology and is actively involved in this field.

Prof. Wong Lim Soon believes that there are three major goals of computational biology. Firstly, it facilitates better understanding of molecular biology; secondly, it improves treatment of diseases; and thirdly, it helps suggest better experiments. His research deals with two aspects. The first aspect is to facilitate a better understanding of protein function and also a more sensitive and precise prediction of protein function. The second aspect of his research is data mining that involves identifying interesting patterns in data from a biological point of view.

Prof. Wong Lim Soon has supervised many students who have done their UROP and FYP under his guidance. One of the UROP projects supervised by him (in association with the Temasek Lifesciences Lab) screened molecular markers that distinguish male and female tilapia fish. The manual screening of sex-specific markers of the fish is tedious, slow and error prone.

The project resulted in an automated screening analysis that finds 13% more markers than manual analysis, shortens time for analysis by 6000 times and improves sensitivity and precision by at least 3 folds. This UROP project was presented in the Universita 21 Conference in 2008. Another UROP project supervised by Prof. Wong Lim Soon produced one of the most accurate prediction methods for the polyadenylation signal site of Arabidopsis genomic DNA sequences . This project was presented at the 18th International Conference on Genome Informatics(GIW) in 2007 and also the Universita 21 Conference in 2007.

The concepts of computational biology can be applied to other fields of research. For example, a UROP project on the elimination of redundant emails was based on techniques from computational biology. Some of the modules suggested by Prof. Wong Lim Soon for students interested in this field are CS2220 Introduction to Computational Biology, CS3225 Combinatorial Methods in Bioinformatics and CS4220 Knowledge Discovery Methods in Bioinformatics.

One of the people Prof Wong Lim Soon admires is Prof. Ming Li from the University of Waterloo. The contributions of Prof Ming Li to the field of computational biology are very significant. His breakthrough works include fast sequence alignment methods and accurate protein structure prediction methods. Prof Wong Lim Soon admires the fact that the logic underlying Prof Ming Li’s methods is simple yet effective and that the knowledge has been applied to build real systems that are widely used in the industry.

Now if you are the type who isn’t going to be doing anything productive during your vacations, then it’s important you finish reading the article...I am convinced you will definitely want to try some of these cool things.
On the other hand, if you are a hard-core enthusiast...you will find some good ideas for your vacation project.

Web Designing

Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript™ 3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. Flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs), as well as an interactive Flex application debugger.
RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Adobe Flash® Player software or on the desktop on Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system runtime. This enables Flex applications to run consistently across all major browsers and on the desktop. And using AIR, Flex applications can now access local data and system resources on the desktop. Both Flash Player and Adobe AIR are available as a free download on Adobe.com.

   
Photo-editing

Computer graphics and animation is one of the emerging technical fields in today’s world. Among the abundant softwares available, Adobe Flash is popular and widely-used. This article gives you a basic idea of Flash and its capabilities, with the hope that it encourages you to learn this amazing software!

What is Flash?
Adobe Flash is a 2D animation software. (All objects in its world have only X and Y co-ordinates)

What can Flash do?
Almost all the web advertisements and online games on the internet today are made using Flash. For example, take a look at this really famous online cricket game - StickCricket. It was made completely using Flash. The above animation was also made using the same software.

There are also websites that are made entirely in Flash. (The official Harry Potter website too!) In fact, the photo slideshows that you might come across on most official websites would definitely have used Flash as well. Thus, if you are interested in learning web design, you better learn Flash.

What is so special about Flash?
Flash is a software that is based heavily on the traditional methods of animation. During the days of Walt Disney, animations were produced by drawing each and every frame. A cartoon video was just a sequence of images played together at a quick rate. For example, in order to show a two second clip of Mickey Mouse smiling, Walt Disney had to draw 60 images at the least. With each image the smile would grow progressively wider, giving the impression that Mickey is smiling when played together. Adobe Flash incorporates this idea of drawing frame by frame. Also, in order to make things faster a powerful concept called keyframing is also used. (Try and read up what it is :P)

Furthermore, Flash is also provided with a programming language, the latest version being ActionScript 3.0. This language provides added functionality to the software. The language can be used to control objects in Flash. Using Actionscript it is possible to make characters move when a particular key is pressed.

Wow! Where can I get it?
The latest version of Adobe Flash CS4 Professional can be downloaded HERE. The Help menu that comes along with the software has very clear and concise instructions to learn all the basics.

But I want to learn more…
There are also several online tutorials available for learning Flash. Here are some of them:

Adobe's Tutorials Click Here

W3Schools Click Here

Apart from these you can also search for video tutorials of Flash on Youtube or Metacafe. You will find loads of them!

But is Flash the only graphic software?
LOL! In the next issue we will be looking at another tool called OpenGL!