{"id":141,"date":"2010-05-09T19:12:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T19:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2010\/05\/09\/making_movies\/"},"modified":"2014-05-11T14:55:52","modified_gmt":"2014-05-11T13:55:52","slug":"making_movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2010\/05\/09\/making_movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

For three days last week I was at the EMBL in Heidelberg taking a fantastic course on data visualisation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As is often the way with scientific training, the course was intense: lectures and practicals from 9 in the morning till 10 at night. This particular course was perhaps unusual in being divided into three modules even though each student focused on just one of them. There was one on programming in Python, one on writing applications for Mac OS X and one — which I took — on making computer animations using Maya<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Maya course was taught by Ga\u00ebl McGill, who runs Digizyme<\/a>, an American company that specialises in scientific visualisation and is something of a pioneer when it comes to animation. For anyone interested in virology, check out their animation of reovirus cell entry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maya is a rather sophisticated program, to say the least. Ga\u00ebl proved to be a very enthusiastic and patient teacher. We worked hard, very hard (!) but still only scratched the surface of the possibilities that Maya has to offer. It was great to have three days to get started with the program (although my brain took a pounding in the process). I now feel — metaphorically — that I have at least managed to master riding on two wheels, even if I am staying on the grass for now and every so often putting my feet down to stop myself falling over.
\nOne of the most exciting aspects of learning this new program is that Ga\u00ebl–as part of his academic work at Harvard Medical School–is developing a tool called mMaya<\/a> that allows you to directly import the PDB<\/a> files of the structures of macromolecules such as proteins and DNA to facilitate animation. This is a capability that I have been waiting for for about five years.<\/p>\n

To give a idea of what can be done, I made a very quick animation on my return to the UK. It didn’t take that<\/em> much effort to pull together, though I am hoping that it won’t take me too long to get up to some kind of decent speed with Maya.<\/p>\n

Anyway, have a look at my teaser trailer.<\/p>\n