HEAL

While browsing around the Internet the other day looking for things related to medical animation, I found this site. ghOst Productions, Inc. (and no, the capitalization is not a mistake) is “a 3D medical animation studio that specializes in promotional marketing, surgical technique, and surgeon and patient education.” Their clients are mostly medical device companies like CardioKinetix, Alphatec Spine, K2 Medical, or Spine Surgical Innovations. However, they have also done work for the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, PBS, A&E Networks, and National Geographic, among others.

So, what exactly is cool about ghOst Productions, Inc.? Pretty much everything. But there is one movie in particular that I really like (and have watched over a half-dozen times by now). It’s called Heal, and it is a demo reel that they created to display the various orthopedic procedures that they are capable of animating. In their own words,

“This reel was built from the ground up to showcase the talents of ghOst Productions at the 2009 American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons in Las Vegas. Instead of showing pre-existing client work in our reel, we thought it would be more fun to make a character animation, break nearly every bone in his body and then surgically repair him in under 3 minutes.”

So here’s the link. Now go watch it and then come back and finish reading.

If you are reading this and you still haven’t watched it, well…. go watch it. Seriously. It’s that good.

So, let me elaborate on what exactly it is that I like about this movie.
First, the music. Now I realize that music is neither medical nor animated, but I love music and I think it has incredible power to enhance the emotional experience of any film. In this little short, the music starts off gentle and beautiful, and then pauses on that long, tense violin note as the camera follows his glasses all the way down to the ground and they shatter (foreshadowing, of course, what if going to happen to him.) Then, as he falls, the music turns darker and more frantic, and then slows and becomes mournful as we see the maintenance man’s horrified expression and the surgeons’ masked faces. Then, as the surgical procedure begins, the music becomes more synthesized and techno-influenced. And at the end, as we see that the artist is back to full health, the music once again becomes hopeful and triumphant.  It’s a huge range of emotions to cover in so short a time, and the music really helps make the animation more effective.

Secondly, I think they did a really great job with all the materials, textures and lighting. The chapel is breath taking, the artists eyes are super realistic, and his clothing looks like real clothing with real paint stains on it. Also, the x-ray-like views that they use when he is falling and during the surgery part is a great way to show exactly what they want people to see without having to distracting the audience with extraneous information. That, in fact is one of the main reasons why medical animations can be so helpful. Using animations similar to this (though probably with less story involved) doctors are able to give patients a good idea of the type of surgery that they are about to undergo without having to see all the blood and other organs that would be present in an actual video of the procedure. For example, while browsing through Wikipedia, I found this picture of a femur replacement. (WARNING: this image is graphic! If you don’t like the sight of blood, I advise you not to look at it). In contrast to an image like this one, a medical animation can give patients a lot of information about the procedure without terrifying them by showing a lot of blood and organs.

And that is a very cool thing.

Drew Berry

Drew Berry is a very cool guy. He works as a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) and has been there for over a decade. Born in New York, he moved to Australia to attend the University of Melbourne where he received a Bachelor of Science degree and then a Master of Science degree for his work using time-lapse microscopy to study human cells. He started animating in 1995 when a friend gave him a copy of Infini-D. Over the next few years, he continued to animate on the side, and work as “the Photoshop guy” at WEHI during the day. He then started some work on some animations explaining the life cycle of the malaria parasite using new data that some of his fellow scientist at WEHI had discovered and an education copy of 3ds Max. These animations proved to be quite popular and jumpstarted him into a full Career in Medical animation. Since then, he has switched to using Maya (which I think is cool because that's the program I use in all my animation classes) and his work has been featured in documentaries, TV shows, museums and art galleries in Australian, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, France, and the US. This year, Drew Berry was awarded with a MacArthur fellowship. (If you don’t know what that is, look here)

However, besides being awesome and relatively renowned, he is also pretty approachable. Let me explain. After learning about Mr. Berry and doing some research on his work, I decided to e-mail him and see if he had any helpful hints for someone doing research on biomedical animation and interested in possibly pursuing it as a career. I sent an email on a Friday morning and by that night I had already received a reply. He had a few good tips that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own and also referred me to a few different website that were pretty cool. I was planning on actually writing what he said and which websites he recommended, but I just went back into my e-mails and re-read it and found a little note in the “letterhead” at the bottom stating that the information in the e-mail is confidential and asking that I not print, share, forward, disclose, or use it without asking permission first. So, sorry, but I’m just going to tell you that it was pretty helpful, cool stuff and if you want to know for yourself, you could e-mail him yourself and I’m sure he’d be happy to answer you.

A few more interesting things before finishing up this post:

I realized that I watched Mr. Berry’s Malaria parasite video my freshman year when doing some research for a Health Promotion class I was in. Also, while looking through some other things that Mr. Berry has animated, I found one that my molecular biology professor had shown us part of one of his pieces depicting DNA replication. So, even though I hadn’t even heard of Drew Berry before starting this blog, I was already familiar with some of his work.  

Social Bookmarking Soul Mate

GAPCarey has a delicious account. For that small minority of you who might think that the previous sentence refers to an account with an exceedingly pleasurable taste, you are wrong. Delicious, formerly known as “del.icio.us” is, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, “a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.” In other words, GAPCarey, whose real name is a complete mystery to me, bookmarks websites that he (though for all I know GAPCarey might be a she, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll assume he’s a he) finds interesting and then shares those bookmarks with anyone in the world who wants to look at them. However, the best part about GAPCarey and his delicious account is not simply that he tags things and shares them, but rather what he tags and shares.

The top ten most common tags on GAPCarey account are, in order: science, education, biology, resources, interactive, tools, animations, web2.0, math, and teaching. The research project I am working on is about how animations can be used as interactive teaching tools to enhance medical education in specific as well as biology and science education in general. So GAPCarey and his delicious account have potential to be a really great resource for me in my research and also probably has links to a lot of interesting things that I may want to comment on in this blog. He just might be, as one of my professors would say, my “social bookmarking soul mate.” However, before we make any conclusions, let us examine GAPCarey more thoroughly so that we may be equipped to make the most accurate decision possible.

We already know what he tags. Now the question is, how does he tag? The first word that comes to mind? Prolifically. He adds probably an average of two or three new bookmarks per day and has bookmarked 831 sites using hundreds of different tagging categories. Most of the time, he doesn’t write any comments, but simply tags them the site with anywhere from one to nine different tags. Sometimes, he does have some comments, but only on about one in 20 bookmarks or so. This is slightly disappointing, because comments can give so much information about whether a site is helpful or not. However, regardless of the lack of comments, I was able to find a few really interesting sites

One of GAPCarey’s bookmarks led me to the “BioInteractive” section within the Howard Hughes Medical Institute website. This site has dozens of animations on multiple topics including, biodiversity, infectious diseases, neuroscience, cancer, obesity, evolution, immunology and DNA. I even found one of the animations about DNA replication that my molecular biology teacher showed us a few weeks ago. Another site I found through GAPCarey’s bookmarks is the Virtual Medical Centre (judging by the spelling of “centre” and by the narrator’s accent, it is a UK-based website), which has over 250 medical animations to help explain various medical conditions as well as common medical procedures. Both of these are really great resources and the quality of the animations is quite good as well.

However, while I did find these two very interesting sites, I had to sift through quite a few other less helpful bookmarks to do so. It seems that GAPCarey’s interest differ from mine in a few key ways. First, while I am mostly interested in medical and biological animations, he is interested in all fields of science. Secondly, many of GAPCarey’s bookmarks tags as “animations” contain 2d animations as well as, or instead of 3d ones. While 2d animations certainly have their place, I’m really not that interested in them for the purposes of my research or for this blog. In conclusion, then, I think that GAPCarey’s bookmarks may be a good research source for me (and for all of you who actually read my blog), but there are enough differences in our interests that we’ll still have to do a considerable amount of sorting. So as a social bookmarking soul mate, I think he gets a 7 out of 10.

New Research Project

As I’ve been doing research (and as I’ve just been going to class) I’ve realized that one of the major intersections between the fields of animation and medicine is in education. Since I’ve started this blog, both my organic chemistry professor and my molecular biology professor have used animations to help us visualize new concepts. So I decided to do some more in-depth research on animation as a teaching tool, with an emphasis on teaching science, but also in education as a whole. I went into this project assuming that the answer was self-evident: of course animation is an excellent teaching tool that helps students learn, right? The answer, as it turns out, is this: Probably. But maybe not as much as we’d think.

 

The first thing my research revealed was that there hasn’t been enough research to form a concrete conclusion. In some studies, the use of animation did facilitate learning in the test subjects. But in other studies, the test scores for students who viewed an animation was not significantly higher than those of students who viewed static images or plain text. Some researchers have suggested an explanation for this discrepancy, namely that the effectiveness of animation as a teaching tool depends heavily on the nature of the material that the animation is trying to teach as well as on the amount of non-essential information in the animation that the students have to sift through to find the pertinent material.

So, in the light of this research, I’ve decided to conduct a small study of my own, partly with the hopes of contributing to the greater body of knowledge in this area, but also out of curiosity and because my findings may benefit me in my quest to reconcile my major and minor. Also, it’s a requirement for one of my classes. In order for it to be the most helpful and the least redundant, I’ve tried to choose a research question that focuses on a specific type of learning that animation might be used in. In other words, because it is likely that animations are more effective when teaching some topics than others, I’ve tried to choose a specific kind of topic to research. So, without further ado, here is the question that my research project will attempt to answer:

Are computer animations more effective than static images for helping students visualize and learn about the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules?

How, you might ask, do I plan on accomplishing this?  The answer: a combination of a survey and an experiment. Using primarily Facebook and email messages, I plan on asking friends, family members and classmates–a relatively large and diverse demographic–to participate. Half the people will view a short animation explaining the “chair” conformation of a cyclohexane molecule, which has a very particular three-dimensional shape. The other half will view a few static images of the molecule and be able to read some text explaining the images. Both groups will then answer questions designed to determine comprehension of what they have just watched or read, as well as a few questions regarding their experience with the animation or the static images and their own opinion as to the effectiveness of each as a teaching tool. For the majority of participants, the content will likely be completely new, making it easier to assess the animations effectiveness for teaching novel information about a particular three-dimensional structure.

Hopefully, there will be a relatively large number of people who respond and the results will be representative of the population as a whole. But we’ll see.

And if you want to know the results, subscribe to the RSS feed and I’ll post updates from time to time.

Some Other Cool Blogs

While looking around at other blogs that are related to mine, I came across these two sites.
http://www.xvivo.net/blog/
http://prep4md.blogspot.com/

(And in case you are curious, here are the comments I left)

XVIVO

So as someone who is looking into pursuing a career in 3d animation, and more specifically, in biological/medical animation, I find this post intriguing, encouraging and helpful. I’m an undergrad at the University of Southern California majoring in biology and minoring in 3d animation. In my drawing class last semester, my professor’s favorite phrase that he continually drilled into our minds was “draw what you see.” It’s encouraging to know that was good training for my future career. However, your post also brings up some questions. Are art fundamentals essential to every aspect of 3d animation? I understand how they would be important for some parts of the animation process, but not all. For example, with things like texturing, lighting, and rendering, it makes perfects sense that one would need to be well acquainted with light, shadow, value, etc.  But what about things like modeling, rigging, and animating? In my class yesterday, we learned how to build skeletons for out characters and then bind the polygon mesh to it and then “paint” skin weights so that the model moves correctly with respect to the skeleton. How, in your opinion, does “art vocabulary” fit in to these components of the animation process?

Prep4med

I might have just missed it, but there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for these “Pre-Med Student” tip movies. And I was wondering: who is this guy? Is he a doctor? Does he teach at a medical school? Some of his tips in these movies seem really helpful, (and on that note, thanks for posting them) but some of them are a little more confusing. For example, in this movie he talks about choosing a major and recommends choosing one like biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, or “anything that sounds like it’s science about people.” I’m currently an undergrad at the University of Southern California and some of my professors have said almost the exact opposite. They recommend having a major (or at least a minor) in a completely different area of study. Their reasoning is that this would set you apart from the rest of the applicants who are nearly all science majors. Also, they would say, it demonstrates that you are a more well-rounded applicant and shows that you are able to handle the stress of having lots of different types of classes–an ability which is important for med school. So, as someone who is already in med school, which of these sets of advice do you think is better? 

Annotation

While doing some research on animation and it's role in biology and medicine, I found this article about it's usefulness as a teaching tool:

Ruiz, J. G., Cook, D. A., & Levinson, A. J. (2009). Computer animations in medical education: a critical literature review. Medical Education, 43(9), 838-846. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03429.x  

As the title suggests, this article analyses the current literature on computer animation as a tool to help teach medical students. The article “aims to illustrate potential applications of animations in medical education, to identify evidence-based principles for their design and use, and to propose an agenda for future research.” The researchers looked through articles from several databases including MEDLINE, PsychINFO, and EMBASE. The majority of these were originally studies that compared computer animations with other teaching tools, both computer-based and non-computer based. They found that the effectiveness of animations as a teaching tool varies widely, depending on the subject being taught, the type of animation, and the students’ previous knowledge on the subject. Because of the nature of the article, the bibliography is quite extensive: they reference 80 different sources, from almost as many different journals. Thus, to some degree, this paper is only as reliable as the sources upon which it is based. However, based on the origin of the sources, and after looking through a number of them, I think it safe to assume that this is article is quite a reliable source of information on this topic. Also, it presents both sides of the argument, namely that animation can sometimes be useful as a teaching tool, but other times it has been found to actually hinder learning. Overall, this article is very useful when doing research about the effectiveness of animation as a teaching tool, medical or otherwise. The bibliography was especially helpful and led me to numerous other articles on the subject. That being said, if the goal is to find new research on the topic, this article will not help. 

Trio

 Hello World
 When people ask me what my major is, there are several different, though all truthful, responses that I can choose from. Sometimes I simply reply “Biology.” It’s fast. It’s simple. And it doesn’t require much elaboration. However, while it is a truthful statement, I don’t think it contains the whole truth. A more complete answer would be “Biology: I’m pre-med” because I am, in fact, much more interested in becoming a doctor than learning about biology, chemistry, and physics. An even more complete answer about what I do at school, though not exactly what they asked, would be “Biology: I’m pre-med. And I have a minor in 3D animation.” Often when I say this, the response I get is something along the lines of “And how are those related?”

   To be honest, I’m still not completely sure how to answer that question. Over time, I’ve come up with multiple answers: some more satisfactory than others. Sometimes, I simply reply that they aren’t related, or that they are related only in the sense that I enjoy both of them. However, as I’ve delved deeper into the fields of 3D animation and medicine, I’ve come to recognize more and more areas where the two fields intersect.

   For example, I have often in my pre-med classes seen the professors use short animations to help us visualize a particular biological or chemical process. Whether it be the mechanism by which ATP powers the ion channels in the cell membrane or how a virus injects it’s genetic information into the host cell or how the four chambers of the heart work together to pump blood through the body, animation is a great way to help people visualize processes which they can’t otherwise observe for themselves. However, not only is animation useful in the world of medicine, but the reverse is true as well. Experience with anatomy and physiology is quite useful when modeling and rigging 3D characters. Knowledge of physics and of the properties of light would help you make your animations and your lighting more realistic and believable. An example that comes to mind is from a discussion panel I attended last year. One of the guest speakers had done some work for a program on Discovery and had animated a person getting shot in the head. He had to have all of the bones in the skull modeled correctly and then had to show the path of the bullet in a sort of x-ray view as it went through the man’s head. And he had to have all the correct physics for the bullet’s path and the damage it caused.

   These are just a few examples of how two of my passions, animation and medicine, intersect and complement each other. Throughout the rest of this blog, I intend to explore these two fields and the ways in which they are related. In doing so I hope to deepen my knowledge of and passion for these fields and maybe even figure out what I want to do with my life after college. 

Visual Complexity: Profile of a Blog

The main theme of the Visual Complexity blog is, according to the author Manuel Lima, the “visualization of complex networks.” It is actually a part of a larger website, also run by Lima, whose purpose is to

“leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.” 

Lima has a BFA in industrial design and an MFA in Design and technology. He created the website and the blog out of a desire to

“inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.”

The VC blog, though not actually related to either medicine or animation, seems to be targeting roughly the same audience as my blog: namely, people who are interested in combining science, technology, art. As this is a rather niche area of interest, it seems logical to assume that the blog has a relatively small, yet faithful, following. However, I am unable to find much evidence either confirming or refuting this assumption. Some of the posts have quite a few comments, but there are many others that have no comments on it at all. If there are large numbers of readers, they certainly don’t leave much trace of themselves. (Though now that I think of it, I didn't exactly leave any indication that I had been reading  his blog either.....) When “visual complexity” is typed into Google, Lima’s site is the first one on the list. Because of Google’s method of giving priority to pages with more links to and from them, this would seem to imply that the blog, or at least the site of which it is a part, is relatively popular. And it doesn’t appear on Technorati’s blog ranking list so it’s impossible to find out that way. Also, Lima doesn’t blog very often: there are only 9 new posts since the beginning of 2010.

I find the blog really interesting because I’ve never seen any other blog quite like it. The Visual Complexity blog has, appropriately, relatively little text and lots of images. Most of Lima’s posts are comments on some new technology, or a new program/work of art that has come out recently. For example, in his post “Artforms of Nature,” he has two beautiful images created with a new plug-in for photoshop and based on the work of German Biologist Earnst Haekel. In another post, he critiques an article about the future of infographics, points out some flaws in the author’s arguments, and presents his own views. He also provides links to the article as well as to one of the tools the artist discusses (which in spite of the article written about it is still very fun to play with. The tool is called Flame, and it a sort of painting program that uses a special kind of brush to give you really cool effects. However, that description gives it no justice so you really should just go check it out yourself. I spent probably 20 minutes playing with it before forcing myself to get back to work.) Overall, the posts are professional, short on words, long on images, and full of links to the sites that Lima comments on.

Because of the purposes of my blog, I’ll have to have more words and fewer pictures. Or maybe no pictures. However, I definitely like the copiousness of links throughout Lima’s posts and I hope to emulate that in my blog.  

Voice of the Blogger

At first, as I was looking for blogs similar to mine, I didn't think I'd be able to find any. Most blogs were related to animation or medicine, not animation and medicine. And anything I could find that was related to both was either a professional website, or was just the topic of a single post, not the entire blog. After playing around with different keyword searches in google, I finally came across a blog that is, well, pretty much amazing. Written by graduate student Sarah Hegmann, the blog is entitled Anatamation: where Anatomy meets Animation. Not only is the topic extremely similar to mine, but it is really  well written. If I were to pick three words describing the voice used in Sarah's blog, I would have to say, “conversational, engaging, and technical.” Or, to put it another way, her blog would be pretty easy to read and interesting to the average blog reader, but it is even better for those of us familiar with her field.

One of the most prominent aspects of the blog is the voice in which it is written. All of her posts are written in a very conversational manner and are thus quite easy to read. For example, when talking about how excited she is to be working on a newly upgraded computer she writes 

“And doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy feeling to know you are supporting a favorite program? Maybe that's just me... If the warm fuzzies don't do it for you, knowing that a 3000+ data set can be opened without hiccups and in less than 2 minutes may peak your interest.” 

Both the use of “warm fuzzies” and her use of “I” and “you” make it seem more like being in a conversation with someone and less like reading what someone else has written. In the same post, she writes that she is “beyond tickled” that some of her work is being used in a new Museum exhibit. At another time she describes a new free program as: 

“Just a whole barrel-full of awesome.” 

Whether or not Sarah Hegmann talks like this all the time, I have no idea. But it certainly adds to the conversational tone and makes her blog feel like a conversation with a good friend.

However, not only is the blog conversational, but also it is interesting, and sometimes downright hilarious. First off, though maybe least important, is the sentence structure.  It varies from long and somewhat complex, to short, and sometimes fragmented. For example:

"Now known just as Unity, (the "indie") was dropped, it has all the features that UnityIndie had. For no money. The game engine that has "made people millionaires" is opening its doors to the students, hobbiests, and other less fortunate folk who couldn't afford this awesome program before."

While the sentence structure in this post helps make it interesting to read, the title makes it funny. “Unity 2.6 Free to a Good Home.” This is obviously a play on the common advertisements for dogs, cats, couches, family heirlooms, or anything else in need of “a good home.” Another example of humor in the blog is from the end of a different post, in which she describes working with digital scans and images of mummies. After discussing how they are more difficult to work with than scans from live humans, she writes 

“That is pretty much it. Now, I have to find someone I can vivisect to see the brachioplexus in action. Any volunteers?"

However, while most of her blog posts are easily readable for anyone, some of them are geared towards a very specific audience. For example, she posts one of the animations she’s been working on and then writes this as part of her description:

I used a basic particle system for the blood, with a rotating erythrocyte instanced onto the particles - with a uniform field, a turbulence field, and a radial field also affecting the particles. They still have some self collision issues that need to be worked out, obviously. I attempted to use the work around of having each particle generate a radial field, but while that partially works... it also causes the blood to be very jumpy in parts.

The use of “erythrocyte” instead of “red blood cell” and use of the animation-specific terminology greatly narrows down the number of people who would find this passage understandable.

While the technicality of some of her posts (as well as the content) might be targeted towards a relatively small audience, the conversational tone and the humor appeal, I would think, to everyone. Also, though certainly technical, the field of 3D animation is filled with people who are fun-loving and humorous. Thus, I think Sarah’s voice in her blog is both appropriate for the subject matter, and probably increases her reader-base as well. 

Voice Post

If I were to pick three words describing the voice used in Sarah Hegmann’s “Anatamation” blog, I would have to say, “conversational, engaging, and technical.” Or, to put it another way, her blog would be pretty easy to read and interesting to the average blog reader, but it is even better for those familiar with her field.

One of the most prominent aspects of the blog is the voice in which it is written. All of her posts are written in a very conversational manner and are thus quite easy to read. For example, when talking about how excited she is to be working on a newly upgraded computer she writes 

“And doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy feeling to know you are supporting a favorite program? Maybe that's just me... If the warm fuzzies don't do it for you, knowing that a 3000+ data set can be opened without hiccups and in less than 2 minutes may peak your interest.” 

Both the use of “warm fuzzies” and her use of “I” and “you” make it seem more like being in a conversation with someone and less like reading what someone else has written. In another blog post, she writes that she is “beyond tickled” that some of her work is being used in a new Museum exhibit. At another time she describes a new free program as: 

“Just a whole barrel-full of awesome.” 

Whether or not Sarah Hegmann talks like this all the time, I have no idea. But it certainly adds to the conversational tone and makes her blog feel like a conversation with a good friend.

However, not only is the blog conversational, but also it is interesting, and sometimes downright hilarious. First off, though maybe least important, is the sentence structure.  It varies from long and somewhat complex, to short, and sometimes fragmented. For example:

"Now known just as Unity, (the "indie") was dropped, it has all the features that UnityIndie had. For no money. The game engine that has "made people millionaires" is opening its doors to the students, hobbiests, and other less fortunate folk who couldn't afford this awesome program before."

The title for this particular blog post is “Unity 2.6 Free to a Good Home” which is obviously a play on the common advertisements for dogs, cats, couches, or anything else in need of “a good home.” Another example of humor in the blog is from the end of a different post, in which she describes working with digital scans and images of mummies. After discussing how they are more difficult to work with than scans from live humans, she writes 

“That is pretty much it. Now, I have to find someone I can vivisect to see the brachioplexus in action. Any volunteers?"

However, while most of her blog posts are easily readable for anyone, some of them are geared towards a very specific audience. For example, she posts one of the animations she’s been working on and then writes this as part of her description:

I used a basic particle system for the blood, with a rotating erythrocyte instanced onto the particles - with a uniform field, a turbulence field, and a radial field also affecting the particles. They still have some self collision issues that need to be worked out, obviously. I attempted to use the work around of having each particle generate a radial field, but while that partially works... it also causes the blood to be very jumpy in parts.

The use of “erythrocyte” instead of “red blood cell” and use of the animation-specific terminology greatly narrows down the number of people who would find this passage understandable.

While the technicality of some of her posts (as well as the content) might be targeted towards a relatively small audience, the conversational tone and the humor appeal, I would think, to everyone. Also, though certainly technical, the field of 3D animation is filled with people who are fun-loving and humorous. Thus, I think Sarah’s voice in her blog is both appropriate for the subject matter, and probably increases her reader-base as well. 

Visual Complexity

The main theme of the Visual Complexity blog is, according to the author Manuel Lima, the “visualization of complex networks.” It is actually a part of a larger website, also run by Lima, whose purpose is to “leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.” Lima has a BFA in industrial design and an MFA in Design and technology. He created the website and the blog out of a desire to “inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.”

The VC blog, though not actually related to either medicine or animation, seems to be targeting roughly the same audience as my blog: namely, people who are interested in combining science, technology, art. As this is a rather niche area of interest, it seems logical to assume that the blog has a relatively small, yet faithful, following. However, I am unable to find much evidence either confirming or refuting this assumption. Some of the posts have quite a few comments, but there are many others that have no comments on it at all. If there are large numbers of readers, they certainly don’t leave much trace of themselves. When “visual complexity” is typed into Google, Lima’s site is the first one on the list. Because of Google’s method of giving priority to pages with more links to and from them, this would seem to imply that the blog, or at least the site of which it is a part, is relatively popular. And it doesn’t appear on Technorati’s blog ranking list so it’s impossible to find out that way. Also, Lima doesn’t blog very often: there are only 9 new posts since the beginning of 2010.

I find the blog really interesting because I’ve never seen any other blog quite like it. The Visual Complexity blog has, appropriately, relatively little text and lots of images. Most of Lima’s posts are comments on some new technology, or a new program/work of art that has come out recently. For example, in his post “Artforms of Nature,” he has two beautiful images created with a new plug-in for photoshop and based on the work of German Biologist Earnst Haekel. In another post, he critiques an article about the future of infographics, points out some flaws in the author’s arguments, and presents his own views. He also provides links to the article as well as to one of the tools the artist discusses (which in spite of the article written about it is still very fun to play with). Overall, the posts are professional, short on words, long on images, and full of links to the sites that Lima comments on.

Because of the purposes of my blog, I’ll have to have more words and fewer pictures. However, I definitely like the copiousness of links throughout Lima’s posts and I hope to emulate that in my blog.  

Hello World

   When people ask me what my major is, there are several different, though all truthful, responses that I can choose from. Sometimes I simply reply “Biology.” It’s fast. It’s simple. And it doesn’t require much elaboration. However, while it is a truthful statement, I don’t think it contains the whole truth. A more complete answer would be “Biology: I’m pre-med” because I am, in fact, much more interested in becoming a doctor than learning about biology, chemistry, and physics. An even more complete answer about what I do at school, though not exactly what they asked, would be “Biology: I’m pre-med. And I have a minor in 3D animation.” Often when I say this, the response I get is something along the lines of “And how are those related?”

   To be honest, I’m still not completely sure how to answer that question. Over time, I’ve come up with multiple answers: some more satisfactory than others. Sometimes, I simply reply that they aren’t related, or that they are related only in the sense that I enjoy both of them. However, as I’ve delved deeper into the fields of 3D animation and medicine, I’ve come to recognize more and more areas where the two fields intersect.

   For example, I have often in my pre-mad classes seen the professors use short animations to help us visualize a particular biological or chemical process. Whether it be the mechanism by which ATP powers the ion channels in the cell membrane or how a virus injects it’s genetic information into the host cell or how the four chambers of the heart work together to pump blood through the body, animation is a great way to help people visualize processes which they can’t otherwise observe for themselves. However, not only is animation useful in the world of medicine, but the reverse is true as well. Experience with anatomy and physiology is quite useful when modeling and rigging 3D characters. Knowledge of physics and of the properties of light would help you make your animations and your lighting more realistic and believable. An example that comes to mind is from a discussion panel I attended last year. One of the guest speakers had done some work for a program on Discovery and had animated a person getting shot in the head. He had to have all of the bones in the skull modeled correctly and then had to show the path of the bullet in a sort of x-ray view as it went through the man’s head. And he had to have all the correct physics for the bullet’s path and the damage it caused.

   These are just a few examples of how two of my passions, animation and medicine, intersect and complement each other. Throughout the rest of this blog, I intend to explore these two fields and the ways in which they are related. In doing so I hope to deepen my knowledge of and passion for these fields and maybe even figure out what I want to do with my life after college.