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
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:
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:
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
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:
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.
