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Science Fact, Not Fiction:
NASA's Astronomy Visualization Lab
by Neal Romanek
Three government employees on the campus of The Johns Hopkins University may constitute one of the most influential entities in the field of visual effects. The Astronomy Visualization Lab (AVL) is responsible for providing the public with images and video describing the discoveries of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. When a news agency illustrates the Hubble's latest findings, with video captioned "NASA Animation", it is the work of the Astronomy Visualization Lab on display.
The Astronomy Visualization Lab is three men - producer / editor Bryan Preston, senior animator Greg Bacon, and animator James Gitlin. Working directly with Hubble astronomers, they transform often theoretical and erudite interpretations of Hubble data into motion images that accurately describe the phenomena and ignite the public imagination.
The Astronomy Visualization Lab is located at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the main campus of Johns Hopkins university, north of downtown Baltimore, MD. The Institute is not affiliated with the university, but does occupy a building on the campus. The AVL is technically owned by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), but answers to and is operated by NASA.
When an astronomer makes a discovery with Hubble, the NASA news team assesses whether the discovery is newsworthy. If so, the AVL team is given the green light to work with scientists at the Institute to visualize that discovery for a Video News Release.
Editor Bryan Preston, who worked in broadcasting for the military before coming to the AVL almost four years ago says "One of the unique things about the institute is that we have astronomers a phone call away. They'll come down and discuss the science in great detail. We then try to relate that to what the public understands to make a better story out of it, then we go back with storyboards and go through the whole production process like a regular production house would. We're a small shop. We don't have a lighting specialist, a texture specialist, a modeling specialist. We're all specialists in our own right."
The AVL turns scientific data--sometimes an image of a star, galaxy, nebula; sometimes a spectrum or mass of numbers requiring deciphering by an astronomer--into a moving image.
The tools of their trade are the same as those of any other animation or post-production house. "For editing, Avid Media Composer 9000 XL is our mainstay," says Bryan Preston, "It's the heart and soul of how we get the animations and videos put together. It's one of the NT-based Meridian systems. Just a phenomenal system. We use a lot of After Effects for motion graphics and compositing and also use Photoshop and Illustrator. Also the Blue ICE board is something I can not imagine living without." Preston uses Sonic Foundry products for sound design--principally Sound Forge and Acid Pro--and Media Cleaner is their choice for file compression for the internet.
Plug-in's for After Effects are essential to their job. "Especially since most of our work is so dust and particle driven." says Preston, "Evolution is probably my favorite."
Prior to joining the AVL, senior animator, Greg Bacon, had been a 3D animator doing simulations for NASA for eleven years, primarily on Alias|Wavefront products. He currently uses Alias|Wavefront's Maya for SGI to create the AVL's 3D animations and their 2D compositing work in After Effects is done on Macintosh. Occasionally, the team also uses Lightwave. The AVL has no digital asset management system, but plans to implement one soon.
The artists at the AVL do not receive image information directly from Hubble because the sheer magnitude of data would be overwhelming. Preston explains. "The Hubble Deep Field, which was taken over the Christmas holiday of 1995, stared at the same patch of the sky for about ten straight days and during that time took thousands of images. Those images obviously don't come to us. It's gigs and gigs of data. What comes to us is a distilled form of that. We have an imaging guy here who takes the data from the astronomers and then, using Photoshop, turns that into the still images that we put in releases and on the web."
Creating the 3D animation of swirling galaxies, and dissolving nebulae requires more abstract thinking and a bit of detective work. "Hubble is taking snapshots of things that occurred millions of years ago," says senior animator Bacon, "So the astronomers give us a little history lesson of what has actually occurred, then we take that history lesson and compress it into a thirty second animation of what has occurred in the past, or how things may look in the future. There are also simulations created by the astronomers, where they give us x, y, and z data transformations, positions in space. I can take that data and then actually fly around it and see it from different perspectives. That's also where we come in."
The AVL's newest project, called "Hubble Minute", is a departure from their usual press release work. "Hubble Minute" is a series of information-packed vignettes about Hubble Telescope and its discoveries. The idea for the project was generated in the shop and then pitched to the Hubble news team, who pitched it to NASA. NASA responded enthusiastically.
"It's a very high-end product," says Preston, the writer and director of Hubble Minute, "We do a lot of travelling for it. We traveled out to L.A. to shoot interviews for the first one and we'll be flying out again in June to shoot more. We're trying to tell an astronomical story in two minutes and still give it some weight. And the way we do that is with clean editing in the Avid, clean compositing in After Effects, and with basically the best 3D animation that's done under NASA's domain."
The team takes six to eight weeks to create an episode of "Hubble Minute". Production takes place concurrently with their other Hubble projects. "Hubble Minute" provides the team with more creative freedom than they are able to exercise in their regular press work.
"I write the scripts and try to stick as close to those as I can." says Preston, "But when you start working in the editing and you see things that would just work better, or something in the script that's just not working, we do have the freedom to make decisions right there. I've worked on other projects where the script is sacred and you can't do anything that's not set in stone in the script. With Hubble Minute, we try to stick as close as we can to the script, but if something works better creatively we go with that."
"Hubble Minute" has been picked up by NASA TV, one of AVL's major customers, as well as by Associated Press TV. "It also seems to be working well in museum kiosks and alcove theatres and things like that." says Preston, "We have a few ideas for exhibition in non-traditional places--malls and airports and things like that. Hopefully you won't be able to escape this thing."
Even in astronomy, the age-old conflict rages between what is true and what the public wants. Preston says, "There's always some give and take with the astronomers. There's a constant battle here between accuracy versus what the public wants to see and will understand. We're the resident experts for gauging what the public will be interested in. We're all layman. There's not a Ph.D. in the shop."
Sometimes problems can arise from producing imagery that is too accurate. "We created a piece about three or four months ago," explains Greg Bacon, "which was a crystallized icy asteroid. It looked very realistic and we got complaints because it looked too real. They thought it was a Hubble image."
After years of working with the real thing, the AVL team is unimpressed with the accuracy of Hollywood space effects. "The ILM's of the world, do a great job with the effects, but the science is seldom accurate." Greg Bacon observes.
But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the AVL team may be one of the best respected effects crews in the country. Their work has found its way into a shocking number of Hollywood effects. Animator James Gitlin observes: "You see our images--or parts of them--used in the backgrounds video games, where it influences the look of a whole production, or in shows where they use our actual clips and re-colorize them and stick them in their piece."
Notable use of AVL animation has occurred on the animated feature "Titan A.E." (2000) and the series "Star Trek: Voyager", as well as programming on The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, and Sci-Fi Channel.
"You definitely see it on TLC and the Discovery Channel where they've taken our pieces and they massaged them a little bit by either blowing them out, changing the color, playing them in reverse, that kind of thing." explains Preston, "'Star Trek: Voyager' is a good example. Just about any time they fly into a dangerous region in the Delta Quadrant, it looks like an old Hubble image that's been restyled."
The most unexpected use of an animation created at AVL was on the series "Friends". "In the episode that Ross and Rachel got together for the first time, they're in a planetarium and the video that's playing in background, is a Big Bang animation that was done here a few years ago by an animator named Dana Barry."
Animator James Gitlin, the newest member of the AVL crew, feels more proud than plagiarized: "Our images have influenced how space is depicted. Years ago, you didn't see all these colors and nebulosity and clouds. They just thought space was black with white dots in it, and that's how they showed it with visual effects. But the images that Hubble has produced in the last couple of years have actually influenced the way they've designed these things to look."
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