CompuServe Messages

This flame was being shared via email – but I thought it might be interesting to open it to everybody for comments, it being a mainly a philosophical issue at this point. It pertains to "amazingly similarities" between work of different artists – I'm sure it's not the first time this has come up – and I think I read some comments here recently on the same topic. "AMAZING SIMILARITIES" About a month ago, I saw a PBS special entitled "AIDS:The Story So Far", produced by WGBH in Boston and the Aaron Diamond Foundation. The special was mostly live-action video of interviews with AIDS researchers but interspersed were 6 – 7 minutes of 3D animation of the virus "in action" in the body. The animation was credited to a single animator (who shall remain nameless) no company name given. I am almost sure it was done in 3DS (r2?), with "smoke" and "explode" IPAS rountines, but the software used is irrelevant to the issue of potential plaigarism; we used Crystal 3D in the original animation. ——– Almost as soon as the animation section began, my 10-year old spun around (catching me with my jaw hanging in stunned amazement), and said "Wow – somebody stole your AIDS film!". In 1991 I directed a multi-student 3D animation project on the AIDS virus at Columbia College in Chicago. The following comments pertain to "amazing similarities" between our film and the recently broadcast AIDS animation. The similarities were so great, that I thought initially it must have been done BY one of the students in our group; however, the artist credited was not known to me. The quality of the animation was "barely" broadcast – it was clearly not the really high end stuff you see on NOVA and such – in fact, it was really not much better than our student effort. The similarities were too great, I thought to be coincidence – on the other hand I can't believe that someone doing a deliberate ripoff would be so stupid as to not even bother to change colors, shapes or camera angles. "Judgement calls?" When doing scientific imaging/medical illustration there will automatically be "non-amazing similarities" in things like mesh structure – just because there is a requirement to stick to the currently-known facts. We credited the scientists who did the electron micrographic studies on which we based the model of the virus. Since the structure of the AIDS virus is well-known – I would expect any responsible illustrator's MODEL to be virtually identical to ours – but things which are entirely a matter of esthetics or creative judgement – such as what color or texture to use to put ON that mesh (nothing actually has color at this microscopic level since the structures are smaller than the wavelength of visible light), or how to represent hypothetical structures – I would expect to be different with every artist; in this case there were similarities. Some of the "processes" will also look similar e.g. there are only so many ways to show how endocytosis/exocytosis would work … BUT – "Directorial" choices, such as where in 360 degrees to put a loop of T-cell DNA, and from what angle viral DNA should fly in and insert itself, how to structurally simplify the viral DNA and RNA for these sequences – even the colors chosen – I would expect to differ – this, however, was the category in which the "amazing similarities" were most striking. The broadcast film even replicated BAD parts of our film. The final sequence, of newly-reproduced viral particles being released from a T-cell was so poor in our film that we considered cutting it (and I almost flunked the student who threw it together at the last minute under threat of flunking! – the T-cell was this really flat- and fake-looking, coarsely texture-mapped blob with little balls popping off of it and swarming into the foreground) – imagine my surprise to see the same bad sequence – and done pretty much as badly! The film differed in that some of the information was updated. e.g. it is now known that several different strains of HIV are produced in a single host – so the broadcast animation had different-colored little balls popping off instead of one color. The overall look is very 3D Studio-ish – or at least the way 3DS can sometimes look when a less-than-highly-skilled person tries to make it do organic shapes (I include myself in that category). All the students who worked on the project were graduating seniors, about to start job-hunting, and all had portfolio copies. In addition, the film was submitted to SIGGRAPH that year (not accepted) – and no one knows what became of the copy that was submitted. The 6-minute 3D animation I directed had a 1991 copyright, owned by Columbia College. As far as I know, the college never did anything with it – but I have had no contact with them since the completion of the project. Even if they had given permission to base something on our film (unlikely), I'm sure they would have insisted on a "with permission of " credit, at least. My guess is that this single animator (one of the thousand one-person businesses using 3DStudio?) somehow landed this plum of a job for WGBH, knew absolutely nothing about medical illustration (that he couldn't have learned from our film), had a deadline – and access to our film. This burns me, on behalf of the group of people who worked very hard on this project – it was, in fact, the first student 3D project that had ever gotten fully rendered and out to tape at Columbia College to that date. It saddens me because I had the impression, from visiting the Asoft forum, that people are generous with their work and ideas, even unto their mesh and project files, expect to be credited for their work, do not fear being ripped off, and are generally honorable – I would love to be uploading some of my work for critical comment – but not if I'm going to see it later, barely rehashed, in someone else's name, on broadcast TV. I'm not impugning the moral character of forum members per se – you are just the only large group of 3D animators with whom I have "contact" (albeit cyber); I had considered what went on here as probably representative of the species at large. Appears that it ain't. Fire away, all. Gayle Gross de Nunez, SAVANTES