Here’s How An Aussie Engineer Won An Academy Award

You might think that engineering is a pretty dry career with a whole lot of diagrams, blueprints and trigonometry. Eek. 

You might also think that making movies is solely reserved for wannabe writers and directors, watching Quentin Tarantino and Greta Gerwig on repeat.

But as audiences seek new visual effects and ways to engage with stories, engineers are an essential part of the film industry. 

Most of your fave movies would look veeery different without engineers. From making practical effects and techniques like steadicam or pyrotechnics, all the way to special effects and CGI, engineers blend science and maths with creativity. Engineers get to create some insane things, especially in the film industry! 

Someone who’s made an amazing career as an electrical engineer working in the film industry is Guy Griffiths.

He’s the Director of R&D (Research and Development) for Oscar-winning visual effects, animation, and production studio Animal Logic, the minds behind the animation for the LEGO Movies, Happy Feet, Walking with Dinosaurs and more. They’ve also worked on the visual effects for movies including Alien: Covenant, The Great Gatsby and The Matrix.
 
His amazing work led to Happy Feet winning the academy award for Best Animated Feature in 2007, and The Lego Movie (2014) making $468 million worldwide. 😮

Speaking of, let’s take a geez at The Lego Movie. 
 
If you’ve seen this banger of a film, you might have even thought that the whole thing was animated using stop-motion rather than CGI, because of how photorealistic the models, lighting and environment is.
 
This stop-motion look is thanks to the animators trying their hardest to ensure that they included aspects of real Lego pieces when creating their characters.
 
An important level to creating this depth was lighting and the way it interacts with the lego bricks. This threw up hurdles for existing tools, such as Pixar’s software RenderMan.

So, what did Griffiths and his company do? They literally developed a new software called Glimpse to be a full production renderer, adding more and more capability to it during the project. This is what engineering is all about - coming up with new innovative solutions to solve problems!

One rendering technique used in animation is ray tracing. See, when a ray of light hits a surface, it can be absorbed, reflected, refracted or fluoresced. So, if you’ve got a certain side of a city, there’s a lot of places that ray can bounce, right? Basically, without ray tracing and huge amounts of description through geometry, animations would look flat and lack life.

To develop such tools, Griffiths says that there’s a mix of physics, maths, and computational skills among a R&D group of roughly 40. Developers need to make detailed mathematical descriptions of the physical world into systems that artists can then manipulate to create and animate the world to deliver an immersive experience for audiences.

So, the next time you watch a movie, whether it has some insane visual effects, or it’s animated, think of the people behind the scenes creating software and merging maths, art, and engineering to bring a story to life. Pretty insane, huh!?
 
If this all sounds unreal, you don’t wanna miss our upcoming academy; “Engineering Your Future”. We partnered with Engineers Australia to take a deep dive into the world of engineering. This academy covers topics like how engineering is everywhere, how it’s changed and will continue to change the world, what types of engineering paths there are, what qualifications you’ll need and what a day in the life of an engineer looks like (to just name a few). Take the next step in engineering here! Who knows, you could win an Oscar one day too. 😉