Contact: Maridith Geuder
Some Mississippi State art students now have an insider's knowledge of how those special-effect characters were created in "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace."
As part of a partnership with software maker Alias-Wavefront, the university is receiving $1.9 million in industry-standard animation programs. MSU first became an A-W "campus partner" in 1997 when the company, a subsidiary of California-based Silicon Graphics, made a $1 million software donation.
The new software has been used to create special effects in movies ranging from "Titantic" to "A Bug's Life." It also is employed for scientific and medical visualizations and for industrial designs, said Guillaume Chartier, associate professor of art and supervisor of MSU's animation laboratory.
Chartier teaches in the master's degree program in electronic visualization, a three-year art department curriculum that is one of the few of its kind in this country. In addition to art, majors in architecture, computer science, landscape architecture, and other academic areas also learn visualization techniques in the Stafford Hall laboratory.
The newly equipped facility features 11 Silicon Graphics workstations and a range of high-end software, including the new Maya Unlimited package.
"Maya is being used to create sophisticated visual effects, some of which are unknown to most people," Chartier said.
In "Phantom Menace," for instance, producers used the software to duplicate thousands of characters, thus saving considerable money and time.
Working with a powerful software not yet in place for some industry users gives Mississippi State students "skills to meet expanding demands from producers of film, video and interactive media," said art department head Brent Funderburk.
"There are career opportunities for our graduates in entertainment, in instructional technology and in multimedia," Funderburk added. "We have graduates working in telecommunications and television here in the state, as well as for major film producers on the West Coast."
With the resources available at the electronic visualization lab, University Television Center, National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, and School of Architecture's Digitial Research Imaging Laboratory, Funderburk said, "Mississippi State students have unparalleled opportunities in an emerging field."