Natural Phenomena in... "Surfs Up!"

I watched Sony's Surf's Up! the other day on the small screen. The use of natural phenomena was refreshingly ambitious most of the time and comically over-ambitious at others. Overall, it improved my impression of Sony's Animation group. A group of Sony Animation VPs and others came out to BYU for a visit a few weeks ago. They had good feedback for my student Cory Rheimschussel's cloud effects in "Kites" (mostly "that's hard, good luck") and the concept art for "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs", some of which was done by a BYU animation intern, looked great.

Back to "Surf's Up!"... it was good to see directors use weather, wind and time-of-day in a story. Scenes on the beach front, generally, included trees moving in the ocean breeze. A few scenes were actually set in weather other than sunny and clear. The rain was nicely done as was the sea fog. To my recollection, this is the first film in which trees moved in the wind and the weather was part of the set. Nice job.

Early on, there was a scene in which Cody rode a whale out of Shiverpool. Unfortunately the water-to-foam transition on the whale's wake was done poorly. Laughably poorly. I felt like I was watching a concept shot in dailies. I was surprised that it made the final cut. The transition seemed to be implemented as "when the curvature passes horizontal, switch immediately to foam!"

Possible Field Work Sites

We are looking for a field work test site somewhere in the desert. We need a place with the following characteristics:

1. Within 2.5 hours of Provo, Utah.
2. Includes a cool looking rock formation. Need to walk around the entire rock formation.
3. Low elevation. We want year-round access.
4. Is between 1 and 2 miles from the closest road. This is negotiable though.

Got any ideas?

We are thinking of using the Conquistadors near Little Holes Canyon near the Grand Canyon of the San Rafael Swell, see picture above. The problem with the Conquistadors is that they are next to a 50 foot cliff with loose rock. Safe enough, but safer would be better.

We are also thinking of using the first Pinnacle (following Steve Allen's guidebook) in Pinnacle Canyon off the Tidwell Draw North Road.

Reflectance from Photographs

Here's the problem: we've got an object of known geometry in a known location at a known time. The problem is to get the color and reflectance from a collection of those photographs. That's a large part of the intellectual merit of this proposal we are working on. The photograph shows such an object in my driveway on a Friday afternoon. The cylinder is 12 inches high and has a diameter of 6 inches. We painted it with matte and semi-gloss spray paint. The painted portions will allow us to calibrate our results with surfaces of known color and reflectance.