Hollywood Magic: Engineering in the Movies

03/10/20 • 30 min

Bringing a touch of Hollywood glamour to Create the Future this week, we interview two visual effects (VFX) engineers whose companies have, between them, received Oscar nominations for visual effects on the Lion King, Gladiator, Life of Pi, the most recent Jungle Book, and won an Oscar for the hugely successful World War 1 movie, 1917.

Unlike special effects – explosions, animatronics, and atmospheric conditions created on set – visual effects are added to a scene digitally during post-production. Visual effects have created some of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema – the liquid metal terminator in Terminator 2, the dragons in Game of Thrones, and the magic in Harry Potter. But good visual effects are more than just visual entertainment; they add to the story that the creatives are trying to tell. Often, when they’re done well enough, we don’t notice them at all.

In this episode, we explore the crucial role of visual effects in storytelling across cinema, television, and advertising with Roy Trosh, Vice President of Global Systems Architecture at Technicolour, and David Spilsbury, Chief Technology Officer for advertising at the Moving Picture Company (MPC) in Soho London. We learn about their journeys into engineering, explore how to make a swimming pool in space, and discover why and how VFX engineers ‘chase the sun’.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

Follow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

Follow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Earthquake Engineering: Predicting Mother Nature

Earthquakes provide a complex challenge for engineers; they are difficult to predict, difficult to withstand and, subsequently, difficult to recover from. But that’s not all – as seen by the 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes, these events can also trigger unforeseen secondary disasters such as tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns, increasing the scale of the disaster several fold.

According to the United States Geological Survey, in an average year an estimated several million earthquakes occur around the world. Thankfully, most of these go undetected because they are in remote areas or are too small to register. However, 18 of these are typically major earthquakes that reach over magnitude 7 on the Richter scale. As a sense of scale, the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan in 2011 was so intense that it altered the distribution of the Earth's mass. As a result, it caused the earth to rotate slightly faster and has fractionally shortened the length of each day.

So how do you design our infrastructure to resist that? How do you determine the specific impact that an earthquake will have from region to region? While it was once a narrower discipline, earthquake engineering today combines several engineering fields with elements of sociology, political science, and finance in order to predict and mitigate the effects of these disasters.

In this episode of Create the Future, we speak with seismic expert Ziggy Lubkowski about the impact of earthquakes around the world, the origins of ‘flexible’ buildings, and how we can build more resilient structures in the future.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

Follow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Exploring the Quantum Realm With Jim Al-Khalili

If you’ve ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat, watched Avengers: Endgame, or binge-watched The Big Bang Theory, then a branch of physics called quantum mechanics may sound familiar. Quantum mechanics (or quantum theory) is one of two theories in physics that work to describe the fundamental properties of the universe, the other being Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Science fiction has wrapped quantum mechanics, which focuses on the atomic level, with an intimidating veil of esoterica and counterintuitivity – teleportation, things being in two places at once, particles also existing as waves, and so on. But the fact is a lot of the things we rely on every day wouldn’t exist without it. Smartphones, MRI scans, GPS, and even the structure of the internet rely on fundamental universal principles that it explains.

However, there has been much debate about whether the principles of physics and chemistry that underpin inanimate objects could also apply to biological systems. Enter quantum biology, a currently speculative field focused on studying biological systems through the lens of quantum mechanics. In the next decade or so, it could help to improve our understanding of a whole swathe of biological phenomena – DNA mutations, photosynthesis, and even the migration patterns of birds.

In this episode of Create the Future, we talk to someone well-versed in the intersectional study of quantum biology: QEPrize Judge Professor Jim Al-Khalili. We speak to Jim about his work and what he describes as the 'dawn of quantum bioengineering’. We also explore how Einstein's theory of relativity affects GPS, the relationship between science and engineering, and the important roles that both play in society.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

Follow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.