Creating a scene like this is a huge undertaking.
There's a lot of people involved.
There's a lot of research that went into it.
At the beginning, we had no idea how we would be able
to just technically create this scene with all of this richness.
Because it requires an incredible amount of computer power
to create a photorealistic environment
full of diversity and complexity.
What we like to do here is use computer graphics
to create environments and animals and creatures from scratch,
from reference, and from video.
We also use a technique called photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry is a technique for combining still imagery
to create either computer models,
or create mosaics of a large area.
Photogrammetry is hard enough,
but to do it underwater kind of amazes me.
We've been working with researchers
both within and outside the academy who have gone to coral reefs
and taken thousands of photos of various species of corals
so that's how we've gotten a lot of the coral models
we've been using is via photogrammetry.
The Visualization Studio’s experience with rendering mosaics
from a photogrammetry standpoint now, they are able to advise me
on how to make that process more efficient,
so that I might use it for a tool for future scientific research.
The hardest part was just starting this incredibly huge task
of putting down thousands and thousands of pieces of coral
and figuring out how to make it look good.
What you do is you take something and you replicate it many times
and you try and change it just enough each time.
You rotate it, you scale it, you kind of orient it different ways,
maybe change the color a little bit,
or kind of other subtle variations that you can do systematically.
As far as how many individual instances of each thing are in there
it's thousands, tens of thousands,
more than I can keep track of.
In addition to the corals, which are animals,
we also created other creatures
to draw the audience into this location.
The scene itself is filled with something like 3,000 fish.
We have 31 different species of fish.
We started by looking at the fish that we have here in our tank.
For a while, I was just going out there every morning,
just staring at the fish and trying to learn about how they move,
so I just sat there and tried to learn as much as I could
about what was going on with their behavior.
Then we began building the models for each fish.
Meanwhile, we needed to figure out a way to get the volume of fish
that we wanted into the scene, and we wanted quite a few.
So, I started researching it.
A piece of software that we use that is really good
in simulating crowds, like large numbers of people,
we were able to adapt that to simulate large crowds of fish.
We move over, and we look at a really interesting relationship
between this creature called a Crown of Thorns starfish,
which is this really amazing starfish, that's covered in spines.
They eat corals, so they can go through
and kind of decimate an entire reef, if they're not held in check.
But a little tiny crab called an Acropora crab,
that lives inside this coral, and when one of these Crown of Thorns
come out to, basically, attack its home, it tries to fight it off.
I did have to do a lot of hand animation for the crab
and Crown of Thorns battle scene,
because the crab is grabbing onto the spikes and shaking them,
and so that involved a lot of hands-on activity.
We had a scientist in here just the other day.
When she saw it, she was like,
"Wow, how'd you do that? It looks great!"
This whole process has been absolutely fascinating
and so much fun for me integrating with our visualizations team.
When they were developing a particular scene,
they would pull me in to advise how to make that scene
very, very scientifically accurate.
But the level of detail that they were going for was incredible.
It really, really challenged me to pull up some of the cutting edge,
really up-to-date literature to try to feed them
as much information as we know.
That opening scene shows the risks that we took
and that they are actually paying off with some beautiful imagery
that the audience will be able to experience.
We really want the audience to walk away from the show
not just entertained but also hopefully
they will have a greater sense of what coral reefs are about.
Right now coral reefs around the world are being challenged
by unprecedented stressors, mostly human-induced.
This show instills a sense of hope.
This is a difficult story, this is a turning point for reefs
but it's not too late.
We can turn this around collectively
if we make some responsible decisions moving forward.
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