Mars Pathfinder by Dan Maas (NIN)

This 3d animation is the work of Dan Maas, a 19-year-old undergraduate at Cornell University enrolled in the university’s College Scholar program for independent, interdisciplinary study. Daniel Maas NASA Mars Pathfinder Animation perfectly set to “Sunspots” by Nine Inch Nails (NIN).

You Tube Mission to Mars animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajsXzTFLYA

Maas has been perfecting his artistic and technical ability to depict the drama of Mars landing missions for the past two years working with Steven Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy. Squyres, who will be the principal investigator on the Athena science cargoes to be carried by the new, long-range rovers, calls Dan’s work “sensational.”

When, earlier this summer, space agency officials saw a previous Mars-landing video made by Maas, they requested that he make a video to herald the 2003 mission. Squyres found Maas working at a summer job at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, a new graphics research lab in Los Angeles, and asked him to return to Ithaca.

Back home, the student produced the NASA video in just three days. “Thankfully I was able to re-use certain elements, such as the Martian landscape, from an earlier video. That saved a great deal of time and effort,” says Maas. “It was quite a stretch, though, to accomplish all of that rendering before the NASA deadline — I had all of our home computers and two laptops churning out the frames around the clock.”

Description of the Movie

The movie opens in true Hollywood style, with the rover’s antenna slowly appearing over a Martian ridge. The vehicle then descends a slope and after maneuvering its way around boulders approaches the edge of a crater, where its microscopic imager takes a fine-scale picture of the soil. Then it heads away into the distance as Maas’s “camera” swings up toward the sky — and a second space capsule. The capsule makes a fiery descent, then a parachute is deployed and airbags inflate to cushion the landing, which is made “bouncing ball”- style, first used in the successful 1997 Pathfinder mission. Then the second rover emerges and begins exploring an ancient lakebed.

Producing Animations since the age of 10

Maas, who entered Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences at the age of 16, has been producing digital animations since he was 10, although his interest in film goes even farther back. His father, James, the noted Cornell professor of psychology, recalls giving him a home-built toy film-editing machine for his third birthday. At the age of 16, Dan Maas started his own company, Digital Cinema, to provide animations for television commercials, and at the age of 17, he went to Los Angeles to intern at one of the leading digital animation studios. In the meantime, he has been studying theater arts at Cornell under David Feldshuh, professor of theatre, film and dance, and taking courses in math and physics.

Somehow Maas also found time to work and study in Cornell’s astronomy department, which is where he met Squyres, who as a seasoned mission scientist had not been impressed by previous videos that had attempted to depict space missions. “They were dry as dust,” he says. But when Squyres discovered Maas’s abilities to create such computer-generated scenes as a helicopter being struck by a missile or a prison guard tower blowing up, he signed on the then-freshman student. “The job interview consisted of two words: ‘You’re hired,’ ” he recalls.

Good old Pen and Paper

Maas begins each video by hand sketching a storyboard, with each panel depicting a specific scene from the Mars mission, which he transfers to the computer with a wash of color. Then, using a program called Lightwave, he begins creating the images in three-dimensional detail. Later, using another program, Digital Fusion, he creates special effects, such as graininess to simulate the look of film, and lens flare — the bright flash caused by the sun.

Almost none of Maas’s scenes contain actual photographic images. Instead he uses a wealth of material — conversations with Squyres and engineers, blueprints, images from NASA web sites — to create his computer-generated space flight. He has even visited the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena to talk to the engineers managing the rover mission.

Source: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Aug00/DanMaas.Mars.deb.html

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