And The Oscar Goes To … Science

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, seafaring iguanas and a prehistoric wasp that captured its prey in one of a kind way. But first, this week, Hollywood celebrated cinema and science. The Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards honored the groundbreaking science and innovations that make movies so magical.

SPEAKER 1: Well, it’s hard to believe that setting people on fire for 20-plus years can get you an Academy Award, but here we are.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Here to tell us more about the newest advances in safely setting performers on fire and the other big screen breakthroughs is Darin Grant, co-chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee, part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He’s a technologist who’s worked in visual effects and on films including ones I know you’ve heard of Titanic, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda. Darin, welcome to Science Friday.

DARIN GRANT: Thank you, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Walk us through some of the innovations and discoveries that were winners this year and also what movies I might have seen them in.

DARIN GRANT: There– were I think there were 14 different categories this year or 14 different awards this year. I’ll talk one that there was a clip at the beginning about a guy talking about setting himself on fire, and I happened to lead that investigation. And so that one I– it’s near and dear to my heart, which is heat protective gels.

And so that’s basically how do people light themselves on fire whether they have clothing on or whether it’s– they call it a naked burn. You have to be totally naked, but just your skin is lit on fire on screen. And there are these heat protective gels obviously to make people feel safe when they’re doing it, but also there’s been a significant innovation in there in the last almost 40 years. There’s been significant innovation to change and make that safer, faster, and better for on screen work. And so we were able to award three different honorees earlier this week.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What was the innovation that made them safer?

DARIN GRANT: Yeah, so basically one of the big things that’s changed the last 40 years is that the base layer, that protective gel, is called a hydrogel because it’s basically water suspended in this gel. So you want to keep the water on your body between– as a layer between you and the accelerant or gasoline or fuel that you’re pouring on yourself and then lighting on lighting on fire. And then you want it to keep semi-far away from your body because the water is right next to your body. It’s going to boil. It’s going to boil your skin.

So this is a hydrogel that basically is a protective layer in between. And one of the things that’s really important is that those gels stay in place because it’s a stunt actor and they’re moving around. And if you roll on the floor and then there’s a patch of stuff that’s– the patch of your body that’s not covered, you’re going to get burned.

And so it’s important that this stuff is viscous. It’s like the stickiest snot you’re ever going to see. You can try to flick it off your finger, and it doesn’t flick off. So you have this nice protective layer no matter where.

And then one of the award winners did something even cooler on top of that, which is had the observation that the best way to have fire safety is to make sure that the accelerant that– whether it’s lighter fluid– they had– he made a special accelerant that bonds to that hydro layer. So first you want to make sure that stick– that goo is everywhere protecting you. And then you want to say I just want the fire right here.

So it’s crazy things like you could make a fire mohawk on somebody’s head. Just I only want the burn to go here. Light it on fire. Super cool.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s really cool. You said that you were part of the team that investigated this. Did you get hands on with this gel?

DARIN GRANT: We did. And so I will say as a co-chair of the committee, I take the executive privilege sometimes that’s the one I want to do. And the interesting thing there is that so they– hey, do you want to try it. Yes. Hard yes. And you may go, well, do you really want to yourself on fire.

Here’s the interesting thing. If I got burned, they’re not getting an award. So it is the safest way that I could be lit on fire in my life. So it was a definite yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What was it like?

DARIN GRANT: It was safe. It was safe. I was like– I was hamming it up for the camera. I was faking that I was on fire just to freak out the– freak out that awardee. But, no, it was super safe. It was fun.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So how much of the scientific process would you say is involved in making movie technology. Is it the same rules of engagement forming and testing hypotheses and experimenting?

DARIN GRANT: Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a formal paper or things like that. But ultimately, these award winners, they’re buckets of goo. [LAUGHS] And some of them– one of the award winners is a chemical engineer who has nothing to do with filmmaking. He just happened to get connected to somebody who said can you make this work, and he did it.

The other awardees– we had three awardees in this area– the other two, career stunt people. And they just– they knew some basics and kept on trying and reading and trying and trying different experiments until they found something that actually worked. And some of the trying was like oh, I’m going to put this gel on me and I’m going to light myself on fire. Does that hurt?

And we have ones that are super nerdy and super technical. We have some of the first machine learning based awards this year. And those also involve lots of trials, lots of experimentation in order to finally figure out that a-ha moment, And That’s one thing that’s really important about these awards is we’re looking to award the people that had that a-ha moment, that moment of innovation that nobody else had. Point is to push people and remind people and recognize people for doing something above and beyond what everybody else has done, and those are the people that get the awards.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you think is one of the most important technical advances or a-ha moments in movies from the last five years that I might not be aware of but has changed my viewing experience.

DARIN GRANT: Gosh, well, safety and anything that improves safety in filmmaking is super valuable. A number of years ago, we had a pneumatic car flipper. It is what it sounds like. You have cars that flip on screen all the time and car chases and stuff like that. And what they used to do was they’d have these gigantic air cannons and just go go, and they’d blow air underneath the car and it would flip in the air. And that’s non-deterministic.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They’d literally flip it is what I’m hearing.

DARIN GRANT: They’d flip it In the air with air cannons, and so it’s non-deterministic. It’s like air flow and different viscosities and your stokes equations and all sorts of tech that could go awry. And it’s random in the real world.

And instead this team inserted a gigantic pneumatic piston in the middle of the car so that they could hit it and it would flip in the exact same way because it was a piston driving down into the cement the exact same way every time so it was far more predictable and far safer. And then you could get the camera a lot closer.

If you see cars flipping now, it’s probably that instead of the air cannons. That’s another aspect of one of the things that we think about in these awards is how much– well, first, how much impact and I’m not talking about into the cement but also how much adoption we have. If this is something that’s so good and people see it and I got to do it that way, you’ve changed motion pictures. We’re all doing it– we’re all doing it with a big steel rod inside the car instead of an air cannon, then that’s significant.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I wanted to ask you about animation and how we animate humans and how that’s changed over time. I was watching Toy Story recently with my kid and the kids’ faces in that movie by today’s standards are a little frightening honestly. And I remember–

DARIN GRANT: Yeah. Yeah Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You see them today and you’re like, wow, this has really changed since when I watched this the first time.

DARIN GRANT: Right.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have there been advances in this, in rendering people?

DARIN GRANT: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so there’s advances in rendering people over many years, and it’s an interesting note. That’s one of the reasons why Toy Story was about toys was because digital humans kind of looked like that as a child. And you’re like, oh, we don’t want to watch a whole movie about that. But toys, shiny objects were a lot easier to do back in the early days of computer graphics.

And to your point about, well, when I look back at it, it’s like, oh, wow, that looks really different. It’s something that was even– all respect to my colleagues who did amazing work on Titanic, the digital water still looks amazing, but the digital humans from 1997 when that came out compared to digital humans today, markedly different. If you go back and look at Titanic and some of the humans on the– walking on the bow of the ship, oof.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But is there science involved in that? What specifically happened with faces?

DARIN GRANT: Well, for the longest time, digital humans were the Holy Grail of visual effects. If you remember The Lord of the Rings– The Two Towers and Gollum in that movie, there’s a significant difference in how a Gollum looked in that movie compared to all of the digital humans to date, and the look of his skin looked significantly better.

And what was different about that skin of Gollum and now every humanoid or digital character since then is this idea of subsurface scattering. And that’s the idea of if you’re at home and you got a flashlight in the mirror and you take the flashlight, you shine it through the back of your ear and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, you can see the light coming through your earlobe. I’ll wait for everybody to do it at home.

So when you do that, you can see– you can see that light coming through, and it’s reddish because it’s colored by the blood in your ear. What it is is when light goes through, it’s being scattered by your skin, by your fascia– the fascia underneath the fat, and the light is being scattered so it’s this diffused light that comes through your ear. And up until two– Lord of the Rings– The Two Towers, there had been research done into it, but I think that was one of the first ones were really put into practice in a film and changed everybody’s view of, oh, everybody’s got to do it this way now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you have a favorite– a recent favorite visual effects heavy movie that you were like this is knocking my socks off?

DARIN GRANT: I do. I really loved Everything Everywhere All at Once. And what was amazing about that film was most of the visual effects– I think there were 600 or so– achieved by a team of five artists.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow.

DARIN GRANT: And if you look at the credits on most movies now, there is not five visual effects people. It is a scrolling list of hundreds and hundreds of people all over the world contributing to the visual effects, which is why they’re so good. But Everything Everywhere All at Once, most of the work was done by just five artists.

And the thing that I loved about that was those artists were more than just artists in back room. Those were true collaborators with the Daniels. One of the VFX supervisor told me about one time he was– I was working on Daniel’s computer in his bedroom while his wife was making his dinner. And that closeness of connection, those individuals really felt like they were a part of making that movie, that was super inspiring. I love that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s it like for you when you go to a movie. Darin? Are you constantly thinking about the craft and the tech?

DARIN GRANT: Well, you’re talking about looking back at things and going, oh, I can see that now. And in the early days you could– I’d go into a movie and I would be distracted by maybe bad visual effects or bad computer animation, bad character animation. But nowadays, things have gotten so good that I can finally enjoy the movies again. And I think as technology is pushed farther and the differences, yes, I can still see some things, but I don’t get as distracted as I used to.

And I hope that the general moviegoing audience doesn’t get distracted at all anymore. And so they can really just focus on the story. And that’s another thing that I got into this business because I want to help make stories. I want to help– stories are a way that we tell history. And this is my small way of being a part of history.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you so much, Darin, for taking the time.

DARIN GRANT: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Darin Grant is a co-chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee. And if you want to learn more about how that burn gel was created, head to our website, sciencefriday.com/techawards.

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