Schrodinger's Office

by Scott Carter

* Winner of Best Visual Effects Editing award at the 2001 University of Alberta Filmzone Misfits Film Festival

* Winner of Third Place People's Choice award at the 2001 Georgia Tech College of Computing UROC (Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing) Research Symposium

This short was created for my senior research project.


Brief Storyline

This film is (very) loosely based upon the quantum physics theory exemplified by Schrodinger's Cat example. Basically I played around with an idea similar to the philisophical question "if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?" My question is, "if you nor anyone else is around to see the tree, is the tree itself really there anyway?" So a guy is on his way into work and unbeknownst to him, t the same time his office is coming into existence in anticipation of his arrival. The original script was more involved and funny, but a key element (an actress) backed out at the last minute.


The Effect

The effect used in this production uses a 2.5 dimensional image renderer that I developed for my senior research project. Originally gathering the depth data was anticipated to be a mostly automatic process, but in the long it wasn't, but it was probably for the best. More technical details about how it was developed and operates can be found here.


The Key People

Scott Carter - The brains behind the project

76 - An artist from mp3.com that gracefully gave me the rights to use one of his tracks for my background music (which meant that I could actually enter this video in festivals.

Jim Davies - Mr Yoohoo, the only "real" actor involved in this...luckily he didn't back out on me. I feel bad though, half of what the footage I shot with him in it (very funny stuff) had to be cut for timing reasons.

Irfan Essa - Nothing in the world gets done without funding

Gabriel Brostow & fellow CPL members - Helped critique and evaluate my many project ideas.

Yanir Hirschberg - My camera assistant and equipment mover.



Download

Disclaimer: By downloading these files, you agree not to modify the content of the files in ANY way. Permission is granted to redistribute these files without modification.

MPEG Format - 25MB (approx)
Technology Demo Only - DIVX Format - 0.8MB (approx)
Technology Demo Only - MPEG Format - 1.7MB (approx)

Note: the original DV production was filmed using DV (720x480) with the intent of being shown with automatic scan conversion to NTSC (640x480) resolution and artifacts from the resize during encoding are present.



hennessey600@collegeclub.com