Joe Justice featured in The WV Record on forensic animation

Back in April I had the opportunity to be the subject of an article in The West Virginia Record, a local legal journal. The reporter was Kyla Asbury. We met, had lunch and I talked her ear off about animation for a few hours. Little known fact, I can talk anyone's ear off about animation... okay, maybe that's actually a well known fact. A few weeks after this the article came out on the cover page, above the fold, which I consider a real honor. So now that a little time has passed, I want to make sure I publicly thank Kyla and post a direct link to the article on-line for anyone who might have missed the paper version.

You can find the article here:

http://www.wvrecord.com/news/234459-forensic-animation-services-available-in-charleston

It's a very good write-up and gives a great overview of the entire forensic animation process. Kyla did a fantastic job in packing a lot of information into a small space. There are just two things I'd like to touch on.

First off, she mentioned the animation portion is a long process, I want to clarify that a bit. She's actually talking about two steps there; animation and rendering. Rendering is where the computer takes in all of the data and then generates the images that are then turned into the final animation video. Rendering does take a long time, theoretically. On average, every frame can take as much as twenty minutes to render and there are thirty frames in each second, so a minute of animation would take six hundred hours to render!

Obviously, if a minute long animation took that long to render, it could never realistically be used in a legal context where changes have to be made relatively quickly. This is where my networking and programming expertise comes into play. I write and maintain my own proprietary software that distributes the rendering task over a series of networked computers and over the Internet. This way, instead of having one computer do all of the rendering, I can have many computers working on the same project, making my animation work accessible to the legal community.

Secondly, not once did Kyla mention my devilish good looks! What a disappointment. But then again, she did snap a great picture, so she probably thought they were self-evident enough to go without saying. Yeah, I'm sure that was it.

-Joe