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A model of a monkey from the movie 'Jumanji' represents professor Tim McLaughlin's first visual design project. McLaughlin is the department head of the visual design program at A&M.

Vizwhiz

Tim Mclaughlin was an artist in Hollywood when artists took over the big screen.

By: Lindsay Anderson

Posted: 6/12/08

Texas A&M students with stars in their eyes and desires of striking it big in Hollywood might practice their ability to cry, their international accents or their memorization. For a group of students in the College of Architecture, breaking into the Hollywood scene could be a matter of clicking a mouse.

Visualization sciences, known as Viz Lab by its constituents, is a nascent masters department headed by former Industrial Light and Magic employee Tim McLaughlin, class of 1990. Hired in September to be Viz Lab's first department head since its evolution from a program offered by the College of Architecture, McLaughlin returned to his roots in Aggieland.

The Longview, Texas, native attained his first degree, an associate's of arts, at Kilgore College in Kilgore, Texas. His bachelor's of environmental design and master's of science in visualization sciences came from A&M. For a brief time, he worked as a draftsman for two Dallas companies, Cunningham Architects and HKS Inc., between his degrees at A&M.

At the time McLaughlin was finishing his master's work in 1994, "Jurassic Park" was making cinematic and technological history. The movie, renowned for innovative special effects with animatronics and computer animation, showed the entertainment industry how much visual artists could bring to the movie-making table.

By the mid-1990s, many movie production teams had thrown their doors open to special effects artists who could effectively breathe life into the sophisticated animation of computer graphics. "I entered the industry at a time when digital effects were just beginning to boom -- just after the success of 'Jurassic Park,'" McLaughlin said. He was hired by ILM in 1994 and moved out to San Rafael, Calif., to work on his first movie, "Jumanji," for which he animated the monkeys that terrorize the city.

Up to that point in time, the industry was filled with "either old school film makers or computer scientists who were into graphics."

"I was neither," McLaughlin said.

Recent visualization graduates like McLaughlin, however, could be both, a feature of A&M's program he lauded: "There remain very few schools that are as balanced in the approach as the Viz Program is."

But roughly a dozen years prior to McLaughlins entry into the industry, such dual training was not as prominent.

"It was odd, at the time, for someone to have been schooled as I was in both artistic image making and technology," he said. "Just about everyone else had received schooling or training in one or the other and picked up the rest through experience."

With the degree work pursued by McLaughlin, his specialty in the movie industry became creatures. Developing fantastical creatures that move realistically is essentially architecture, he said. His most recent example is the dragon animation from the film "Eragon."

Though Mclaughlin used his visual science education to enter the entertainment industry, he said that there are other uses for such skills beyond movies and video games. He said the skills could be applied to other purposes, such as forensics or climatology.

Though the most recognized use of a visualization sciences education is to enter the entertainment industry through work on movies or video games, McLaughlin said the skills could be applied to other purposes such as forensics. The the goal is to communicate.

"Our goal is to communicate through imagery," McLaughlin said. "The key issue that we tackle in each example is how to manipulate the technology and how to create and organize the visual experience to effectively communicate.

"Our students are both technical and visual problem solvers."

Students interested in entering the master's program can expect a focus on technology and creativity, which McLaughlin said the department tries not to separate. "Our students are wholly engaged" in left-brain and right-brain thinking.

He said that if students feel weak in either area, then through study anything could be learned. What is needed to overcome that weakness is the willingness to try to embrace the other side of the brain, though he said he philosophically questions a student's decision to enter into a field that relies heavily on a skill set that the student may have developed a phobia of. On a more pragmatic note, students entering the program need a strong foundation in computer technology, math, design and creating artwork.

Just because a student hasn't pursued an engineering or an architecture bachelor's doesn't mean she or he can't perform well in the Viz Lab program. Students with backgrounds in anatomy, physiology, biology, zoology or history can significantly strengthen a movie team's product. McLaughlin said some of the best visual artists he knew in industry were political science and English majors.

"The best students in visualization are those who are constantly curious and not confined to a comfort zone of their existing knowledge," McLaughlin said. "Individuals with such a mindset come from all sorts of undergraduate experiences."

Though there are many things to learn in visualization sciences about how to maintain data accuracy, demonstrate motion and replicate camera work, McLaughlin said some of the most successful artists in the program are non-conformists.

"Visualizers who are non-conformists are individuals who can communicate an idea or an event in a way that creates a novel experience for the viewer," he said.

McLaughlin's summer agenda is consumed with developing a bachelor's program at A&M that would offer a preliminary to the master's program or a similar skill set, though he said it might be more than five years before such a curriculum was realized at A&M. He also has been interviewing and hiring faculty and overseeing general operations so the department can be fully functioning in the fall.

Though McLaughlin showed pleasure at returning to A&M to be Viz Lab's first department head, the work he's doing at the University seems a far cry from the glamorous work he did in Hollywood. "It depends on your perception of what glamour is. If you get a kick out of the rest of the world seeing what you worked on, then that's glamorous." Based on this, he's likely to find his contribution to A&M's history just as glamorous.