Watson MD. New ways to see data.

Data is not use­ful until it becomes infor­ma­tion, and on this fas­ci­nat­ing 30-second com­mer­cial the flow of infor­ma­tion is pre­sented in a unique way by seam­lessly com­bin­ing med­ical visu­al­iza­tions, sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture, live action pho­tog­ra­phy, pathogen analy­sis, and more. Guillermo Navarro, the same cin­e­matog­ra­pher who shot Night at the Museum, the Hell­boy series, and the fan­tas­tic Pan’s Labyrinth, used two RED cam­eras and one ARRI Alexa cam­era to cap­ture over a mil­lion images for this project.

“We shot insects, live­stock, plants and other ele­ments live on green­screen. We licensed med­ical pro­ce­dures for the young actor in the spot to get med­ical visu­al­iza­tions of the boy’s actual anatomy – CAT scans, X-rays, brain stem eye visu­al­iza­tions, and more; pho­tos of his fam­ily mem­bers to illus­trate med­ical his­tory, med­ical lit­er­a­ture show­ing research on actual poten­tial causes and con­di­tions of the sce­nario, images of pathogens, viruses, aller­gens and bac­te­ria at the root of the pos­si­ble causes, and more.”

Motion Theory’s Direc­tor Mathew Cullen Visu­al­izes Supercomputer’s Think­ing Process for IBM’s “Wat­son M.D.”

Incred­i­bly, none of the images in the spot are com­puter gen­er­ated! Accord­ing to another source, pro­duc­tion on “Wat­son M.D.” took four weeks and included con­sult­ing with med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers, a three-day live-action shoot, devel­op­ing the ani­ma­tion engine and inte­grat­ing visual effects, and editing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2011 at 07:57. It is filed under Digital Cinema, Photography, Technology, Visuals and tagged with animation, ARRI, cinematographer, data, digital cinema, greenscreen, motion, RED, video, visual effects, visualizations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.