Campanile Movie Trivia

• None of the trees in the campus environment were explicitly modeled; instead, their texture information was projected flat onto the ground. Although there originally were plans to model the trees, renderings produced before any tree modeling was done were deemed sufficiently convincing for use in the demo and in the film.

• Copies of the original 1913 John Galen Howard plans for the Campanile were used by architects Dorrice Pyle and Russel Bayba to build the miniature of the Campanile. The minature was detailed by hand to level of individual bricks.

• The computer model of the Campanile was built relying only on photogrammetric measurements. Informal comparisons were made between the recovered measurements and the measurements on the plans to judge the accuracy of the algorithms. The hardest measurement to recover accurately from the available photographs was the height of the tower's main shaft, which is somewhat smaller at the top than at the bottom. The gentle tapering of the shaft - commonly used by architects to exaggerate the perceived height of a building - turned out to make photogrammetric information less definitive as well. The tower's bricks also decrease in size toward the top of tower.

• No attempt was made to be consistent with the times shown on the Campanile clock. As a result, the times do not match between the virtual, real, and minature versions. Furthermore, as an artifact of the view-dependent texture-mapping method, the clock fades between different times during the synthetic fly-around.

• A design requirement for the renderer was for all of the photographic data to fit within the 16MB of texture memory available on the RealityEngine2. To meet this requirement with the highest resolution imagery, the four-fold symmtery of the tower was exploited to use each tower photograph as if it were four photographs taken at ninety degree rotations to each other. To do this convincingly it was necessary to factor out the original shading variations between the different sides of the tower and to synthetically re-adjust the illumination of tower during rendering.

• Except for the analog photographs, the Campanile movie was produced using all-digital equipment. A Sony VX1000 mini-DV digital video camcorder was used for shooting the live action and re-recording the computer processed imagery. The DPS Spark Firewire card necessary for the digital video editing became commercially available three weeks before the deadline for the final version of the film.

• An early version of the storyboard included a final scene in which the Campanile (first the model miniature, then the real thing) falls over and crushes the person.

• The movie was scripted to occur in cloudy conditions in part to make it easier to acquire consistent photographic data. Nonetheless, various linear remappings were required to adjust the photographs of the Campanile taken on different days to match with each other and with the environment.

• Special access to the Campanile was granted to make this project happen. The upper deck of Berkeley's Campanile is accessed through a very narrow staircase that goes through one of the corner supports of the observation level. The lantern is accessed by a series of four unlit staircases and ladders through the pyramid of the Campanile. Less than three feet wide, strewn with cobwebs, and towering over the vast expanse of Berkeley, the journey to the top has something to offer anyone with nichtophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, acrophobia, or arachniphobia.

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