Rice alum Mark Hall gets creative with his degree in computer science

Rice
alum Mark Hall gets creative with his degree in computer
science

BY DONNA JARES
Special to the Rice News

If you’ve
seen the movies “The Matrix: Reloaded,” “Harry
Potter” or “Stuart Little,” then you have
enjoyed some graphical handiwork of Mark Hall, a Rice computer
science alumnus. But chances are it’s not something
you noticed.

Rice alumnus Mark Hall

“It’s
really fun to go to a theater and hear oohs and ahs as something
I did is on the screen — or sometimes silence, because
no one can tell that what they’re looking at isn’t
real,” said Hall, technical director for Sony Pictures
Imageworks.

Hall’s other
credits include the 2002 Oscar-winning animated short film
“The Chubb Chubbs” and full-length feature films
such as “Starship Troopers,” “Anger Management”
and “The Matrix: Revolutions.”

Hall said that
his work often is seemingly trivial or silly.

“On ‘Stuart
Little,’ I was on the team that built the Stuart character,”
he said. “In three or four scenes, Stuart’s thumbs
were very visible, and they were far shorter than human
thumbs. The director decided he wanted them longer. So the
scenes where Stuart is in the washing machine and pressing
his hands on the glass door? I made his thumbs longer.”

After receiving
a bachelor’s degree (1981) and master’s degree
(1982) in electrical engineering from Rice, Hall pursued
his interest in computer graphics, which led him to Texas
Instruments (TI). He was part of a group that developed
computer graphics software to help petroleum geologists
determine drill sites. While recruiting new Rice graduates
for TI, Hall met Mary Wolcott.

“As part
of my recruiter training, I’d been taught that making
passes at the interviewees was a really bad idea. So I reluctantly
put her phone number away,” Hall recalled.

Wolcott turned
down the position with TI and joined the computer science
graduate program at Rice. “At that point she became
fair game, and that’s how I met my wonderful wife,
Mary.”

When Hall’s
TI project ended, he returned to Rice. “I had noticed
that the Ph.D.s in TI’s corporate research labs had
a pretty sweet job situation, and I had the vague idea that
maybe a Ph.D. would make me a more viable candidate for
movie jobs,” Hall said.

He entered the
Department of Computer Science’s graduate program and
studied under Tony Gorry, now the Friedkin Professor of
Management and professor of computer science, and later
Joe Warren, professor of computer science. After graduating
in 1992, Hall spent two years as a graphics programmer at
Sun Microsystems, while his wife worked as a postdoctoral
student at Stanford University.

Hall joined Walt
Disney Feature Animation in Los Angeles in 1994, while Mary
joined Caltech as a visiting professor. After working on
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Fantasia
2000” and “Dinosaur,” Hall accepted a position
with Sony Pictures Imageworks.

“My job
takes an eye for details about how light reacts to different
things and some programming skills,” he said. Hall
was on the team that worked on the Quidditch match in “Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” With the exception
of some of the children, the Sony team created everything
on the screen with computer graphics.

“I wrote
the shaders [code] that made the [stadium] cloth ripple
in the wind,” Hall explained. “My shaders didn’t
make the cloth reflect the light like cloth; it made it
move as if a wind was blowing. When the cloth blows toward
the wood it’s loosely attached to, you can see the
outline of the stand’s wooden skeleton. When the wind
is blowing away from the stands, the cloth billows like
a sail, and it stays attached at the points where it’s
attached to the wood.”

A broad computer
science background comes in handy day-to-day, Hall said,
and his computer science background seems to be serving
him well in other areas as well. “On ‘The Matrix:
Reloaded’ I solved someone else’s problem by knowing
that matrix math isn’t exact, and you can’t do
exact mathematical compares after a matrix multiply. You
never know which computer science classes you’ll end
up using. I certainly didn’t!”

Visual arts,
such as photography, sculpting or drawing, are also fundamental
for students interested in pursuing a career in computer
graphics.

“I know
for a fact that my resume’s most defining characteristic
when I applied at Walt Disney Feature Animation was the
last line under hobbies where I had added, ‘I make
small wooden boxes,’” said Hall. That hint of
understanding and building things in three dimensions got
him the job, he was told.

Being a member
of a maturing field has both advantages and challenges.

“Drawing
hair used to be insanely slow, even after people had solved
the problems of how to create a decent picture,” Hall
said. “Now we’re doing 1,200 scene movies with
furred creatures, because computers are so fast and cheap.”

However, the
demand for heightened realism has also affected computer
animation. “More and more, the new areas involve making
things look totally real, whereas it used to be, ‘How
can we draw a curved surface behind another curved surface?’”

For instance,
reproducing Sentinels for “The Matrix: Reloaded”
was challenging and expensive; the squid-like death machines
were drawn separately, due to their complexity. While “The
Matrix: Reloaded” included up to five Sentinels in
a scene, “The Matrix: Revolutions” had as many
as 3,000 Sentinels in some scenes. Hall and his group tried
creating the Sentinels for these scenes by modifying a commercial
package that allows simulations of flocks. An initial methodology
was tested and implemented. Eventually, the group determined
that their method wouldn’t work and went back to the
drawing board. Since the movie release date was not going
to change, Hall spent a very long weekend coming up with
a new method.

Hall, who enjoys
technical challenges, pinpoints “The Matrix: Reloaded”
as his favorite project. Sony picked up the project after
the company originally contracted for the work went bankrupt.
What normally would have taken eight months, Sony had to
complete in three months. Each day Hall and his group met
early in a theater to view their work from the day before
and discuss technical problems.

“I was the
clear Alpha Geek after a few weeks,” Hall said. “So
I got called in to troubleshoot the hardest problems, which
was fun in a sick sort of way. My phone rang a lot.”

As Hall continues
to enjoy the challenges of the computer animation field,
his career goals seem quite modest. “Mostly I want
to work on movies that I would actually want to go see,
have fun making pictures and have a little time for life
away from work,” Hall said. Daughters Jamie, 7, and
Jackie, 3, are probably pleased to hear that.