ISLAND ON THE MOVE.(Technology Information)

A six-minute animation covers more than 1.5 billion years of geological history

The Danish island of Bornholm is a geographical oddity for several reasons. First, it's off the coast of Sweden rather than Denmark. Second, due to tectonic plate movement, it has moved from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere over the course of its 1.7 billion years of existence. And last, a fault zone slices through it, dividing the island into two distinctly different types of rock--an ancient granite layer and a sandstone layer that is 1.2 billion years more recent.

Several years ago, the town of Aarkirkeby on Bornholm decided to build a museum to demonstrate the island's unique geological history. The facility was to include a series of interactive installations, including a large-scale time-travel animation that would take visitors back to the island's earliest days in the preCambrian period. The Copenhagen-based firm of Christian Bjorn Design was chosen to oversee the development of the internal installations for the museum, and Bjorn employee Herman Bailey was assigned to create the necessary animations, including the large time-travel piece.

This was to be his first full-fledged animation project. "I'm trained as an industrial designer," says Bailey, a British citizen who has been working in Denmark for several years, "but my previous experience with computer visualization gave me the necessary tools for this project." In the case of the time-travel animation, the finished film covers six different geologic time periods, beginning with a view of Bornholm during the ice age (a mere 13,000 years ago), then proceeding back through the Cretaceous, Jurassic, Cambrian, early Cambrian, and preCambrian periods, ending up 1.5 billion years ago 40 degrees south of the equator. The animation takes place in a room in which three projectors run in parallel to project imagery in high-quality format onto a wall 10 meters wide. The idea is to immerse visitors in the sheer scope of geological change.

Bailey created the animation using Discreet's 3D Studio ...