Deus ex Machina

• January 1, 1993
• Brian Guenter, Microsoft; Casey Anderson, Microsoft

“This is a movie made by my graduate students in 1993 when I was an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. I hadn’t looked at this video for more than 15 years. It holds up remarkably well and I’m still impressed by the incredible job they did. My contribution was negligible even though I’m listed as a producer on the credits—the students deserve all the credit. Unfortunately, we made some sort of scaling error when we rendered the frames so the entire film came out much darker than we intended (the producer is supposed to make sure that things like this don’t happen). When it was shown at the electronic theater the projector was also very dim so it was almost impossible to see what was going on. A few bat-like people who could see in the dark complimented us on the film but my students were still terribly disappointed that after all their hard work no one had really seen their film. Now you can see it in all its original glory, and by using the brightness and contrast controls in Windows media player you can largely eliminate the darkness problem.”  —Brian Guenter, Principal Researcher