Behind ahd168: The Pixel’s Tale

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Sharp Project is proud to present … the return of ahd168! Please be seated as our iconic android sweeps, slides and leaps in exploration of our place of work. Released a few days ago, the video is still creating waves of comment online, and it’s sure to continue doing so.

The last time we saw ahd168 he was a creaking wreck, a blown fuse, stumbling around the streets of Salford looking for a fix of whatever androids got hooked on in those days. Oh, yes, he caused quite a stir back then, reaching viral status via YouTube and helping animators Mi fill their trophy cabinet. The film has aged remarkably well – two and a half years is a long time in the insatiable world of digital imagery, where mega framerates and resolutions are quickly bedded into people’s minds and accepted as normal.

Ahd168’s comeback is not just a joy to behold for those of us who care about the rehabilitation of unwanted lovable animated junkie award-winning androids. It’s a triumph of creativity and technology that showcases Greater Manchester talent as well as our fantastic building, and for the first part at least, we once again have Mi to thank and back-pat.

The first thing you’ll probably notice about this film is that it’s entirely digital. Whereas the original was superimposed brilliantly onto live backdrops, his second coming is a completely virtual construct – give or take a few still photos. Because Sharp is still not finished and the film has taken many months to make, it would have been impossible to film the actual backgrounds.

When you’re watching the film you’re immersed in its realism subconsciously, but check out some of the stills and you’ll see what kind of level of detail we’re dealing with. So the first thing I wanted to know when I chatted with Mi’s Ian Hogg was whether there was, on one of their hard drives, a complete virtual Sharp Project waiting to be explored.

In a way, the answer is yes, as they used the architect’s actual digital plans to produce the location. But because the architectural plans don’t need to be photorealistic, Mi still had plenty to do to make the building convincing. Some of the external shots did use actual photographs (for example the Police HQ neighbouring Sharp) but on the whole, it’s hand-made. Also, only the parts that appear in the film have been given any detail by Mi, in much the same way as the buildings you see in Hollywood movies are often just plywood façades.

The robot himself was just as painstakingly constructed. You might be stunned to learn that ahd168’s movement wasn’t motion-captured from a runnin’ jumpin’ human; his every move was programmed from scratch by an animator. “We did occasionally find ourselves posing in strange positions,” admits Ian, but it was purely as artists’ life models for their animator to refer to.

One of the most dissatisfying things about animated creatures in general has always been (for me at least) the lack of realism when it comes to running and jumping. There’s often a missing sense of trajectory, that ephemeral defeat of, and inevitable submission to, gravity’s pull. But ahd168’s fluid, fluent and graceful locomotion has restored my faith; this is an occasion where describing it as unbelievable wouldn’t be a compliment. It isn’t unbelievable.

If you’re inspired to make your own high-definition animated film, please sit down and prepare for sobriety as I run a few stats past you.

To render this film, Mi have some 60 nodes (networked computers) churning out their data, arrived at by calculating the colour of every pixel that will appear on the finished product. This in itself is no simple task. It must take into account not only the given colour for each point in space (e.g. the red of a brick), but also whether it is hiding some other detail behind it and whether it is transparent, translucent, shiny, dull, illuminated, in shadow, in focus, blurred or reflective. To complicate matters, there are varying degrees of each of those properties of a virtual point in space; opacity can be anything from 100% (opaque) to 0% (invisible). The glare from the strip lights, the reflections in the windows and the shadows on the floor all “exist” in a virtual space, but it’s necessary to perform these complex calculations to end up with what a two-dimensional scene looks like from the camera position. Move the camera a centimetre to the left and the sums will all have to change. And yes, that’s all for one single pixel that will appear for 1/25 of a second.

So how long does it take to perform this calculation, with 60 computers churning away? One hour …

… per frame. Wow. Thankfully, when the film-makers are experimenting with the animation and the camera angles, they can turn the quality right down or switch to wire-frame to get a feel for the scene. But when it comes to the final rendering, there must be a bit of finger-crossing going on. The full resolution is 1024 × 720 pixels, which is 921,600 pixels per frame (and each pixel can be any of millions of colours). At 25 frames per second and 113 seconds that makes … oh … my computer just crashed.

Just near the start of the film look at ahd168’s metallic shoulders and you’ll see a reflection of the car park, a massive virtual area, convincingly rendered as if bouncing off a convex, colourless, brushed, reflective, opaque surface. It takes up maybe 500 pixels, but represents an immense amount of calculated data. That might drill home why a frame can take an hour to compute.

So all it takes to get 1 minute 53 of sensational bliss is some inspiration from the Boot Room in Manchester, some thumping music composed and recorded by Zelig Sound in London, a backdrop designed and created by PRP Architects in Manchester and the whole scene being given life by Salford’s Mi. Easy.

Charlie Hankers