It’s not all glamour and sizzle, but forensics is a rapidly growing field that needs animators and vfx artists. Above is an example of XVIVO LLC’s work: © XVIVO LLC.

The sky’s the limit for vfx artists and animators specializing in the hotly emerging area of forensics and medical science, but don’t be fooled by fictional portrayals on television.

“A lot of people think if they get into forensic animation that it’s going to be like CSI,” observes James Murphy, whose Virtual Partners Training Center (VPTC) in Green Bay, Wis., is the first animation training center to offer forensics education. “Not going to happen. Most forensic animators will probably be in a courtroom once or twice every three years. It’s not very dramatic and can be boring. There’s a lot of interaction with attorneys and expert witnesses, and you’re there to simply help visualize what the experts witnesses are attesting to.”

Even without the Hollywood sizzle, there are plenty of pluses along this seemingly unorthodox career path. “It’s a market where you can really learn things about what you are animating,” according to Michael Astrachan, studio director for XVIVO LLC, a 3D animation facility in Rocky Hill, Conn., for which he’s also one of three partners.

At VPTC, Dave Wright teaches the first forensics class ever offered at an animation school. All VPTC images © JMC Inc and Virtual Partners.

His firm specializes in translating complex medical information into scientifically accurate and visually compelling presentations for scores of blue-chip clients, including Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Yale University, Alcon Surgical, IBM, Canon, Lego and Hasbro. The company’s award-winning mechanism-of-action animation offers extraordinary insight into how drugs work at the molecular level and parts of a fully implantable artificial heart mimic the real thing.

Too Much Information
One slippery slope for vfx artists and animators is augmenting reality to sway juries. Too much detail can get cases tossed out of court, with Murphy citing as the most infamous example a forensic animation short used in the O.J. Simpson murder trial depicting a black man as the perpetrator. Indeed, he says topographic data needn’t be spelled out to the nth degree for most forensics.

“We spend our careers making things look more fantastic, so in that regard it can be a detriment if you have a background in visual effects and try and go into forensics for court cases,” says Perry Harovas, director of visual effects for XVIVO and a partner in the firm. If anyone knows this, it’s Harovas. Prior to joining XVIVO, he worked in vfx for about a dozen years on projects that included several features with legendary director-producer Roger Corman.

He believes another draw to the field is that “for a lot of the stuff we’re depicting nobody knows what it looks like, especially at the molecular level, because these objects are smaller than the wavelength of light and, therefore, have no color. The colors are all inferred. It’s either a combination of what the client wants for a color palette or what has been shown in their field to be the specific colors for parts of cell structure.”