The Hindu Business Line : Lights, camera, CG!

CG is centigram, centre of gravity, as also the two-character ISO 3166 country code for `The Congo'. But CG is also the hottest thing in moviemaking! Yes, we're talking about computer graphics that enables stunt doubles in the Matrix to amaze us, or elevates Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to "play an effective emotional lead". If you're keen on filmmaking, instead of going to Kollywood or Bollywood, here is Barrett Fox, `animator, teacher and journalist' with his book 3ds max 6 Animation, from Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Co Ltd (www.tatamcgrawhill.com) to lead you "from concept to completion".

The intro explains how CG filmmaking is a bunch of many disciplines, such as "scriptwriting, sound design, art direction, modelling, rigging and animating". Think of this book as "a unified theory of CG animating," exhorts the author. "Almost all the 17 chapters in the book represent entire disciplines that, in larger CG productions, have professionals dedicated solely to them."

Keeping at the back of your mind Day After Tomorrow that you perhaps saw day before yesterday, you can engage yourself in creating a short animated film, titled "The Game to Save the World", set in "a fictional multiplayer online videogame". There Fox, through his three main characters, combines "expediency and pragmatism to strike a balance between creating rich, quality work and making practical choices so your project can be finished in a timely manner." Story concepts are of two types, says the book: "Your stories and someone else's stories". How simple! But avoid clichés, advises Fox. Think twice, therefore, he says, before embracing dragons, dungeons, robots, dinosaurs, spaceships, Star Wars recreations and so on, because these categories are shunned by art directors and objective observers outside the industry.

A major pitfall to avoid is to bite off more than what you can chew. "A key point to remember is that you can make anything, but you can't make everything." What can cheer CG artists, however, is that these are good days because they can "focus more on artistry than on technology." So, shall we say, `Lights, camera, CG'?

Make it an inviting portal

Computers are eco-friendly, one might argue, because you can save a lot of paper and so trees too. How about using the Net for promoting ecotourism? A recent book from Universities Press (www.universitiespress.com) discusses this question, apart from a host of others, in Tourism Management: The Socio-economic and Ecological Perspective. Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, notes Prof A.H. Kalro, Director of IIM, Kozhikode. "It generates around $4 trillion in gross output, employs about 260 million people and yields $700 billion in tax revenues to different governments."

In the preface, the editors Tapan K.Panda, Sitikantha Mishra and Bivraj Bhusan Parida point out that ecotourism can balance sustainable development with commercial needs. "A study of Indian tourism Web sites shows that although some are visually appealing, the information provided in most sites is of very little value and often outdated," observes the book. Requests for "approximate cost of non-standard tour" sent by e-mail to some of the sites did not elicit any response, add the authors. "Ecotourists are primarily interested in information related to places of natural beauty, and the history and culture of the destination they intend to visit," is a clue for those in the industry. Also some `groundwork' is required: "There should be a great degree of integration and cooperation among the entire chain of industries that contribute to the tourists' overall experiences. These include tourism development corporations, travel agencies, tour operators, airlines, hotels, resorts, taxi unions and wildlife or forest authorities."

Something that calls for networking, bottom up, before transforming the tourism site into an inviting portal.

Become Access-able

ACCESS needs no introduction. You know it's there in the Microsoft Office suite, and perhaps use it too, though far less than Excel or Outlook, PowerPoint or FrontPage. May be you are good at using this database workhorse for your own limited use, "opening forms and printing reports directly from the database window, and you know what query to run before printing which report or exporting data to Word." To make others use your databases with as much ease, "you have to do a lot more work, mostly in the form of writing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code," says Helen Feddema in Expert one-on-one Microsoft Access Application Development, from Wiley Dreamtech India P Ltd (www.wileydreamtech.com) . The book promises to teach you how to set up your tables and relationships to ensure that the database is properly normalised, and write VBA code to create the connective tissue that turns a bunch of tables, queries, forms and reports into a complete and coherent application.

Anybody can create a database but application is more than a database. An Access application consists of a database - or possibly several databases - "containing normalised tables with appropriate relationships between them; queries that filter and sort data; forms to add and edit data; reports to display the data; and possibly PivotTables or PivotCharts to analyse the data, with all of those components connected into an efficiently functioning and coherent whole by VBA code." Access the book before you access Access.

Tailpiece

"Can you talk like an interactive voice response system?"

"Why?"

"Our machine conked off."

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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