Winning an Academy Award® is something most of us never imagine, let alone ever accomplish. The same could be said for Youngwoong Jang of Seoul, South Korea, who can now add this prestigious honor to the long list of accolades and accomplishments he has been awarded for his animated film called “Mirage”. In June of 2007, Jang was awarded the Gold Medal in animation in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 34th Annual Student Academy Awards competition.

Mirage, Jang’s master thesis project while attending New York’s School of Visual Arts, has not only won an Academy Award, but has also taken home numerous awards from some of the most celebrated film festivals worldwide. Jang was able to accomplish this great honor with a lot of hard work using best of breed products including a variety of ATI FireGL™ graphics processors from AMD.

ATI FireGL Delivers Big Features in Little Package
“As a student creating an animation production of this scope, I had to maximize my limited computer resources,” comments Jang. Mirage was animated using a Hewlett Packard nw8240 mobile workstation powered by the ATI Mobility FireGL™ V5000 graphics processor from AMD. In addition, Jang rendered all his images on a DELL Precision™ 670 workstation powered by ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerator.

Jang choose to use the HP laptop as his main modeling and animating tool specifically for the power and ease of the ATI Mobility FireGL card inside. “The pairing of the small HP laptop and powerful ATI Mobility FireGL V5000, gave me great flexibility and offered me a comfortable and affordable working environment. I wanted to show my own artistic sense in life like visual story telling, not like a cartoon, ” Jang affirms.

The Real Mechanics of Making a Movie
Turning Jang’s vision into an Academy Award winning film took nearly two years to complete. Mirage’s main character must fill his glass chest with water in order to survive. His character’s life has become all about the endless task of squeezing droplets of water from tiny plant stems. In order to create such stunning visuals, Jang used Avid SOFTIMAGE®|XSI® as his primary 3D tool and Nextlimit Realflow™ to generate water simulation. “The ATI FireGL card allowed me to work flawlessly in Avid Softimage XSI and Realflow. The graphics processors have been certified to support most of the 3D industry’s leading applications ensuring me of complete hardware and software compatibility.”

Bringing Reality Down to Size
“People ask me ‘what was my inspiration for my movie?’ Mirage, is to some extent autobiographical and I wanted to tell my own story using pictures,” Jang says. “It has always been my obsession in life to strive for more, whether it is a better education, a better job and so on. With Mirage, I was able to create dramatic visual communication using the best tools the 3D industry has to offer. Managing the incredibly large data sets for the highly complex modeling, texturing and geometry of Mirage, I had to totally trust that the ATI FireGL could handle the task seamlessly. I can’t risk any downtime and software card incompatibility when working on my project. The ATI FireGL card works perfectly with XSI’s real-time OpenGL view port. The ATI FireGL cards surpassed my expectations in both 3D and 2D applications,” stresses Jang.