Berit Glanz via digital animations of water

Water, with its wetting coolness and fluidity invading every niche, is a great metaphor. From martial artist Bruce Lee, who said “Be Water,” referring to water’s ability to adapt to any new situation, to writer David Foster Wallace, who, in This Is Water, referred to being aware of the almost imperceptibly surrounding reality that must not be lost. The water metaphor is just as fluid and adaptable as its real-world subject. The water as the subject of a story is anything but easy to capture. Anyone who has observed the refraction of light on ocean waves, the foaming movement of a surf zone, knows how easily language slips through your fingers when trying to put it into words. Converting the dynamics of water into other sign systems, into music, into language or into images, is always a new challenge.

Not surprisingly, this also and especially applies to the digital reproduction of water. For many years it was one of the great challenges of computer animation. The Internet is full of funny video clippings from the early days of computer graphics, sequences from films and video games, in which the difficulty of fluid animation – of water, smoke or the movement of hair – can be seen in particular. For years, simulating water realistically and convincingly was considered one of the last frontiers of digitally animated representations.

If you look at examples from around the turn of the millennium, like a scene from the 1997 film Speed ​​2: Cruise Control, in which two ships collide and a completely absurd wave formation appears between them, or the unintentionally comical tsunami surfing on an absurdly artificial-looking wave in the Bond film “Die Another Day” from 2002 – then one is almost touched by the many unrealistically animated ocean surfaces.

Because to animate flowing water is difficult. Because water is constantly moving and the light is therefore refracted again and again. In addition, natural waters are not crystal clear, but full of floating particles, which in turn affect the light.

“Find Nemo”

When the Pixar animated film Finding Nemo was released in 2003, it received a lot of praise for the impressive underwater scenes, in which rays of light penetrate and break through the water. The creative team behind these scenes reported in interviews that they had to find a whole new vocabulary to communicate the various nuances of water design. Water is difficult to translate.

If you add the dynamics of water waves, whitecaps and spray splashes to the great problem of mimicking the multiple refractions of water, you quickly understand why the digital simulation of water has been such a great challenge for many years. For a long time, the computers used simply did not have the computing power to realistically simulate the hyper-complexity of water scenes.

The depiction of water in films, in which important parts play on or in the ocean, has therefore always been presented as a technical problem in marketing. Because one of the biggest problems with water scenes in pre-digital cinema is that ships and the sea can be recreated as miniatures, but the size of the water drops is not scalable. The drop of water on the model-size ship is an unmistakable reference to the tricks of film production that should remain invisible.