Imagining the Inner Workings of the Internet

"DAWN OF THE NET"
 Imagining the Inner Workings of the Internet

The journey of the data packets To begin, the user clicks on a Web link which causes empty IP data packets – the large steel trucks – to be filled with a load of data. This is represented by a jumble of blue zeros and ones that tumble down a chute into the waiting trucks, which are then sealed and labeled with delivery addresses. They then trundle along conveyor belt until they are launched into the LAN (local-area network). 

 These beams form tunnels through the dark void along with data packets speed. On the LAN there are a number of different types of data packets generated by the different networking protocols in use. The beams can also cross and intersect each other and at key junction points there stands a router, directing traffic. This is a large gyrating machine with mechanical arms that lifts and sort packets into the appropriate network paths to reach their destination.The proxy opens the packet and looks for the WEB address or URL. Depending upon whether the address is acceptable…the packet is sent on to the Internet. There are, however, some addresses which do not meet with the approval of the proxy.he corporate Fire Wall serves two purposes. It prevents some rather nasty things from the Internet from coming into the intranet. And it also can prevent sensitive corporate information from being sent out to the Internet. Once through the fire wall, a router picks up the packet and places it on to a much narrower road or band-width.

       The data packets travel on through the proxy server and firewalls out onto the global Internet. We are now ready to enter the world of the Internet.which spans our entire globe.routers and switches establish links between networks. The paths our packets take maybe via satellite, telephone lines, wireless or even trans-oceanic cable. They don't always take the fastest or shortest routes possible, but they probably will get there . Nowadays, a web server can run on many things. From a mainframe, to a web-cam to the computer on your desk. One by one, the packets are received, opened and unpacked. The information they contained, that is your request for information is sent onto the Web server application. The packet itself is recycled. Ready to be used again. And filled with your requested information. Addressed and sent out on its way back to you. This journey is not without its perils and data packets do get lost and destroyed along the way. But most often the packets reach their destination in a timely fashion.

How we did it: According to http://www.warriorsofthe.net/how.html

The animation part - Finding out the concept...
We started out by going through the basics about TCP/IP and how it works. I, Gunillla Elam, tried to get a grip on the elementary parts and how to visualise them in an effective manner. The first thing that struck me when we started to draw the outlines for this project was how mechanical things seems to work on a network or on the web. So, I decided to make the inhabitants of the web as machinery or parts thereof. I also wanted to have a rusty, kind of worn out look and feeling in the environment - as being filled with lots and lots of hard-working creatures...
Putting it together...
All modeling and animation was made with 3dsMAX 2.5 with the textures , lots of metals! made as bitmaps in Photoshop.
The lights were made using Cebas LumaObjects and the blue explosions were made using their PyroCluster plug-in. Some post processing in Adobe After Effects and the final editing was made in Premiere.
For the web graphics used Macromedia Flash along with Photoshop.
For self studies in 3D I highly recommend Eni Okens clas

The music - The stunning imagery of Gunilla Elam created the scene for the soundtrack of Warriors of the Net. I, Niklas Hanberger, started out by finding a few different motives that suited some key scenes in the story. The first that started the ball rolling was actually the firewall and router switch scenes which made me think of circus or fairground environments but then severely tilted into some strange dark metalic machinery soundscape. The tivoli theme actually exists as a more normally orchestrated recording if any orchestra out there wants to use it in their repetoir :-)
Then came the monk choir theme which sounded dooming enough to represent the journey into the unknown and also the mighty router! The whole soundtrack was built around these and a few other themes and combined so that themes represented known actors in the movie (ah, the router!) but always modified so that everything continues to move towards the end. 


The Warriors of the Net Movie

  Warriors of the Net, a thirteen minute long animated film, was conceived and created, in 1999, by a small team at Ericsson Medialab, Sweden. The initial idea to make a short educational film was that of Tomas Stephansson. “Tomas, the network expert, used to go around within Ericsson having speeches of the advantage of IP telephony, always moaning about how difficult it was to make people understand the fundamentals,” said Gunilla Elam. “After one of these occasions we started to talk about making a visualization of the basic functions for him to use in these meetings.” Although, “none of use realized at the time what a huge project it would end up becoming,” Elam wryly comments. In addition to the three-dimensional animation work of Gunilla Elam, the atmospheric music and sounds for the film were created by composer Niklas Hanberger, while the narration was provided by Monte Reid. The movie took the team around six months to complete, in amongst other projects and work commitments. The film was premiered in may 1999 in Stockholm and it has been well received, proving particularly useful for educators. It has been translated into ten different languages and in 1999 it won first prize in the Pirelli INTERNETional Multimedia Awards .“The final results greatly exceed[ed] our early expectations,” says Elam.

       Elam’s background is in fine arts and she has been actively researching the social aspects of computing and networking technologies over the last few years, at the Ericsson Medialab and now works as a designer at a startup venture called AirClic. Of the many challenges in making Warriors of the Net, Elam says that, “The hardest part was without question to simplify the structure into an understandable, easy to grasp concept. I had not been going into the tech part of the Internet much before starting with this, so the way we did it was Tomas filling me up with as much information I could handle, then let me think about it for a while and melt it down to a level where anyone would be able to understand it.” She adds, “basically I functioned as a translator in that sense. There was information enough for a two hour movie and my aim was to bring that down to 7 minutes which I failed to do, it's almost 13 min long.” Although Elam may have failed to deliver a seven minute movie, she succeeded admirably in creating a most unique and powerful imaginative view of the inner workings of the Internet.