Animation in the court: Lawyers present cases to jurors using video game wizardry.

Look at the computer screen and peer inside a man's skull. You see a rotating, animated image of a brain that's missing a piece.

No, it's not the latest gory video game. It's computer-generated animation that helped an Orlando man win a lawsuit against Ford and Mazda for $32.5 million.

The animation "took all the guesswork out of the injury," which involved a defective seat belt, said Ben Hogan, one of the man's attorneys.

Computer animation has transformed the entertainment industry, fueling the rise of video games and movies such as Toy Story and Monsters vs. Aliens.

Now, animation is beginning to redraw the rules of how to present a case to a jury. Instead of telling jurors how Car A struck Car B — or trying to demonstrate it with miniature cars — a legal team can re-create the accident in a way that's almost as realistic as video.

And in some ways, animations are superior to videos, because they can be created from any angle.

Animations have been used in car accident, medical liability, faulty product and even criminal cases. These days, if lawyers can't find the smoking gun, they can animate one — but only if evidence shows it was really there.

An animation cannot take the place of an expert witness who explains why the car flipped off the road or why the surgery failed. But it can help jurors visualize an expert's testimony — especially if he or she points to the animation and says, yes, that's exactly how it happened.

"It's the credibility of the witness that determines the value or the weight that the jury would give the animation," said professor Lee Coppock of Stetson University College of Law.

So while filmmakers base their animations on whimsical story lines, legal animators such as Luke Roman rely on experts such as doctors or accident reconstruction specialists.

"(The expert) has the physics degree, he has the biomedical degree, he has all the experience of seeing injuries," said Roman, one of two animators at Trial Practices of Tampa, a nationally known legal consulting firm.

"We visualize the testimony," said his colleague Rob Firman.

Animations have been used in courts for more than a decade, but improving technology has made them vastly more realistic in the past couple of years.

In one accident re-creation, for example, Trial Practices went to the site of an accident and shot video of a car driving down the road. Then it animated in a pedestrian being hit by the car.

But there's a difference between realistic and real. Just because an animator concocts something, that doesn't mean things actually happened that way.

It's important to be able to stick to the proven facts so, "there's no guesswork, we're not making anything up, we're not interpreting anything. We're just using the tools to show what was really there," Roman said.

"If it's not credible … it'll be treated as a cartoon," said Harvey Moore, founder of Trial Practices. Lawyers on the other side will attack the animation, and the case.

Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge W. Douglas Baird said he has seen only a couple of animations used in his court, but called it "a very powerful piece of demonstrative evidence."

Clearwater attorney George Tragos said the federal government prepared an animation in a case of a man accused of manslaughter on an oceangoing vessel, purporting to show how the man died as he encountered deadly cases inside the hold of the ship. But Tragos had an animation also, which he said showed that his client could not have known the other man was entering a danger zone as he climbed lower into the hold. He believes his animation was a key reason his client was acquitted.

Moore said the best animations are more than pictures brought to life. They're more like computer models, which make use of complex variables such as speed, acceleration, the coefficient of friction and others. In some cases they are admitted into evidence and juries can study them in the jury room.

Moore expects this sophistication to continue into three dimensions.

"I'm talking about a complete re-enactment of the crime scene, for example, as a hologram, no different from the holodeck in the old Star Trek episodes," he said.

Curtis Krueger can be reached at ckrueger@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8232.

Above and below: This animation was created with real photographic images shot at the scene where a traffic accident occurred. The animated cars were added to the photographic background, for a realistic effect. The positioning of the cars was based on experts' analysis of what happened during the crash.