Hibakusha Series

A CG model of a Hiroshima neighborhood with the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (A-bomb Dome), in the distance. (Courtesy of the Knack Eizo Center)

Director Masaaki Tanabe, right, in an Internet meeting with USC staff. A CG model of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall is seen on a screen at center. (Mainichi)

Japanese and American experts, as well as Hollywood movie special effects veterans, have joined a film project to recreate the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (A-bomb Dome) along with much of the surrounding city before the atomic bombing in CG.

Seven professors and graduate students from the University of Southern California (USC) -- which has produced numerous graduates involved in the film industry -- and members of the computer graphics team behind "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004) have joined the project. From Japan, participants include the University of Tokyo Intelligent Modeling Lab, and researchers in architectural history from Waseda University.

The Japanese contingent met their counterparts at USC by Internet conference on Oct. 28 to brief them on the features of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the ruins of which became the Peace Dome seen today.

When the CG building and surrounding city have been completed, they will be combined with atomic bomb victim statements into a one hour documentary film, under the direction of filmmaker Masaaki Tanabe, 71 -- himself a survivor of the bombing that took his parents and little brother.

For the past two years, Tanabe has been aiming to premiere the film at the same time as next spring's international conference on the renewal of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.