A Blend of Art and Science

A highlight reel that will be shown at the Electronic Theater will focus on how George Lucas takes realism to the next level with Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith
(Image courtesy of LucasFilms ©2005)

When a crowd of 25,000 converges in Los Angeles for SIGGRAPH 2005, the hot ticket they'll be seeking is for the two-hour “Best of Show” Electronic Theater. This portion of SIGGRAPH's Computer Animation Festival features 26 pieces chosen for both technical excellence and creative innovation. Considering that these 26 winners were culled from 560 submissions, landing a place in “ET” is as good as it gets.

An additional 42 pieces comprise the Animation Theater, a series of screenings that run continuously throughout SIGGRAPH. But this year's Computer Animation Festival Chair, Samuel Lord Black, cautions against regarding those pieces as second tier. “The mix of the show was actually an important key for us. We changed the way the jury has worked in the last couple of years. Instead of just ranking pieces by the number of votes received, we wanted to craft a good show out of what we picked. So we have some really good pieces in the Animation Theater that didn't quite fit the ET.”

The unique visual style of Madagascar will not only be on display in the Electronic Theater, but will be a topic of discussion of one of the sessions in the Courses program.
(Image courtesy of DreamWorks Animation ©2005)

Black, a CG software expert whose production credits include The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story 2, chose his seven-person jury with an eye towards diversity.

“I wanted jurors from outside the U.S. and from different factions of the CG industry,” he says.

As a result, the primary panel included David Ebert from Purdue University, Donna Cox from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Emru Townsend from fps Magazine, Linda Lauro-Lazin from Pratt Institute, Pierre Hénon from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Shuzo John Shiota from Polygon Pictures and Ted Burge from Walt Disney Feature Animation. The winning pieces that this jury chose reflected the state of CG art — and science — in 14 countries. These winners were also noteworthy for reviving attention to SIGGRAPH's scientific past, and for recognizing the student talent that will drive the medium's future.

Tippett Studios turned Los Angeles into a hellish landscape for the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine.
(Image courtesy of Tippett Studios)

Of course the chosen few included an ample dose of high-end Hollywood, which has been heavily featured at SIGGRAPH ever since CG features and digital effects became entertainment industry staples. Certainly there are the expected winners, including ILM, Dreamworks Animation, Digital Domain, Disney and Tippett Studios. In addition to ILM's 2005 highlight reel, the studio is represented by a piece devoted to Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, which Black says, “Takes everything up to the next level of realism.”

PDI/DreamWorks also delivered a winning technical piece, Making of Madagascar, which reveals the processes behind the CG feature. As Black observes, “In addition to the animation, you can see how everything was built — the hair, the fur and all the sand and fire effects.” But since the timing of this year's show wasn't right for the next feature releases from Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Blue Sky or Rhythm & Hues, Black says “There were actually very few feature film submissions.”

Curious Pictures relied on its compositing and special effects skills to create this scene of a man flying down the highway in an office chair. The scene comes from the commercial Life in the Fast Lane, which will be shown in the Computer Animation Festival screening rooms.
(Image courtesy Curious Pictures)

Yet the venerable tradition of studios creating short films was continued with not one but two ET winners from Blur Studio — In the Rough and the Oscar nominee Gopher Broke. That might be a record, especially for a relatively small shop like Blur. And SIGGRAPH history definitely was made by Tomek Baginski of Poland's Platige Image. His film Fallen Art was awarded Jury Honors this year, making Baginski the first two-time winner at the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. Tomek previously won Best Animated Short honors at SIGGRAPH 2002 for The Cathedral.

CG artists who typically work in television also were also well represented among the festival winners, including American director David Fincher, who submitted an ingenious photo-real CG for an HP commercial done at Digital Domain.

But Black notes, “A lot of the broadcast and commercial work that was submitted was from overseas.” Pro pieces were submitted from France, Japan, Germany, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands, but two British shops stood out — Framestore CFC and Passion Pictures each had two winning entries.

In a four-minute short called In the Rough created by Blur Studio, caveman Brog discovers the hard way that the bachelor's life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
(Image courtesy of Blur Studio)

Probably the biggest surprise among the professional submissions came in the category of game animation. Only two game cinematics, Blizzard Entertainment's World of WarCraft and Final Fantasy XII from Square Enix made the cut. And unlike the past two SIGGRAPHs, there are no real-time rendered pieces among the winners this year.

Behind the cool effects audiences see onscreen are usually lineages of scientific visualization research — from the subsurface scattering techniques that give CG characters plausible looking skin, to the fluid dynamic simulations behind faux floods. The first visual demonstrations of these techniques — usually done by scientists — largely have been overlooked in the years since SIGGRAPH has “gone Hollywood.”

The video Visualizing the XYZ Color Space is just one of several sci-vis entries in this year's Electronic Theater.
(Image courtesy Sony Pictures Imageworks ©2005)

Certainly most of these visualizations lack the glossy production values of entertainment animation. But things are different this year, thanks to a conscious outreach effort to the sci-viz community. “Bring your brain” was a theme of SIGGRAPH's Call for Participation this year, and Black wanted to make sure that call was heard. “The visualization community was somewhat disaffected with SIGGRAPH, seeing how things were moving away from it. We wanted to say ‘Come back. We'd like to see your stuff.’”

CAF Chair Black put juror Dr. David Ebert in charge of the outreach effort, and Ebert recalls, “A lot of people seemed very excited that there was a push to get back to the roots of SIGGRAPH.”

The effort worked, resulting in 11 innovative visualizations chosen from dozens of submissions for this year's Computer Animation Festival. They include a way to visualize tornadoes and a new method for simulating fluid dynamics.

Among the many student films that will be shown at the ET is La Migration Bigoudenn, which won Jury Honors.
(Image courtesy of Gobelins l'École de l'image ©2004)

Although the winners include pieces from NASA, Cal Berkeley and the NCSA, they weren't all done in ivory towers. One standout ET winner was created by a technical specialist at Sony Pictures Imageworks, addressing a subject that's critical to the development of digital cinema. Despite its staid title, Visualizing the XYZ Color Space, Ebert says it's not an arcane topic.

“This is information that everyone who does computer graphics should know,” he says. “But a lot of people don't, and this is one of the better visualizations explaining the differences in the color space, and just how limited some things are. When you look at color gamuts in books, you always see them in 2D. So you don't realize the difference in the volume of space. It's nice to see that a production company can apply their quality of work to teaching fundamental principles.”

Tomek Baginski of Poland won Jury Honors for the second time in three years with his video, Fallen Art
(Image courtesy Platige Image ©2004)

Ebert thinks the resurgence of scientific visualization in the Computer Animation Festival reflects the real transfer that happens between scientists and people at production studios. That makes sense, since ideas presented at SIGGRAPH often lead to Sci Tech Oscars a few years later. “I see quite a mix of technology now between the visualization community and the movie industry, especially in terms of simulating natural phenomena. People from the effects community are using more and more techniques that have been developed from the visualization community over the past 20 years. They're realizing ‘We need that.’”

But Ebert, who has had his own visualization work shown at SIGGRAPH in the past, acknowledges, “Getting production-quality effects into scientific visualization is probably not flowing as well as the other direction. A lot of visualizations are created by computer programmers, and they look it!”

Six student winners, including Helium, came from the French animation school Supinfocom. This animation was created with 3ds Max software.
(Image courtesy of Supinfocom Aries)

Ebert thinks that Sony's piece this year was particularly effective because Sony has people who are trained to communicate effectively with images. “They understand the importance of timing and editing and choice of camera angles. Fortunately, a lot of the visualization pieces that people will see at SIGGRAPH this year were well produced.”

One of the most heartening things about this year's Computer Animation Festival is the incredibly strong representation of student work. Pieces were submitted by 256 students, and 26 were accepted, so competition was fierce. Since most of these student works were created with the same software used at the major studios, the quality of the winners was exceptionally high. But even more notable was the boldness of the student winners' subject matter, and their pairing of CG and music. As Black observes, “Students are willing to try lots of different things. A company's business isn't depending on them doing a certain thing, so they have a lot more freedom.”

Among the many works in this year's festival that were submitted by overseas contributors are Jona/Tomberry (top), which was produced in Germany, and Lucia (bottom), which was created in the Netherlands.

If there's a dominant trend represented by student work at SIGGRAPH 2005, it is the preeminence of French animation schools. No fewer than six student winners came from Supinfocom's campuses in Valenciennes and Arles. Four winners also came from Gobelins l'école de l'image, including La Migration Bigoudenn, which won Jury Honors. It's the third time in four years that French students have earned that recognition.

Strong showings were also made by the Florida's Ringling School of Art and Design with three winners, and Britain's NCCA Bournemouth University with three. But the most dazzling student work of all was the UCLA graduate film 9 from Shane Acker, which was awarded Best of Show. (See sidebar, “Best of Show: 9”)

This 10-minute tale — told completely in pantomime — has an enigmatic quality that makes it, in Black's words, “A piece that you can watch over and over again. It has a deeper and deeper meaning every time.

Despite its relatively lengthy running time, 9 will be shown in its entirety in the Electronic Theater. The ET show, directed by BZ Petroff from San Francisco's Wild Brain, will be projected in HDTV resolution (1920×1080), and will support both 1080p/24 (24fps progressive scan) and 1080i/30 (30fps interlaced).

This year's Computer Animation Festival will undoubtedly present a full complement of dazzling techniques, but “eye candy” alone won't win prizes at SIGGRAPH any more. Cool technical tricks that in the past would have garnered applause are no longer enough. The standard for storytelling continues to rise, and SIGGRAPH's prestige continues to inspire those who submit their work for consideration.

Black laughs when he describes one reaction to this year's tagline for the Festival — “The show cannot go on without your work.”

“Somebody came back and said, ‘Our work cannot go on without the show!’”

Written, Directed and Animated by Shane Acker

Like all great films, Shane Acker's 9 defies easy description. As 9 has traveled the worldwide film festival circuit, it's been described as a post-apocalyptic fantasy and an urban fairytale. It chronicles the triumphs of a rag-doll character named 9 who outwits a giant mechanical beast that's bent on stealing 9's soul. Set in a junk-yard world where only the best scavengers survive, 9 features characters cobbled together from screws, nuts, zippers and bolts. Yet without a word of dialogue, this 10-minute film manages to convey layers of poignant emotions.

Acker credits artists like Jan Svankmeyer, The Brothers Quay, The Lauenstein Brothers and Zdzislaw Beksinski as sources of inspiration for 9. Conceived as a graduate project for Acker's UCLA Master's degree in film, 9 took four years to complete. “I was shooting to make it a festival piece, sort of as a calling card for me as a director. That's why I took a lot of time crafting it.”

It proceeded in stages, Acker recalls. “I spent about two years working on 9 at school and then I went on a leave of absence and started doing freelance jobs. I would take a gig for a few months, save my money, and then get back to 9.” One of Acker's freelance gigs was nothing less than animating at WETA Digital on The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, which he cheerfully calls “animation boot camp.”

A small group of friends helped Acker periodically with 9, and he did get encouragement from Rhythm & Hues, which in 2001 awarded him a Computer Graphics Scholarship in Modeling based on tests for his film. But for a great deal of the time 9 was a solitary effort, with Acker handling animation, lighting and shading for the film. The detailed textures, the play of shadow and light and the camera angles and cutting reveal the skills of a gifted filmmaker hitting his stride.

“Technology has now trickled down so that you don't need a huge crew,” he observes. “But you definitely need a lot of time. Twenty years ago I couldn't have made 9. The technology wasn't there to do it all in one workstation.”

Acker estimates that the hard costs for 9 were around $5,000. Rhythm and Hues donated the time and facilities to film out to 35mm, and 740 Sound Design and Danetracks donated facilities for the sound. “I couldn't have done it without them,” he says.

Having now won SIGGRAPH's Best of Show honors, 9 qualifies for Oscar consideration. But Acker has dreams beyond competing for a Best Animated Short Film statuette next spring. “I've paired up with some producers and we're developing 9 as a feature. I wrote a treatment and I've got people interested in it. This would be an independent production. We're really concerned about allowing 9 to be what it wants to be, and not have to tweak it too much. So we're trying to do it for not a whole lot of money and outside the studio system so that I can be protected and make the movie that I want to make. I think my timing couldn't be better. There's so much going on in animation industry right now, and so much interest.”

Acker's exposure at SIGGRAPH will certainly help generate buzz among the film industry's digital cognoscenti. In addition to the screenings of 9 in the Electronic Theater, Acker will conduct an hour-long “Meet the Filmmaker” session during SIGGRAPH. “I'm going to show the animatic,” he explains. “It's the skeleton that allowed me to have such a long production time and to stay on track. When you play the animatic alongside the finished film, it's basically the same movie — it's just in pencil, in black and white.”

Looking back on the long road to this success, Acker admits, “It did seem like I was pushing this boulder up a hill by myself for a long time. When I was in the middle of the production — say year 3 — I hated it. But once it's done and out there in screenings, you only remember snippets of misery. You just look back on the production with fondness and say ‘That was the best time of my life.’”