Animation Theaters and Electronic Theater

Computer Animation Festival

I found time on Sunday to attend the Animation Theater, which features the best animated pieces submitted over the last year. Many of these shorts are stunning examples, some are delightful and humorous and several are just plan weird.

Improved resolution of 4K

As I walked into the theatre, a 12-minute film written and directed by Peter Jackson was playing in the 4K format via a Sony SXRD projector. This simple short was shot to show off the new 4096 by 2048 resolution camera technology and it was amazing. The clarity and picture quality is several times better than HD and the entire production was shot in merely two days. The key was using a unique compression drive that enabled a huge amount of film data to be captured with minimal loss.

One segment of the festival showed other 4K examples including a rendered piece about flying to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Now that we’ve all converted to HD, it is interesting to see what is next on the horizon.

In another part of the conference was a huge flat screen display showing slides in 4K and it was close enough that you could examine the details of this improved resolution up close. Cool stuff.

Game animations and awards

All of the accepted pieces were divided into several categories including 4K, Music, Creativity, Games and FX, Science, Storytelling, and Madness. Of all these categories, I probably enjoyed the Games and FX category the best. Many of the games and film studios continually blow away the competition with their cutting edge work. The pieces included in the category included birth of Sandman from Spiderman 3, the intro to Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the opening sequence to Lost Odyssey, and animations from World of Warcraft--The Burning Crusade, Warhammer Online, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Fight Night Round III, and NBA Street.

Three shorts were singled out from the record-breaking 905 submissions, Dreammaker, submitted by Liszek Plichta, Institute of Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Post Production, Filakademie Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany was awarded Jury Honors, the short film, EnTus Brazos, submitted by Fancois-Xaxier Goby, Edouard Jouret, and Matthieu Landour, Supinfocom Valenciennes, France was given the Award of Excellence, and Ark, submitted by Grzegorz Jonkajtys and Marcin Kobylecki, Poland was cited as Best in Show.

Of all the shorts, one of my favorites was the Versus (Figure 1), which showed a duel between two comic Japanese warlords fighting foolishly over a small island that was between them.

Another one of my favorites was called Contrast, which featured Escher prints where the sketched objects are animated in 3D.

Animation Theater Chair

I had a chance to speak with Paul Debavac, the Animation Theater chair, about the pieces selected for this year’s Animation Theaters. Paul mentioned that there were over 900 submitted pieces. One criteria that seem to work against submitted pieces was if they seemed derivative. The committee was on the look out for animations that were new, unique and original.

Paul also mentioned that many of the European animation pieces met this original criteria and in many ways, the schools in Europe are raising the bar for the quality of work displayed at the Siggraph.

Electronic Theatre

Of course the best animated pieces are saved for the Electronic Theater. This year’s Electronic Theatre pre-show featured a laser typically used in planetarium light shows configured to re-create the early video game hits, Asteroids, Tempest and Star Wars. Players for each game were selected by tossing out soft objects into the audience.

For the players, it must have been quite a thrill to be playing these classic video games on a 40 foot screen with an auditorium of 3000 people cheering for you. The player selected for the Asteroids game in my session was confused by the controls and quickly died being hit by the first rock that came his way as the whole audience boo’ed his lack of success. He was mercifully given a second chance where he did much better, even blowing up a couple of spaceships. The Tempest and Star Wars players also seemed to die off quickly.

The animation pieces presented in the Electronic Theatre were absolutely spellbinding. Each diverse from the other, the collection featured film shots from Pan’s Labyrinth, World Trade Center, Surf’s Up, Spiderman 3, 300, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the digital birth from Children of Men among others. There were also humorous shorts from Pixar, about an alien trainee program and Blue Sky, the makers of Ice Age featuring Skrat, the saber-toothed squirrel. These shots clearly showed why these studios have been so successful.

Games clips in the Electronic Theatre included a humorous clip explaining the upcoming Valve game, Portal, along with a show reel of EA games showing Crytek, Gears of War, and Resistance-Fall of Man.

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