SIGGRAPH Day 3
The last couple of days really took it out of me so I decided to turn in early and get some down time. I’m actually feeling pretty inspired so I might animate for an hour or two before bed. (if that’s what I call down time… I might have a problem.) The Softimage party last night was a lot of fun and definitely one of the better Siggraph parties I’ve been to. Vanilla Ice even did a half-hour set. Let’s hear it for random 90’s pop music references!
The big events for today were the Iron Man/Cloverfield VFX panels and the Frank and Ollie Tribute. The tribute was definitely right up there with the Catmull keynote for me. The panelists read like a whose who of modern animation and it was incredibly fun. There’s nothing like being in a room with 400 other animators who all just want to geek out and reminisce about the good old days. Actually, they also talked a lot about CG and how the transition is going, but the main focus was on Frank and Ollie’s different approaches and there’s nothing like hearing it from the mouths of people who witnessed the magic first hand.
The Iron Man presentation was also incredibly fun, but my favorite was definitely Cloverfield. The VFX of that movie were pretty low-budget and had a lot of traditionally challenging issues like handheld cameras with lots of zooming. However, the panel focused on the good-old-fashioned tricks like hiding cuts in whip pans, having difficult interactions happen just out of frame, and obscuring the tricky VFX with DOF and zooming. Those are the types of the things I’m a huge fan of because they actually allow the production to save money by doing VFX. Its good to see how much bang for the buck you can get by involving the VFX people earlier on in the creative process.
I also caught the animation festival. It was definitely the strongest animation program I’ve seen in a long time. Octopodi from some of the Gobelins guys was my favorite. Its another one of those shorts that is just incredibly tight and has a very clear and well-paced story that flows beautifully.
August 16th, 2008 at 5:11 am
Hey Lucas, it’s really funny that Octopodi keeps coming up, I’ve heard it on this site, and my old tutor sent me a link to it. And all a day after I spent a day randomly looking up Gobelins short films and found it. It’s so good, when I was watching the “making of” video, on their site, my mouth drooped open, it’s incredible.