SIGGRAPH. Artistic and Technical!

Details of the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers and the Computer Animation Festival.

Last year SIGGRAPH gave the now 36-year-old celebration of CG through short films a new face by establishing the Computer Animation Festival (CAF) as a separate but equal part of the conference with screenings, talks, panels and other sessions. This year, the CAF has taken a little from the old and a little from the new and crafted a sparkling five-day event. As before, attendees can purchase a separate CAF pass for the entire five days or separate, less expensive, passes for individual days. A full pass includes the CAF, of course, too.

Once again, CAF includes a sub-fest on stereo 3D, with screenings, plus sessions on Thursday and some of Friday in rooms 260-262 and 271-273, all organized by Imageworks’ Rob Engle, who just finished working on the 3D version of 'G-Force'.

So what changed? CAF executive producer Carlye Archibeque of LightStage brought back the sorely missed, prestigious Electronic Theater (renamed the Evening Theater) which highlights most of the best of the best, and bundled the ticket price into the one-day CAF pass as well as the full CAF pass. So, for the price of an Electronic Ticket a few years ago, you can now spend an entire day at the festival.

The selected films shown each night at the Evening Theater include two screenings, each an hour long, to show selected Juried and Curated films. You can see all the nominees for awards Monday afternoon at 1:45. Then, if you attend the Monday night screening, you can be the first to learn which films won the awards.

The nominees for the Oscar-qualifying Best of Show award are: 'Engel zu Fuss' (Angel Afoot), a cartoon for children about an angel that joins a circus, created for television by Jakob Schuh and Saschka Unseld of Studio Soi in Germany. 'French Roast,' starring an uptight businessman who can’t pay his bill in a fancy café, a story told largely without dialog by Fabrice O. Joubert of Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films, a small animation studio near Paris. And, 'Silhouettes of Jazz,' a film by Dominik Käser, Martin-Sebastian Senn, Mario Deuss, Niloy J. Mitra, and Mark Pauly from Zürich, Switzerland that uses 3D sculpture to cast multiple 2D shadows that tell the story of the evolution of jazz.

Films from The Mill, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and Supinfocom Valenciennes compete for the prestigious jury award, also announced Monday night. The Mill’s 'Dix' explores obsessive behavior, Taiwan’s 'Love Child' demonstrates visual capture software by constructing a new-born infant, and Supinfocom’s “Anima” imagines a city made of animal shapes.

In addition, SIGGRAPH will announce the winners of the Student Prize – either 'Dim Sum' from Ringling (US), 'Incident at Tower 37' from Hampshire College (US), or 'Alpha' from The Animation Workshop (Denmark). Nominees for the WFT (Well Told Fable) Award include 'friends?' (Iceland), “Unbelievable Four (US), and 'Fernet 1,882 ‘Mini Cab Company’ (Argentina).

Making Music, Making Cities
On Monday, the CAF looks at visual music during talks and screenings, and then jazzes the conference with music performances every night at 6:00 in Rooms 243-245 plus Wednesday and Thursday afternoons at 1:45. These performances are open to anyone with a full, CAF, or basic pass. Extended guitars, custom instruments, interactive electronics, music! Check out the instruments. Check out the sounds. Jam.

On Tuesday, the CAF concentrates on urban planning and architecture and many of those films along with other jury selections screen during the 2Cool4School session on Thursday at 3:45 and Friday at 8:30 for those with Full and CAF passes.

“I love short animation, but I wanted to take advantage of having a digital arts festival,” says Archibeque. “The digital tool has developed so far for these applications and I we are in New Orleans where urban planning is so important now. So, we tried to come up with sessions that link to what people in this area would be interested in and feature things that haven’t been showcased before. We have one session with the Los Angeles department of transportation talking about building and rebuilding roads. I love urban planning and architectural visualizations. So, I did a special call for those.”

Technical Papers
Technical papers are one of the most important parts of SIGGRAPH, the underlying foundation, the algorithms that make the art possible. If you can understand what the papers accepted at SIGGRAPH say today, you’ll know more about what kind of art you can make tomorrow.

This year, SIGGRAPH’s dozens of peer reviewers accepted 78 papers from the 439 submitted, about half from US universities with the rest split among industrial, European and Asian sources.



“The remarkable trends in this year’s papers program are the increases in papers in physically-based modeling and surface deformation,” says Thomas Funkhouser of Princeton University, who chaired the papers committee. “Physical models are used in almost every subfield of graphic including fluid simulation, character animation, soft tissue, fire simulation and surface modeling.

All of this brings the CG world closer and closer to the real world, in appearance and in motion. Bringing the two worlds closer in another way are papers advancing the art of interfacing with the digital world.

“The program has an exciting session of papers on human-computer interaction technologies,” Funkhouser says. “Including hand tracking and achieving eye contact in a teleconferencing system.” That session is Thursday at 10:30 for people with full conference passes.

You can also find papers this year describing an interactive simulation of surgical needle insertion and steering, ways to capture a 3mm barcode from two meters away, dark flash photography, and, appropriate for a SIGGRAPH held in a musical city, harmonic fluids.

And, you might also want to check out a session on creating natural variations, which includes procedural methods for generating trees, hair, crowds, and faces. (Wednesday, 3:45)

If you don’t speak calculus and don’t want to sit through a technical session you can barely understand, or don’t have a full conference pass, be sure, whatever you do, to catch the Fast Forward session. Here, the scientists have one minute to describe their work. It’s open to everyone. You’ll be amazed. And, entertained. It’s Monday at 6 in Hall E.

And, don’t forget…

The exhibition trade show and the exhibitors tech talks. You can spend time in user group meetings, watch demos, discover new software and hardware. It’s about the tools. We need the fracking tools! We need to know how they work, what they do, what they will be doing tomorrow and for that, be sure to also visit the Emerging Technology area.

And, don’t forget to save time to be inspired with artwork in all the galleries. Last years’ algorithmic designs were the hits of the show. This year, the Generative Fabrication galleries are open to those with full and basic conference passes on Monday through Friday in rooms 356-357, and the interactive, kinetic, BioLogic art every day in rooms 352-355.

Also open to those with full and basic passes are talks by this year’s award winners on Monday, at 1:45: Robert L. Cook, Vice President of Advanced Technology, Pixar Animation Studios: Steven A. Coons Award. Michael Kass, Senior Scientist, Pixar Animation Studios: Computer Graphics Achievement Award. Wojciech Matusik, Senior Research Scientist, Adobe Systems, Inc.: Significant New Researcher Award. Roman Verostko, Professor Emeritus, Minneapolis College of Art & Design and Lynn Hershman Leeson Professor Emeritus, UC Davis, Chair of Film Department, San Francisco Art Institute: The Distinguished Artist Award.

Where else could you improvise a week by riffing from a session with Oscar-winning sound designer Randy Thom to one with the remarkable Will Wright, creator of the Sims and Spore and speaker extraordinaire? Or, move from a session on getting a job to watching the Oscar winning short animated film? Watch stereo 3D, watch a researcher create digital fire. Make music. Make art.

Studios and software developers keep their secrets all year long and then, as if they couldn’t hold on one minute longer, they bring their best talent, best software, and best images to SIGGRAPH and tell all. The artists, the propeller heads, the managers, the vendors – all share their knowledge with the community during this incredible, week-long event. It happens only once a year and this year expect something special.

“In uncertain economic times like these it's more important than ever for the conference to provide our community with kind of experiences that teach and inspire and help people grow and connect in order to plant the seeds for the future,” says conference chair Ronen Barzel.