Comic-Con 2009: 15 VFX Events You Must See

Rick DeMott makes a hand cheat sheet of the must see VFX-related panels at Comic-Con 2009.


Comic-Con 2009: 15 VFX Events You Must See
Rick DeMott makes a hand cheat sheet of the must see VFX-related panels at Comic-Con 2009.
By Rick DeMott
[ Posted on July 20, 2009 ]

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Outer space effects on display in Pandorum.

Big budget Hollywood genre films have ruled Comic-Con for years now. Fans get a chance to see footage and ask questions to the cast and crews. But with so much going on at the Con, what should you attend? VFXWorld has put together a handy cheat sheet of the most interesting VFX-related panels at this year's event. Find out the must see events that everyone will probably be talking about afterward, so you can plan your time at the event wisely.

15.) Eastwick Pilot Screening and Q&A [Saturday 10:15-11:15 -- Room 6A]
One of the most anticipated series of the fall, this series based on the John Updike novel and the hit film The Witches of Eastwick will make its first public screening at Comic-Con. The series centers on three young witches whose powers are awakened when a mysterious man moves to town. Panel will include stars Rebecca Romijn (X-Men), Lindsay Price (Lipstick Jungle), Jaime Ray Newman (Veronica Mars), and Paul Gross (Due South) with creator/exec producer Maggie Friedman (Related) and director/exec producer David Nutter (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). Produced by Warner Bros. Television, Eastwick will air Wednesdays at 10:00 PM ET/PT this fall on ABC.

14.) Overture Films: Pandorum [Thursday 5:15-5:45 -- Hall H]
The producers of the Resident Evil series bring their latest sci-fi thriller to Comic-Con. Attendees will get never-before-seen looks at Pandorum where two crewmembers wake up on an abandoned spacecraft with no idea who they are, how long they've been asleep, or what their mission is. The two soon discover they're actually not alone -- and the reality of their situation is more horrifying than they could have imagined. Panel includes producer Paul Anderson and stars Ben Foster (X-Men: The Last Stand, 3:10 to Yuma, 30 Days of Night), Cung Le (The Ultimate Fighter), and Antje Traue.

13.) Robert Rodriguez [Friday 1:45-2:45 -- Room 6DE]
Troublemaker Studio's Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids) will be at the Con showing off his new family film, Shorts. But I'm sure he'll get into other future projects like Predators and Sin City 2.

From one of the most kick-ass comics comes one of the most anticipated films at Comic-Con.

12.) Kick-Ass [Thursday 5:45-6:30 -- Hall H]
The highly anticipated comic adaptation with world premiere footage at the Con. The story follows a comic book geek who decides he wants to be a hero, but learns bloody quick that it takes far more than a costume to be a superhero. Fans will get a chance to ask questions of director Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Layercake), Nicolas Cage, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad) and comic co-creator John Romita Jr., including a surprise guest.

Comic-Con 2009: 15 VFX Events You Must See (continued from page 1)

Gilliam's work always has magic inside.

11.) Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus [Thursday 4:30-5:15 -- Hall H]
Animator and director Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Brazil, 12 Monkeys) will show off footage from the film, which features the last performance of Heath Ledger. Dr. Parnassus is a fabulous anachronism, touring the streets of modern-day London in a horse-drawn carnival wagon accompanied by his beautiful daughter, devoted dwarf and neophyte barker. On stage Parnassus plays a holy man whose Imaginarium can realize the innermost fantasies of all who dare to enter. Backstage, he is a drunkard, a gambler who centuries ago lost a wager with the Devil and must now pony up with his daughter once she turns sixteen. Film stars Christopher Plummer, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits and Lily Cole. So you never know who could show up.

10.) Caprica/Battlestar Galactica: The Plan [Friday 11:45-12:45 -- Ballroom 20]
The makers of Battlestar Galactica will give fans the first glimpses of the highly anticipated Syfy original series, Caprica and the two-hour event, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, directed by Edward James Olmos. Panel will include executive producers Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson, Caprica star Esai Morales and Battlestar Galactica's Olmos. The best in TV visual effects will be on display for sure.

Caprica's characters, including the Graystone and Adama families, live in a world before the events of Battlestar Galactica occurred.

9.) Summit Ent. [Thursday 1:45-2:45 -- Hall H]
Summit Entertainment presents a sneak peek at three of their upcoming films. 3-D CG feature Astro Boy, horror flick Sorority Row and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Fangirls will be there is force to catch a glimpse of Edward, but VFX fans will hopefully get a better look at the werewolf effects in the Twilight sequel. Plus, Summit will screen the first 3-D footage from Astro Boy.

Get a taste of Astro Boy! 8.) Warner Bros. [Friday 10:00-12:30 -- Hall H] Little details are known about this year's Warner Bros. panel, but a potential VFX smorgasbord is very possible. The WB will be previewing Where the Wild Things Are, The Book of Eli, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Box, Jonah Hex and Sherlock Holmes. Rumors are that Megan Fox and Robert Downey Jr. will be on hand as well. But could fans also get Spike Jonze, Denzel Washington, Jackie Earle Haley, Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Josh Brolin or Jude Law? Could be the panel with the most surprises. Where the Wild Things Are trailer The Box trailer Sherlock Holmes trailer Comic-Con 2009: 15 VFX Events You Must See (continued from page 3) 7.) Sony Pictures: Zombieland and 2012 [Saturday 2:45-3:45 -- Hall H] Sony Pictures has two flicks this year – the horror comedy Zombieland and Roland Emmerich's disaster epic 2012. Zombieland asks the question -- what if the Zombies won? Panel will include Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and director Ruben Fleischer. Emmerich will be on hand to share world destroying visual effects not seen in the trailer for fans. Zomblieland trailer 2012 trailer Christmas Carol in July at Comic-Con. 6.) Disney: 3-D Panel [Thursday 11:00-12:30 – Hall H] Walt Disney Pictures presents three of its biggest upcoming releases on 3-D Day at Comic-Con. Robert Zemeckis will be on hand to present A Christmas Carol while Tim Burton will show off the first footage from Alice in Wonderland. Disney surprised fans last year with the first look at Tr2n and they'll be back with much more this year. Guests will also include Sean Bailey, Steve Lisberger and moderator Patton Oswalt. Disney is known for big surprises, just so you know. 5.) Lucasfilm: Star Wars Spectacular [Friday 5:15-6:15 -- Hall H] Star Wars fans certainly shouldn't miss the yearly look at the Star Wars universe. But this year is extra special, because it will be the first ever panel broadcast live on TV. Special guest hosts G4's Olivia Munn and Kevin Pereira will grill guests from The Clone Wars and beyond, including supervising director Dave Filoni, plus voice talent from the show and more. Fans will get a live table read of a script from Clone Wars season 2. LucasFilm will also announce news on the worldwide Star Wars Concert Tour, the latest Star Wars games from LucasArts, upcoming DVD (and Blu-ray) releases and more. Could George be coming? Star Wars: The Clone Wars playlist 4.) Sony Pictures Ent.: Legion and District 9 [Friday 3:45-5:00 -- Hall H] Peter Jackson will make his first Comic-Con appearance this year. As the exec producer, he is there to showcase the highly anticipated sci-fi film District 9. On the panel with Jackson will be director Neill Blomkamp and star Sharlto Copley. As a bonus, attendees will be the first look at Legion. When the last angel falls, the fight for mankind begins. Having lost faith in the human race, a legion of angels descends to Earth to bring about the Apocalypse. Humanity's only hope lies in a group of strangers trapped in a desert diner and the Archangel Michael himself (Paul Bettany). Panel will include Paul Bettany (A Beautiful Mind, The DaVinci Code), Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights, Supernatural), Tyrese Gibson (Transformers, Death Race), Doug Jones (Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Abe Sapien in Hellboy) and director Scott Stewart, who was previously a vfx artist on Sin City, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Iron Man. District 9 trailer Peter Jackson and James Cameron on one stage! 3.) Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries [Friday 6:30-7:30 -- Hall H] Of course, one panel featuring Peter Jackson isn't enough. So why not bring him out with James Cameron? EW will conduct an in-depth conversation with the innovators about the art of film and how technology and global culture will change cinema. A must attend for any VFX pro. Mickey Rourke coming to The Con? 2.) Paramount Pictures and Marvel Ent.: Iron Man 2 [Saturday 4:00-5:00 -- Hall H] When Iron Man footage first debuted at Comic-Con, it blew fans away. Paramount Pictures and Marvel Ent. hope to do the same with the sequel. Besides new footage fans can expect cast members to grace the stage as well. Who could it be -- director Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow or Samuel L. Jackson, who have been to the Con before, or new Iron Man cast members like Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell or Mickey Rourke? It's one of those events you have to attend to find out. More than this press shot will be revealed of Avatar at Comic-Con. 1.) 20th Century Fox and James Cameron present Avatar [Thursday 3:00-4:15 -- Hall H] But no panel at the entire Con is more anticipated than the first public look at footage from James Cameron's Avatar. Cameron, producer Jon Landau, and cast members will be on hand. If the rumors are true, this could be a moment for the history books. I'm jealous of all who get to attend.

Sci-Fi prequel goes to comic form to bridge into Mass Effect 2. Comic-Con this week in San Diego.

The EA studio BioWare, and Dark Horse Comics have announced a new comic book series based on Mass Effect, the blockbuster sci-fi action videogame. In Mass Effect: Redemption, the story takes readers through the treacherous events leading up to Mass Effect 2 which opens with galactic hero Commander Shepard having mysteriously gone missing and left to fight for survival. What unfolds next will expose readers to new locations, aliens and extended storyline in the Mass Effect universe. Mass Effect: Redemption is scheduled to launch in January 6, 2010.

The Mass Effect: Redemption story is written by Lead Writer Mac Walters at BioWare. Walters is the script writer behind Mass Effect 2. He brings unique insight to the Mass Effect comic and nuance of the world within. The comic is scripted by John Jackson Miller (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, The Invincible Iron Man) and drawn by Omar Francia (Star Wars Legacy). This first four-part series explores the exotic and dangerous future Milky Way of Mass Effect, revealing previously unseen locations, aliens, and enemies of this rich science fiction landscape.

Mac Walters and Omar Francia will be autographing a Comic-con exclusive Mass Effect signing card at the Dark Horse booth (#2615) on July 24th at 4:00pm to 5:00pm at Comic-Con International 2009 in San Diego, CA.

CGSociety will be reporting from Comic-Con this year. You will be able to read the report early next week.

“Fans of Mass Effect are going to be pleasantly shocked by the events in these comics," says Mac Walters. "We worked very closely with Dark Horse to make sure this story was built in to the Mass Effect 2 arc, right from the ground up. Reading the series won’t just add to your experience of the universe, it will change the way you look at Mass Effect 2.”

The narrative in Mass Effect: Redemption picks up just as Commander Shepard disappears and is left without the support of the crew on the Normandy in the lawless Terminus Systems. Shepard must fight for survival, and will be assisted by close companion, Dr. Liara T’Soni, to come home alive. This story is sure to be a must-read for fans looking to fill the gap between the first and second game.

Mass Effect 2 is scheduled for release on Xbox 360 and PC in early 2010.

Related links:
Mass Effect 2
BioWare
Dark Horse Comics
Comic-Con

How To: Building Your Own Render Farm

A good render time for television visual effects is anywhere between 30 minutes to one hour per frame, while multiple hours per frame is common for feature films. Some of the IMAX resolution frames required for Devastator, a character in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, took up to 72 hours per frame. How do studios get around this? They use render farms, which are banks of machines with the express p.................



More At:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/render-farm-node,2340.html#xtor=RSS-182

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.