SIGGRAPH in LA

Now that SIGGRAPH is less than two weeks away, it’s time to pull out that slick little mobile digital calendar and get ready to meet, greet, learn, play, buy, sell and party at the biggest computer graphics conference in the world. This year, the legendary show lands in Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, digital multi-mega-media, games, aerospace engineering, and all things weird and wacky. And that means even more connections than usual for people involved in or interested in digital art, media and entertainment.

As anyone who has read the artist profiles on this site knows, the connections people make at SIGGRAPH often launch new careers and invigorate those already on a career path. It’s one thing to read about computer graphics. Quite another to shake the hand of the scientist who invented it, the technical director who put it to use, and the artist who made it beautiful. 

“We’ve packed every minute of every day with uncompromising excellence,” says Terrence Masson, conference chair. “There’s not a single minute of weak content. We could have put on two SIGGRAPHs with the amount of amazing content that was submitted.”

For people involved in production, that might be especially true this year. “I tried really hard to get the conference mission and the jury instructions in line with Terrence’s goal of making SIGGRAPH more relevant to the production community,” says Bill Polson, director of production communities. “SIGGRAPH tends to favor cutting edge techniques and research. But in production, we focus on quality, excellence, issues of scale – applying a technique to 1000 shots. So, I wanted to make sure that in the panels, talks, and courses, we paid attention to excellence and interest as much as novelty.”


Masson anticipates attendance will be around 25,000, and emphasizes that this is the reason to be there in person. “You can download more and more of the content before, during, after,” he says. “But you have to go there physically to experience all the face to face fun with colleagues, luminaries, and the people who make the content.”

In fact, the theme of the conference this year is 'the people behind the pixels.' “It won’t be obvious from reading descriptions of the talks and courses,” Masson says, “but they all have a personal angle. It’s something we really wanted to emphasize. The curated material, the call for presentations, all centered on making content more accessible, maybe more informal, and hopefully a lot more fun. Fun is going to be a big part of this.”

One bit of fun that won’t be happening this year, though, is Fjorge!, the competition in which teams of animators competed to create the best short animated film during the show. “It was too expensive in terms of hard costs,” says Masson. “People don’t realize this is a nonprofit conference and we rely heavily on donations from major studios and hardware and software vendors. Their generosity allows us to put the conference on. Every computer, monitor, light is donated. Fjorge! was a massive draw on that donation pool and when we have a limited number of donations, they have to go to our core programs.”
At the Movies


Included in the fun, though, is the prestigious Electronic Theater, which showcases the best CG eye candy during the past year. After experimenting with various formats during the last couple of SIGGRAPHS, the committee this year returned to the ET everyone remembers in which all the content is wrapped into one two-hour show that repeats on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Three students at Filmakademie Baden Württemberg, Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, and Csaba Letay, took Best in Show honors for their film, “Loom,” the story of a drowning moth. The award qualifies the film for Oscar consideration. Winning the Jury Award is “Poppy,” an independent film by James Cunningham from New Zealand, which uses motion capture and facial animation to help animate an emotional story of two soldiers and a baby in France during World War I. The best student film prize went to “The Wonder Hospital,” a short animated film by Beomsik Shimbe Shim of the California Institute of the Arts.

The Electronic Theater also honors visual effects with clips from “Tron: Legacy” (Disney / Digital Domain), “2012” (Digital Domain, Scanline), “Alice in Wonderland” (Sony Pictures Imageworks), “Avatar” (Weta Digital) “Iron Man 2” and “The Last Airbender” from Industrial Light & Magic, “Prince of Persia” and “Sherlock Holmes” from Framestore all making the cut. Also featured are commercials, more fabulous short films, scientific visualizations, and selections from videogames. It’s a juried and curated selection of the best in CG. There’s nothing else like it . . . except . . . the other screenings: Commercials and Cinematics on Sunday and Tuesday, more Short Films on Monday and Wednesday, and Chinese Student Animation on Thursday. You need a Full conference ticket or a Computer Animation Festival ticket to get a seat.

Related links:
SIGGRAPH 2010