SIGGRAPH Dailies!

The Studio

Also returning to SIGGRAPH this year, bigger and better than ever is The Studio, once known as the 'Gorilla Studio.' The Studio, the Art Gallery – which features haptics devices this year – and Emerging Technologies, are all in one large open space. “We got the chairs of these three hand-on areas together to create an integrated experience,” Masson says. “They are all doing fantastic things.”

ILM's Elements for The Last Airbender

or The Last Airbender, director M. Night Shyamalan turned to Industrial Light & Magic to create dynamic fighting scenes featuring elemental manipulation, as well as complex creatures and environments for the film. VFX supe Pablo Helman and associate VFX supervisor Craig Hammack take us through some of ILM's main technical challenges. 

Creating 3D fire and other earthly elements

In the world of Airbender, each nation controls an element - Water, Air, Earth and Fire - under the supervision of the Avatar. When the Fire Nation seeks world domination, Young Avatar Aang, who can control all four elements, is charged with restoring the peace. Fire, in particular, was one of the elements ILM tackled early on, drawing on its previous work for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. "What we found in that movie," noted visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, "was that the fire looked great, but it was only projected onto 3D cards. ForAirbender we needed a real 3D volume fire. The fire events are coming towards camera and the camera was also moving around so much that we would need to be going through the volume itself." 

CGWorkshops: Jon Rush and Rob Chang!

COURSE OVERVIEW

This workshop is an updated version of Jon’s previous Modern Game Character Creation workshop. Updates include; full figure massing, hair sculpting, streamlined baking process, introduction and instruction with Topogun (students get a 20% discount per license), and an introduction to the Marmoset real-time viewing app. Jon will take you under the hood of the 'character art hot rod' and guide you through the 'ins & outs' of successfully creating video game characters within a studio mind-set. Through this intense eight-week class, students will learn by doing! Not only will you learn the successive phases of character creation based on a simulated game studio pipeline, you will also have your own unique creation to show off as part of your folio.

OptiTrack's Insight VCS brings an 'Avatar' virtual camera to any studio.

Optical Virtual Camera System brings live-action camera Work for CG filmmaking at a lower price, compatible with all Optical Motion Capture Systems.

James Cameron revolutionized digital cinematography with his innovative control of the virtual camera using motion capture. This 'Virtual Verite' technology is now being offered for a fraction of the cost, with OptiTrack's Insight VCS.

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.

Oscars open visual-effects prize to 5 nominees

LOS ANGELES — The visual-effects category has gotten an upgrade at the next Academy Awards ceremony.

The board of governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences increased the number of nominees to five, up from three, at the 83rd awards show next Feb. 27.

The switch brings more awards attention to visual effects, which play a bigger role in Hollywood blockbusters as digital-animation technology continues to advance.

Since 1996, the visual-effects category has featured only three nominees, including last year's winner, the science-fiction blockbuster "Avatar."

'Despicable' filmmakers like their villains to be redeemable

Anyone who has ever told a story to a group of children knows it's the good, well-behaved ones who always sit up front and listen attentively, beatific smiles on their faces.

But at least one new animation company is telling tales for the spitball-throwing troublemakers in the back row.

Despicable Me, a comedy with a super-villain as the leading man, opens Friday and is the first film from Illumination Entertainment, a Universal Picturescompany founded by former Fox animation chief Chris Meledandri (Ice Age, Robots).

Shut Up Fool, This is the A-team!

Director Joe Carnahan's re-imagining of the popular 1980s TV series The A-Team sees the renegade soldiers taking on a more modern mission. Overall visual effects supervisor James E. Price looked to both practical and digital means to achieve the characteristically crazy and high action stunts made famous by the series. We drill down on some of the major FX sequences from the film. 

Meet the A-Team

An early sequence shows Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) coming to the rescue of Face (Bradley Cooper) with the aid of the iconic GMC Vandura. Shots of the van launching were achieved by special effects supervisor Mike Vezina. "The director wanted the van to be quite iconic and come up almost like the rising sun and be backlit. So we dug in a 30 foot ramp that we could adjust in height and then used a very powerful 10 foot ratchet to get the speed of the van from 0 to 45 km/h. As it lands, the stunt guy took over and slid the van out." 

After recruiting helicopter pilot Murdoch (Sharlto Copley), the A-Team is then pursued in a dramatic helicopter

Jellyfish Transitions for History Channel

America: The Story of Us is one of the History Channel's most popular series, telling the story of how the United States was invented. To help showcase many years of history in only a 12 part series, Jellyfish Pictures realised several sweeping 'transition' shots to link stories together. We talk to Jellyfish creative director Phil Dobree and visual effects supervisor Hasraf Dulull. 

fxg: What was the overall philosophy behind the narrative device of these sweeping transition shots?

Phil Dobree: This show is quite different to anything we've been asked to do before. What the TV documentary guys are trying to do is find a new way of showcasing history. They're trying to get away from doing the doco-drama approach, which can sometimes have cheesy historical reconstructions with lots of commentary. In this series there was a mixture between talking heads with celebrities. They're trying to give some more mass appeal. Then they would take these very key moments in the history of the US and link them. The technique we had to come up with was to take the story and link it to the next story. You've got these global views that involve traveling across the country in time and space to the next story. 

The reason they came to us, I think, was that we've got a good reputation for coming up with creative solutions to those tricky problems. We just don't take visual effects shots and deliver them - we've have quite a lot of say in the whole creative approach. They didn't really the budget to do these sequences entirely photoreal. It just wouldn't have been feasible to go from big close-ups to these wide travelling shots to global views and back up and down again. So we came up with some creative solutions and ways of doing those shots in a more stylised look.


fxg: Can you give me an example of one of the transition shots?

Isaac Kerlow is the SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festival Director. He hails from The Earth Observatory of Singapore/NTU ADM.

"The 2010 Computer Animation Festival continues the tradition of showcasing the best in computer animation and visual effects," says Kerlow. "This year we have formalized the submission categories to bring the Computer Animation Festival more in line with other top international film festivals and to make the jury process a bit easier. We have a Student Projects category, for example, among the new submission categories, so that computer-animated works produced to satisfy a school, coursework, and/or graduation requirement are to be submitted under this category."