Animated Travels

AnimfxNZ 3-D panel - EA's Habib Zargarpour (l to r), Adlabs/Reliance India's Patrick von Sychowski, 3ality Digital's Steve Schklair, and SohoNet's Dave Scammell.

One of the hot topics at AnimfxNZ was 3-D stereo and digital cinema. Dave Scammell, the President of SohoNet, ran a panel on the issue with Steve Schklair from 3ality Digital, Patrick von Sychowski from Adlabs/Reliance India, and Habib Zargarpour from Electronic Arts Los Angeles.

It’s obvious that the move towards 3-D is slow and painful. Patrick has been in digital cinema for 10 years, and says 3-D is one of those developments that’s always five years away. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem — stereoscopic 3-D in cinema is a function of the theaters’ conversion from 35 mm cinema to digital cinema. He likens the changeover process to the process of switching from left-hand drive to right-hand drive.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Willits

Kaila Colbin reports from AnimfxNZ.

Tim Willits is the Creative Director at id Software, where he’s been since 1995. One of the interesting things in the gaming industry is how so many of their issues predate identical issues in other arenas.

One example is the current UGC / open source / community ownership explosion online, which is having a dramatic impact on music, film, and television. id has always allowed people to modify their games, which has the added benefit of allowing them to identify skilled and passionate talent. All of the designers they’ve got in software now are from the community; young people out of college with no experience can download games, make changes, add levels, create new art, and use that for their resumes to get into the industry.

id Software has made some incredible contributions to gaming and the broader world of technology. Their game Doom legitimized the shareware / demo model, where a portion of a game gets distributed for free and then people have to pay to get more involved. Quake was the first 3D action game and the first server model game: the precursor to online social communities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joseph Olin

Kaila Colbin reports from AnimfxNZ.

Joseph Olin is the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Just like that Other Academy, on which it’s modeled, the AIAS exists to recognize and reward outstanding accomplishments in video games. The Academy is 12 years old, has 15,000 members, and acknowledges the best of the gaming best every year through the Interactive Achievement Awards.

Last year, the Game of the Year award went to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which also received awards for Console Game of the Year, Action Game of the Year, and Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play. The public obviously agrees: at any given moment, approximately two million people are online playing CoD4 through Xbox Live.

Read the rest of this entry »

Henry LaBounta

Kaila Colbin reports from AnimfxNZ.

As Chief Visual Officer for EA Black Box, Henry LaBounta works with art directors and studios to define their visual goals in preproduction and help them execute.

Game Art Direction has three main focus areas – the look of the game, the characters and animation, and the graphic design (menus, user interface, and fonts) – and most of the unsolved problems are with the characters and animation.

One of the interesting things about this conference, and something I discussed with Henry after his presentation, is that video games have come so far in the past 14 years that we can actually have a conference like this one, where the issues facing movie animators and the issues facing game developers can overlap. In fact, when Henry first got into gaming from his TV, movie visual effects and feature animation background, he was surprised at how many similarities there were.

Read the rest of this entry »

Carolyn Soper

Carolyn Soper is a Vice President of Disney Animation Studios, and has been working on the upcoming Disney feature Bolt. She walked AnimfxNZ attendees through the process of building a hamster named Rhino.

Bolt is the story of a dog (played by John Travolta) who’s the star of an action show. He believes anything he can do in the show, he can do in real life. He thinks he can knock down stuntmen and jump across 16 lanes of traffic. He thinks he’s got laser vision. Unfortunately, he doesn’t realize it’s all fake. Bolt is owned by Penny (Miley Cyrus), whom he loves deeply and would do anything to protect.

The fun starts when Bolt gets shipped to New York, still believing he’s got powers, and now believing Penny was kidnapped by the Man With Green Eye. So he does the only logical thing: he abducts a cat. Because all cats are evil and therefore agents of the Man With Green Eye, this one, Mittens (Susie Essman) will surely know where Penny is.

Partway along their quest, they find Rhino the hamster, Bolt’s ‘biggest fan.’ So now there’s this poor sane cat tied to a delusional dog and hounded by an equally delusional hamster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hai capito? Visual culture panelists (l to r) Phil Stenton, Will Wright, Glen Entis and Michael Rubin get some auditory input.

Friday, the final day of the VIEW Conference, and a time for summing up.  Let’s make a list:

Read the rest of this entry »

Aimee McCammon of Park Road.

AnimfxNZ 2008 began with a song.

A contingent of Maori gathered to perform a ‘powhiri’, or New Zealand traditional welcome. The foreign visitors and speakers lined up so the kaumatua could determine if they were friends or foes. Thankfully, there were no enemies among them, and the conference was able to proceed.

Aimee McCammon, the General Manager of Park Road Post Production, explored some of the challenges faced by PRPP and post-production houses in general. It’s a commodity business. The pace of change is phenomenal. High entry costs for the really cool new equipment coexist with the plummeting price of downstream technology, generating a tricky balance between early adoption and ROI.

Consider the Quantel Pablo they bought in late 2006. They started the kit with a chargeout rate of $1600/hr. 18 months later the rate was down to $800/hr, and under continuing and relentless price pressure from competitors. Nonetheless, Aimee is proud of and will continue the company’s policy of being early adopters of technology.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pervasive computing gets the upper hand.

Russell Bekins reports from the VIEW Conference in Turin

Well, I’m torn.  Shall I go to the presentation on “Hair shells and bi-quad transition rig on Shrek the Halls and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” or to the “Humanizing virtual agents: the role of speech technology in effective human-machine interaction?”  All of this requires a certain mind-set.  Maybe if they made a rule that titles had to be short, like “Beards and boundaries” and “Talk to me, Mac,” I would feel less anxiety about making these choices.
Read the rest of this entry »

VIEW Conference visitors The Hive filmmaking collective presents their credentials and contemplates transformation

The autumn haze in Turin is downright metaphorical.  The precursor of another grey Po Valley winter, a haze that creeps into the bones and causes a ridiculously high percentage of arthritis in these parts.  Sunny Italy my foot.

Here at the VIEW Conference there is another vapor in the air besides water:  a palpable sense of worry.  You can see it on the faces of the digital hipsters listening attentively to representatives of Pixar and DreamWorks, consigning their show reels with all the courtesy and ceremony of a Japanese businessman presenting his business card.

O youngsters, where is thy arrogance?

Read the rest of this entry »