Animated Travels

Genzano di Roma from across the lake. All images courtesy of Heather Kenyon.

What is it about Italians?  Give any of them a microphone and invite them to speak and they immediately turn into the best public speakers known to man.  Joking, calling out to the audience, laughing, and then delivering interesting insight and banter.  This is I Castelli Animati.  Led by unfazable festival director, Luca Raffaelli, the festival bounced along for four days, from November 26 – 30, 2008 in Genzano di Roma, a little hill town north of Rome located around sparkling blue lakes.

Luca has created an usual way of presenting films in that, as usual, there are several categories of films.  However, the categories are broken up into screenings of just 15 – 30 minutes.  So one will see three student films, then a few films from the prestigious international competition, then a few more from the Italian or international showcase and then a retrospective will take place and then next a special guest will have a word, and then suddenly student films will appear again!  And each spoonful of screenings is introduced by Luca who does an impromptu interview with whomever is in the audience with a relationship to the films.  If – and admit it, we’ve all done it – if snoozing at festivals is a habit of yours, it won’t be at I Castelli.  Lights come up, lights go down, films come on, people charge up to the front of the audience for quick interviews, people shout out, children come and go and so on and so on.  But…the presentation isn’t chaotic or irritating or disrespectful to the films.  Rather it is lovely, endearing and charming.  “I liked the festival as the films were presented like in a theatre show,” says juror Gerben Schermer, festival director of Holland’s HAFF.  “This way of presentation creates an intimate relationship with the audience.  And, of course, no screening can begin without Luca yelling out, ‘Bonna visione!’”  He must collapse of exhaustion after helming four days of screenings – most lasting over 12 hours a day – with such exuberance, but such is the gentle charisma of Luca and of I Castelli.

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Eggy Robo was a favorite at the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. All images courtesy of SIGGRAPH Asia 2008.

I spoke with the Computer Animation Festival (CAF) Chair Jinny Choo about her ideas and vision for CAF. Being the curator and manager of SICAF Seoul, Jinny’s aim was to bring a similar festival feeling to SIGGRAPH Asia and sees it as an opportunity to taste other styles in a global festival. So for the animation fan there were a plethora of programs to choose from. The Electronic Theater, screening the best of the best, was, as usual, the main event, with additional submissions selected for the Animation Theatre I and II and the Special Programme I and II. An addition was the Invited Screenings, showing previous Best of SIGGRAPH Award Winners; Gobelins, K’ARTS and Supinfocom selections; an Australian and India Focus and a Studio AKA Special; complemented by Festival Talks and Panels on Productions.

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Rob Cook.

Rob Cook’s featured speaker keynote took us on a journey behind the scenes of a Pixar production. Interestingly, Rob is the Vice President of Advanced Technology at Pixar Animation Studios, yet he hardly spoke about technology. He talked about story, story, story, and art. It might just be that he is so humble to rather highlight other folk’s contributions to Pixar’s final products, but it surely is connected with Pixar’s secret recipe to success – their stories.

Rob highlights the process that John Lasseter had introduced to the previously technology driven group in the early Lucasfilm VFX days, before the formation of Pixar. As John Lasseter put it “art challenges the technology, technology inspires the art.” Throughout his breakdown of the production process, Rob highlighted the importance of story and art, and the artist driven process.

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For everyone used to the grandeur and immense scale of the U.S. SIGGRAPH, it is important to explain that the inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore is planned to be much smaller. ACM has taken a big risk in bringing the conference abroad, no one could be certain if it would work. With the last conference day still ahead of us I would already like to call the show a success. From what I see and hear, everybody seems happy at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore. The exhibition floor is busy; the quality of talks is as high as we are used to, the Electronic Theater has been praised for its quality selection, and whether speaking with SIGGRAPH Committee members or attendees, everyone notes the intimate feeling, “stars” of the community become more approachable and there is a family flair in the air.

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Don Greenberg. Courtesy of SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008.

The inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 was formally opened on Tuesday, Dec 11, in true Singaporean style: with festive opening speeches by the Conference Chair YT Lee and by distinguished government representatives.

Highlight of the opening ceremony was featured speaker of the day Don Greenberg, Computer Graphics Pioneer and Director of Cornell University. Coming from an architecture background and using some of the earliest computer science to generate his first visualizations, Don was basically marking out the new territory of computer graphics. Yes, they did use punch cards back then to feed XYZ coordinates into the computer! Courage to try out new approaches and techniques, and find new fields to apply this technology, were the driving factors for him and his peers back then in the early days of computer graphics. Don noted that large parts of the new computer science research in the SIGGRAPH community are focused in animation, games and entertainment. While the quality increases, research topics have narrowed down to a few fields. Don calls us to have courage not to be risk adverse and venture into new areas of research and interdisciplinary practice, citing examples of applications in medical technology, earthquake and tectonic research, to ornithology where he researched the potential existence of an extinct bird species.

This curiosity for innovative uses of technology and to look beyond narrowing boarders shines through in Don’s enthusiasm. Adequately the motto, which he thinks of every morning, is “happy is the man whose work is his hobby.”
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