Animated Travels

Robot Chicken panel treats fans to talent and sneak peeks.

When the New York Comic Con premiered four years ago, its exhibit area was a relatively small but instantly overcrowded portion of the Javits Convention Center’s basement space. This year’s exhibitors filled the high-ceilinged main floor, a football-field sized area where you could score anything one’s geekish heart desired while dodging the multitude of Rorschachs prowling the convention.

Alfred University wasn’t named for Bruce Wayne’s butler, but for the upstate New York town where Dan Napolitano offers his Drawn to Diversity course. A big crowd filled a small room to hear Napolitano outline the ways in which minorities have been represented and misrepresented in U.S. pop culture. According to Napolitano George Carlin may have had his seven dirty words but Warner Bros. has their censored eleven Looney Tunes. The Jap-bashing and black-belittling cartoons are officially out of circulation – except for YouTube bootlegs and academic explication.

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I was one of the lucky presenters at Imagina 09.

written by Eric Hanson of LA-based xRez Studio

Imagina, a longstanding computer graphics conference in Europe, has transformed itself in 2009 to cater more toward the industrial and building industries, with the prior media and entertainment scope being served by one of several sub-conference tracks. The tracks in 2009 include Architecture & Urbanism, Driving Simulation, Landscape and Territory, and Media and Entertainment. Addressing this shift, the Media and Entertainment track included speakers and panels intended to address commonalities and differences between architectural visualization and feature film visual effects work.

Held in idyllic Monaco, the one-day Media and Entertainment event consisted of two sessions, the first entitled “What Lessons can be Learned from the Technical Know-How of VFX-Heavy Blockbusters?”. Moderators included Mireille Frenette and Benoit Guerville of Wide Cinema, who also skillfully organized the event. Speakers included myself, and Christophe Courgeau, Hughes Namur, and Jean Rabasse of Mikros Image in Paris.

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