Animated Travels

Cloudy with the Chance of Meatballs shows more 3-D potential.

The exhibition has closed but the conference continues on this last day, with 3-D screenings (including some new Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs footage) and E-Tech still attracting lots of attention, even spread out in several rooms and isolated on the third floor. The emphasis is on interactive sensory techniques. And what’s hot? “The interconnectivity between the machine and human,” asserted Manabu Sakurai, Emerging Technologies chair. “If you see the gaming industry, your console is not just a game console anymore — part of your body is the game console. And the machine understands your natural movements. And then, in an opposite way, the display, what you see is also getting closer to humans. The key word is 3-D.”
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Rob Cook.

Press reports have attendance at about 10,000, which is extremely low, of course. But, as I previously noted, it’s resulted in a very appropriate quaintness. You can tell that the people who have come here are very passionate. While one exhibitor lamented the lack of scientific research on display and the commercialization of the event (no need to wait for SIGGRAPH to publish your tech paper), Rob Cook (the recipient of the Steven A. Coons Award) gave what Chris Landreth described as a “spiritual, practical and visionary” speech about “why there still needs to be SIGGRAPH.”

“He put in a ‘Fool’s Hypothesis’ that SIGGRAPH is no longer relevant: the only problems left to be solved are minor and not that interesting. Then he proceeded to bash it apart. I think in the world he was talking about even GPU-based rendering would be a minor problem: the content coming out the other end isn’t different; you’re using different hardware to do it.”
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Silhouettes of Jazz

written by Lance Jones and Jessica Brown of the Animation and Visual Effects Program Louisiana State University Shreveport

Evening Theater’s Jury Chair’s Reel included the following shorts.
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Pigeon Impossible competes at SIGGRAPH.

written by Lance Jones and Jessica Brown of the Animation and Visual Effects Program Louisiana State University Shreveport

Evening Theater’s Festival Chair’s Reel included the following shorts.
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