written by Johannes Wolters

Okay, there is one minor flaw in fmx. I had to go through three days of fmx09, but then I found it. Or better it found me. The house of commerce, this big old wonderful building, where fmx is placed is a truly great place for all the things going on. But the event has now conquered four floors of the place and every floor has very high walls. So if you want to run downstairs and upstairs to catch your next meeting, to get to your next discussion, whatever, you climbed in the end all together the Everest. Or at least your legs begin to revolt. So on the last day of fmx you notice more and more people (and not only the elderly ones), who take the elevators, a little bit hidden and a little bit slow. But that’s the only flaw I have found on this years edition of fmx. I have to admit this stairs-sport is also very healthy. May be not, with all the coffee you need to drain every piece of information from this awesome conference. Again the creators of the fmx, Renata and Thomas Haegele topped the event from last year and again the numbers of attendees increased. Again more and internationally renowned speakers came to Stuttgart, again for four days the sunny town became animator’s land And that in those dark and gloomy times of worldwide economic crisis. And I did not discover one unhappy face during all those days. Must be heaven!

Victor Antonov showed breathtaking artwork from the upcoming “The Prodigies”, a dark probably x-rated animated feature film produced by Fidelite Films, Onyx and Studio 37. In all modesty he described the movie as a new genre of animated movie. And the graphic approach he and his team choosed convinced the audience. The film is currently in postproduction and will be released hopefully in summer 2010.

After that, Brad Blackburn, the director of photography from Framestore’s “Tales of Desperaux” talked about his endeavor to paint with light in this delightful story about a gentleman mouse.

Danielle Feinberg told a fascinated audience almost every secrets behind the cinematography of the most beloved Pixar movie so far, this year’s academy award winner “Wall-E”. If you nee to know, if there are some films, that have a soul, go and see every film done by Pixar. Said Matte Artist/Legen Harrison Ellenshaw! And Syd Mead, by the way, claimed jokingly, that his No 5 robot from Short Circuit was the inspiration for “Wall-E.”

Waltz with Bashir shows that technology can help push storytelling as well.

And Michael Faust, one of the Bridgit Folman Gang, enchanted the audience with his personal “Waltz with Bashir.” The right wing parties in Israel hated the movie for being left wing, the left wing parties complained, that the film wasn’t left wing enough. And only a very small group of Israelis admitted that they actually liked the movie. But the movie still runs in the theaters over there since its release six months ago, so it hit definitely a nerve. Faust didn’t knew, if the film was already shown in the Lebanon, but he did know everything about working on a very, very tight budget, working in a politically hot film, working with cutouts in flash, which is sometimes like working in hell. But his explanations about the famous, perverse waltz scene, which also was the most expensive one of the movie touched the audience because of its sheer, terrible beauty.  And one funny thing: The younger self of director Ari Folman, which is shown in the movie is based on the “old” face of the artist and writer, but not on the pictures of the then young Ari, who interestingly looked nothing like the animated character in comparison. Being asked, if he finds “Waltz with Bashir” a politically movie, he answered, that he thinks not. “As long as you consider “Saving Private Ryan” a political movie too. Both deal with memories. But there was no discussion around the Spielberg film!” he stated. The Award for the shortest presentation goes to Alain Lahanne, who presented the work of BUF on “The Dark Knight”. Called “Batman’s Sonar Vision” the interesting presentation ended after about 19 minutes, a record in my opinion. Christopher Nolan’s request to the studio was: It has to look like rain on water. So the BUF artists very carefully created a lot of ideas for the pitch and convinced Nolan with truly remarkable images. What did I miss today? Kay Delventhal’s presentation of the upcoming german feature film called Jasper the Penguin, who was coproduced with almost every European country. I missed also Gray Hodgkinsons talk about the animation education at New Zealand. Or Marc Caro’s presentation of “Dante 01” But you have to make some impossible decisions.

One very good advice came from the very last panel, when Joseph Olin, the president of the Academy of interactive Arts & Sciences gathered all the panelists of the games section for a final discussion. Again the audience and the panelists interacted quite well, like yesterday at the 5D-Conference. Richard Hilleman, the chief creatice director of Electronic Arts came up with a very wonderful advice: If you want to imitate someone, who has truly inspired you, you should not simply ape him or her, but you should go to the place, where the inspiration came from, that inspired the thing, you are inspired from. And built from there! What better advice to get from one of the smartest people I met during the conference.

So please take your calendar and make a big note. Next fmx will be hosted at Stuttgart from May 4th till May 7th 2010 You know, it’s the year, we will make contact again.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network

written by Johannes Wolters

You know what´s interesting about the fmx?. You stay there in the foyer, in the halls, you have this big accessibility to each and everyone. So I found myself talking to one of the big visual effects designers of this planet.

Kevin Tod Haugs worked on “Quantum of Solace,” “The Kite Runner,” “Finding Neverland,” “Panic Room” and many more. An his opinion about the stereoscopic films is a technical one:  “I just find it heartbreaking, that after years and years and years of dealing with resolution, we are finally getting to the point, where its 2k or 4k, we could make choices, its all gonna be fine, we get digital cameras, we get rid of scanning, its all gonna be fine and then we have to make it twice as complicated. Just, when its gonna be easy, we have to make it hard.”

So I asked him, if it will enhance the storytelling.

“Eventually. Right now it’s a gag. Someone will find stories that need it. Mostly it will be like when color came in. Lots of people said, do we need color? Really? But can do the film industry without it now? No! So, it will be about the same, I am sure. They said it about sound, they said it about color, they say it about stereo. But do I feel, that it enhances the storytelling-process right now? I haven´t seen any example, that blew my mind, but you know…. It will have to happen.”

Kevin is by the way the author of a VFX-related blog called Manifxto, so please, if you are interested, go there.

Day three of fmx09 started with lots tech talk, regarding the future of moviemaking as well as many other parts of our daily lives. Patrick Davenport and Steve Caulkin explained their Image Metrics system,  how fast this wonderful tool works. Both showed the Performance Capturing, which works without markers, then the Performance Analysis, after that the data is combined with a rig in a retargeting process. The final output is clean, editable animation curves. The system was heavily used in “Benjamin Button” and in the upcoming animated feature “Foodfight” as well as in games like Grand Theft Auto IV and many, many other big projects. The capture of lips through Image Metrics was shown in a hilarious musicv ideo of Gnarls Barkley´s “Who gonna save my soul”, directed by Chris Milk. You have to see that one! And of course you have to learn more about “The Emily Project” (www.image-metrics.com)

Paul Debevec explains it all.

Paul Debevec, the Whizkid from the USC, the University of Southern California´s Institute for Creative Technologies, showed the audience the future or the recent developments he and his fellows are working on.  Having driven the facial expression capture to new heights with the possibilities of USC´s Light stage no. 5, Debevec showed and explained the goal to establish a telephone conference with a real 3D image of the guy on the other end of the line. A real time 3D face scanning system interfaced to a face sized autostereoscopic3D display with some more unbelievable gadgets. In other words: it looked like the heads in “Futurama”, still in black and white, a problem they will solve in the very near future. This brilliant talk by Paul Debevec was truly inspiring and let us hope, we will live long enough to see the “holodeck” from Star Trek become real. Please check out their website its called http://gl.ict.usc.edu/ or shorter www.debevec.org

Christophe Hery from ILM explained about the latest in Skin and Reflection Research. Parag Havaldar from Sony told you a lot about the evolution of motion capture. He is currently implementing a new markerless video based motion capture system to assist full body animation for characters in Tim Burton´s “Alice in Wonderland.”
For the first time the 5D conference is now part of the fmx here at Stuttgart, Germany. Alex McDowell explained, that the conference at Long Beach will be held biannually. In the meantime, the conference will travel and go to interesting events like fmx to spread  the idea and to find new inspiration.

Peter Plantec opened up the conference with a short history about his first getting contact with 5D. He had to admit that he did not get it in the first place!

“What the heck, I can´t figure out what 5D was. 3D with two extra D´s? So Alex McDowell had to carefully explain it to me. And he had a hard time. He knew what is was. Its all about Design! Let´s say Design, Design, Design, Design, Design and its about immersive design, it is about the future of design. As we move on into new worlds, new types of entertainments, we have to evolve our ways, how to do design. And the idea that a single designer comes up with the concept, those days are over. Doomed by the incredibly complex.   And 5D looks at the whole issue and how we bring in more minds and resources to create virtual collaborative workspaces. It looks at how we bring talents of various  sorts  together in order a design synergy that can lead to really wild immersive storytelling experiences.” And this idea is already becoming reality. Or as producer Chris de Faria put: “For better or for worse this will be the future of cinema!” Very lively debates between the panellists and the audience went on through the whole afternoon. A young design student from Berlin, Daniela Kleint from HWT Berlin summarized it for me afterwards: “Great! Really great!!! The event inspired me very much. The people here choose an open platform, open discussions, very convenient for an interactive immersive design, a wonderful mixture of input and discussion. I would like to know more about it, so Iwill go to see, what they are doing next and what they have already achieved.”  And so can you!

The only bad thing about this day at fmx was that, if you choose to go to the 5D conference, you missed Jonathan Litt and Steve Preeg from Digital Domain and their panel about the truly amazing work on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” As you can imagine the place was crowded, while Litt and Preeg revealed some of the magic behind the first convincing fully animated character in a live action film.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network

written by Johannes Wolters

Where to begin? Information overload. Day 2. Fmx09.

The fmx may not be as big as SIGGRAPH, but like an American professional stated, it is superbly organized, which makes it a truly wonderful event throughout the world of Visual Effects, Animation, Games and Digital Media. Steffen Wild presented the work and the developments inside the beloved World of Jim Henson Muppets today. The famous creature shop made it bold steps into the digital realm, carefully keeping the original muppet touch alive. Like Jim Henson told his staff “Have an Idea? We try it out. Never be afraid of failure”. The successful use of digital puppeteering was successful used on the TV-show “Sid the Science Kid”. 40 episodes, together 20 hours had to be put together within only one year. Key to the success: strong characters, the excellent collaboration between the puppeteers, the use of live action disciplines, the clever utilization of new technology and a perfect real-world-compatibility. Just doing digital puppets the muppet way. On the live stage up to six characters can now be handled at the same time datawise. All to create webisodes, commercials, Television shows and direct-to-dvd material at the moment. And of course at some point in the future creating a feature film with a hybrid approach.

Standing ovations for Richard Edlund, multiple Academy Award winner, who worked on the initial Star Wars-Trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Ark and many, many, many other wonderful films, who shaped our common popular culture in the last 35 years. Edlund gave a touching insight into his life and career. Being a working hippie in the early seventies, he already had worked on the initial Star Trek Television series. But then John Dykstra called him, asking, if he wanted to join George Lucas and ILM for Star Wars. He immediately took the job, just hesitating a few seconds. At that time ILM was nothing more than a room with a big table and phone on it. Later during the production, during a coffebreak he already had the foresight to tell his fellow workers to keep this moment in mind and remember this very time as “the good old times”. Edlund fells himself lucky to live through two revolutions. One to have made Star Wars and to get control over all the 24 frames per seconds running through the projector, using optical printers and motion control cameras, inventing a whole industry through the process. The public reactions were absolutely wonderful. “There were times, when people actually apologized for not having seen the movie! People felt bad having seen it only five times, when somebody told them, he had seen it up to ten times.”  The second revolution came with the digital world. Now Edlund not only had control over 24 frames per second, now he had control over al the millions of tiny pixels on every and each frame. “That makes you feel like god!”

Edlund was part of the Star Wars revolution.

Having worked with directors like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harold Ramis, Wolfgang Petersen or John McTiernan, Richard Edlund is now a vital keyplayer of the ASC-ADG-VES Previs 2020 Workgroup, where creative people can exchange ideas about better collaboration, communication and efficiency in modern and future filmmaking. You could catch a glimpse of this wonderful future later on, when you joined Edlund, Alex McDowell, John Scheele and Kevin Tod Haug for an absolute mindboggling talk about the future of digital visualization in film production. Richard Edlund told about his visit to James Cameron just a week ago, where Cameron showed him “Avatar” and the technique behind it, McDowell told the audience about his visit to Steven Spielberg’s “Tintin”-set. It seems that our traditional understanding of filmmaking will be a thing of the past in only a few years from now. Again information overload. By then the fmx audience had already learned about the brilliant art direction and the lighting of Disney´s academy-award nominated  “Bolt” Paul Felix and Adolph Lusinsky told about the problems and tasks of the 3D-journey of the studio and his remarkable dog. And afterwards director Chris Williams talked about the difficulties and the joys he and his bold team experienced while creating the story of “Bolt”. Meanwhile Brian Van´T Hul from Laika did the same a few metres away at the Metropol cinema, talking about Henry Selick´s “Coraline” and the stereoscopic process. If you were ready to miss the panels about the creation of the absolute stunning “River God” from “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” by famous german studio Scanline VFX, if you dared to avoid Pixar´s presentation of the career gears at this studio presented by Robin McDonald, then you could go to meet Syd Mead and be blown away by his boundless imagination and his ability to put it down in beautiful artwork. His concepts, ideas and designs inspired cineastic milestones like Ridley Scotts “Blade Runner”, Steven Lisbergers “Tron”, Kathryn Bigelow´s “Strange Days” or James Cameron´s “Aliens”. Syd Mead freely explained his working methods, spoke about his approach how to carefully construct his wonderful paintings and the brief moments, when he can be available for himself.

After that you only had one choice, you had to see Harrison Ellenshaw´s talk about Visual Storytelling in Computer Graphics. Did I mention “information overload”?

Wonderful Shelley Page concluded the day´s event with her own unique presentation of “Shelley´s Eye Candy”.  Her actual favorites from festivals and graduation shows around the world included “Ex-Et” from Esma and “Dix” from BIF. Who could possibly ask for anything more.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network

written by Johannes Wolters

Cloudy, sometimes rainy. Stuttgart, the capital of the German federal state of Baden Wüerrttemberg is once again for the next four days the global center of animation. The 14. International Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Digital Media opened its gates to the huge crowds of professionals, students, journalists and all enthusiasts, who are interested in the latest technologies, brilliant developments and in meeting and talking to the leading women and men behind the magic of animation. “The fmx09 has become Europe´s most significant animation get together” stated the Minister for Media, Professor Dr. Wolfgang Reinhart. And the Conference is still growing strongly. At the opening press conference, Prof. Thomas Haegele thanked all the partners of the event, especially the Visual Effects Society (VES) and the Academy of Arts & Sciences (AIAS) The new kid on the block is the 5D Conference, becoming a cooperation partner of the fmx for the first time this year. Main partners again are Autodesk, Deutsche Telekom, Pixar Animation Studios and Sony Pictures Imageworks. And every year, more and more floors of the gigantic old Palais, now called Haus der Wirtschaft/House of Commerce become occupied with all the highly interesting events of the fmx. That means, if you choose one event, you miss 10 other.  So either you have to be Doctor Manhattan and split up, or you have to suffer through those difficult decisions, where to go, what to attend. Thinking all the time, what you are missing.

Robert Neumann talked about the 3-D pipeline created for Disney´s “Bolt” while Lionel Fages talked about the 15 years of 3-D movie production at Cube Creative, while DreamWorks´s David Burgess explained the 3D-approach of “Monsters vs. Aliens.” French producer and director Pascal Herold presented his in-house build Fantasmagorix software suite. His very interesting goal is to produce a 3D-feature film at minimal costs and in a very short time frame. Fantasmagorix allows a very fast previs of all the aspects of a shot and is heavily used to create “Cinderella”, the very first 3-D CGI feature film of Herold and his studio Delacave.

VFX Supervisor John Scheele, VFX Producer Georgia Scheele and Previs Supervisor Ron Frankel, President and Founder of Proof, Inc.  presented an interesting insight into the Previs of Oliver Stone´s “World Trade Center”, the historical Epos “Alexander” and Steven Spielbers “The Terminal”. Reconstructing recent history with great detail, extreme care and sensitivity was the goal for the story of two surviving policemen in the catastrophe of the collapsing twin towers. Los Angeles´s Lebanon Street was chosen to stand in for parts of New York. For “The Terminal” the artists combined parts of the Airport of Montreal with the Airports of New York to create an unreal real place to work in.

Stone´s obsession for historical detail can be observed in the fact that he demanded to create an exact replication of the moon and its positions during the nights of 9/11 and after.

As the competition of VFX/Animation Studios grows, the production has to be streamlined. The short deadlines demand more efficiency. And the increased complexity of work needed new talent and innovation.  Xavier Nicolas, escorted by imperial Stormtroopers, explained the genesis of Lucas Animation Singapore, its past, present and future. The studio works closely together with ILM, Lucas Arts and of course Lucas Animation San Francisco. As Nicolas stated, George Lucas wanted to access the Asian talent. Being a lifelong fan of Japanese Manga and Chinese culture, Lucas tried to capture the creativity born from the diversity of Asian artists. Singapore is English speaking, has a reliable infrastructure and protects intellectual properties. Also labor is more cost effective than in the States. And of course the US visa limitations do not allow to invite the Asian talent in a big way to San Francisco. The studio was set up in 2005, they started work for the TV-show “The Clone Wars” in 2006 and produced VFX for films like “Transformers”, “Iron Man”, G-Force” since then. A year later the artists began to collaborate with Lucas Arts on games like “Star Wars – The force unleashed” and developed their own game: “The Clone Wars – Jedi Alliance”. Due to an extensive training program, called “The Jedi Master Program” 330 highly trained artists are now working in a great multicultural environment and they are preparing now for their first own feature film endeavour.

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

Bob Osher, President of Sony Digital Productions, presented an inside look at Sony Pictures Digital Production Companies Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks. “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” will come to us in mouthwatering 3D Osher explained the new philosophy of the studios, who will produce four types of animation: The all audience features, hybrid Live Action films, Direct to DVD Movies like the highly successful “Open Season 2” and audience specific features. Animation is handled like a technique here and not as a genre. Mentioning films like “Tripplets of Belleville”, “Waltz with Bashir” or “Persepolis” Sony aims now also to other audience groups than the common family entertainment films. A yet untitled Avi Arad-Project, written by Mark Frost will be the first film in this direction.

Alex McDowell

The biggest room of the Haus der Wirtschaft was still too small for the audience, who wanted to know all about the unbelievable amount of work, achieved in a very small amount of time for Zach Snyder´s “Watchmen”. Alex McDowell, John DJ Desjardin and Pete Travers explained in three hours the making of Doctor Manhattan, explained the production design and the VFX of the ambitious and groundbreaking adaptation of Alan Moore´s famous graphic novel. Funny enough to create Doc Manhattan, Pete Travers had the opportunity to “hire” the “Beowulf”-character as an early stand-in.

Meanwhile Kevin Geiger opened the section focus on China with his talk on the cultural revolution coming now to the western animated world as China opens up. Wen Feng and Lijun Sun from Magic Dumpling (www.magicdumpling.com) presented China´s first environmentally-themed animated feature film, called “Road to Home”, while Lifeng Wang, president of Xing Xing Digital Corporation (www.xing-xing.com) showed examples of the studio´s vfx created for films like “Fantastic Four”, “Tropic Thunder” or “The Forbidden kingdom”. Vance Huang and Stella Huang completed the section with a brief overview about the work and achievements of SOFA studios, based in Taipeh, Taiwan. (www.sofastudios.com). The studio generates high quality computer animation from concept design to rendering.

And in case you were not tired enough, panel after panel, talk after talk, meeting after meeting – at the end of the day Animation World Network publisher Ron Diamond presented the Screening of “The Animation Show of Shows”. Nine exquisite short films delighted the audience in High Definition, from the academy award winning “La Maison en petit cubes” to Chris Williams stunning “Glago´s Guest”.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network