Shiloh T. McClean talked about ways that she has been able to give young creatives access to Australia’s digital effects and film industry. Via a call for competition, she selects 5 people each year for a six-month training program where they are placed alongside a senior person in the industry and are prepared for work in their field, like the coal miner from New South Wales who is now working in the affects industry.  All residents of New South Wales are eligible to apply to this program.

Rhythm & Hues which has over 700 employees is now partnering with colleges and universities to educate faculty about their specific pipeline. The Fac Ed program which started in 2007 is a 4-day seminar in LA where faculty get to see what R&H likes to see in a reel, and learn how to transition young people from student to professional. You can bet I’ll be signing up.

Dreamworks and Texas A&M University’s Department of Visualization partnered to create a summer industry class for students who are serious about the business of animation. For 10 weeks, 5 days a week, the students worked with Dreamworks as their “client”. Students woring in teams would be given a deadline, a storyboard, animatic and key character to start with. They had to produce a 30 second piece which had to be shown to the client for approval at the end of every step in the production pipeline.  Needless to say, the students were blown away by the tight deadline, but still managed to create very professional shorts. This is something I’d love to implement at Ramapo. Possibly with volunteers from Perception, Charlex, or Blue Sky.

I met with a networking group, Birds of a Feather, that focused on Motion Graphics where I saw a great commercial produced for Weeds created using Cinema 4D. and saw some great Aftereffects plugins demonstrated by Gil at Conoa.com

Some great Art Papers were presented; Experimental Interaction Unit was presented by by Anuradha Vikram, an art historian investigating surveillance. She covered the work of EIU artist Eric Pallos who worked with Mark Puline’s SRL group and who also was in contact with the Yes Men and E-Toy. She focused on the ideas behind bartering of personal informaiton for goods and services in this and other interactive work. Very engaging!  http://www.eiu.org/

Jurgen Scheible deomnstrated his new piece, Mobi-Spray where with an inexpensive media projector, moble phone with an accelerometer, and a laptop can be combined to create large-scale projected non-destructive graffitti. Now you KNOW I like that. Very similar to GRL’s Laser Tag, but this one has color, though a much more blunt “brush” which makes it hard for the user to create anything but fat stripes or dots.

Camille Scherrer presented her recent work, Souvenirs du Monde des Montagnes which she built with  Julien Pilet, Vincent Lepetit and Pascal Fua. It is a storybook-driven interactive installation which consists of an illustrated book, a lamp, desk and monitor. The lamp “Reads” the images on the book and then adds to them , showing on the monitor the book page in real time, with its illustration (and possibly the viewer’s hand, if it is resting on the page), and  an animation overlayed onto the illustration which further brings it to life, enacting the story.  This was  a beautiful and succesful melding of digital and analog because it happened so seamlessly. Imagine reading a novel on the couch and looking up at the television screen to see just that scene from your current page being displayed, as if your imagination were now broadcast directly to the monitor.

Tsutomu Miyashita described a touch screen built recently for the Louvre to demonstrate links in symbolism and imagery to museumgoers. The aesthetic of the interface was rich and beautifully presented, but museumgoers did not tend to engage in it long enough to understand the links between multiple paintings as semantic elements.

click on the image below to see the list of animation teams and their work:

The work is tough and the groups need to stay focused and motivated. That’s why at any time during the conference, you might see student volunteers wandering the halls with furry vests, viking helmets and cardboard swords and shields, growling and yelling Fjorg! I know the furry vest is supposed to be big this fall, but I was determined to get one of those helmets. To recieve my viking chapeau, this is what I had to do. In support of the teams, of course:Fjorg!

The Animation in Education panel preseted a computer science class in Second Life at RIT, a collaborative animation class at the University of Central Florida where the music professors compose original scores for the class animation, and computer science and engineering students who create animations and scene graphs with an emphasis on computational complexity at the University of Pittsburgh. The showcasing of these programs and the students’ resulting work gave me some ideas, but also made me very proud of the work of our Ramapo College animation students. Good work!

Next, I went to the Making It Move Talk where our friends at Electronic Arts Canada explained how they create their physics-driven animation for Fight Night 4. It starts with motion capture tied to a dual rig with joint limits and without, and then physics systems which are tied to the soft body simulations of the models (so the jaw flaps when punched) which sit on top of the rigid body.  Particle systems are then tied to the physics systems (so the spittle and blood fly…)  I was the most impressed by the simplicity of how EA created varieties of scale of muscle tension ont he characters. This was created with shader blending between two surface maps: one of map of bare muscle structure and the other of the basic body shader.

Terran Boylan, the FX Animator and Character Technical Director at Dreamworks also demonstrated the complicated BOB character from Monsters VS Aliens which was part particle, part softbody rig and also had to come apart into sections. He showed the components of B.O.B.’s character rig and the overall design approach. There were a lot of  technical challenges in order to animate and render a high-resolution warped polygonal mesh with a topology that changed in every frame.

I went to the Maxon booth and talked to some of the folks who create plugins, make tutorials and do demos with the software we use at Ramapo, Cinema 4D. I also met a charming robot interface designed by the students in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon: Quasi. He’ll explain:

Next to the projection is a sculptural interactive installation, Cunning Genus. The installation is an entomologist’s field case in which there are three collection jars – a bursting chrysalis in one, a group of fireflies in the second, and a spider in another.

The computer controlled retro- engineered LCD panels inside the case show the insects moving about in their normal behavioral state. When a viewer taps on one of the jars, the creature inside will respond with strange behavior inversely based on its aesthetic value. Nearby projections show the dichotomy between true scientific investigation and inherent human myths. The viewer must stand with her head inside the Plexi curve, nestling her ears close to two small, whispering speakers. This projection space puts the viewer in the position of looking out from within a large glass jar.

•Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time, Winter Garden, New York, NY, Spring 2003, Curated by Bruce Wands
•Dislodged, West Side Gallery, New York, NY, Spring 2003, Curated by Rachel Gugelberger
•MFA Exhibition, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY, April 2003