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MillimeterA Festival of Peers
Jun 16, 2003 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
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The 2003 Computer Animation Festival
 Mekarate by Hiroyasu Shimo (Animation Theater). |
ANY WAY YOU DO THE MATH, it was a marathon job. In a recurring SIGGRAPH 2003 theme, the jury of seven faced 635 submissions with roughly three days to choose the program for the Computer Animation Festival. Riding on the jury’s decision were the aspirations of student and professional animators worldwide. That’s because selection for the SIGGRAPH festival—especially the hot-ticket Electronic Theater—is a premier accomplishment for CG practitioners. While many film festivals today recognize computer-generated pieces, SIGGRAPH recognition remains the benchmark for digital artists and scientists alike. These winners are widely considered to represent the leading edge of what CG can now achieve.
At this year’s SIGGRAPH, attendees can see 77 jury selections. Twenty-six earned a showcase in the 2-hour Electronic Theater and 51 in the Animation Theater. Making all these selections, notes Festival Chair Darin Grant, required an intensive, multi-stage process.
Perhaps most crucial for Grant was the first step: selecting a diverse jury that could approach the process without any personal agendas. “I chose to hunt down people with different backgrounds, which I felt was necessary to cover the gamut,” he explains. “I wanted people with artistic and technical backgrounds, and I also wanted somebody from realtime graphics, either from a graphics card manufacturer or a game company.”
Grant, manager of the Technical Director and Software departments at Digital Domain, whose experience includes Fight Club and What Dreams May Come, understood the importance of having jurors with digital production expertise who could evaluate the professional studio submissions. So he called on ex-DD CG supervisor Judith Crow (Titanic, Fight Club, Apollo 13) who is now at software manufacturer Side Effects. Also bringing production expertise to the panel were ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Erik Mattson, freelance animator Joel Sevilla, and Anezka Sebek, formerly of R.Greenberg and now at Parsons School of Design. The panel’s technical experts, (in addition to Grant) were Pixar software engineer Sam Black and Electronic Arts’ John Rix.
A two-round voting system helped the jury sift through the submissions. "We split up into sub-juries for the first pass,” explains Grant, who was a SIGGRAPH alternate juror in 2002. “People looked at groups of submissions based on their specialties, and we culled out what we didn’t think should make it to further consideration." People could vote one of three ways: ET for Electronic Theater, AT for Animation Theater, or NT for No Theater. Using the criteria of creativity, innovation, and technical achievement, the panel marked submissions ET if an entry met all three criteria and AT if it met two. To crosscheck these judgments, Grant says, "Anything that made it into either theater was evaluated at least twice."
 Tim Tom by Romain Segaud, Christel Pougeoise, Supinfocom Valenciennes (Electronic Theater). |
THE WINNERS REFLECT an international professional industry that's increasingly capable of unprecedented photorealistic animation, and a student population creating animation on a level never reached before. Not surprisingly, the Electronic Theater includes a hefty chunk of major movie CGI—from ESC’s digital eye candy in The Matrix Reloaded and Cinesite's Nightcrawler animation in X-Men 2, to WETA Digital’s Oscar-winning animation in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. Selecting WETA’s astonishing Gollum creature for the ET show was a no-brainer, notes Grant. "That’s the most fascinating character to ever be created in CG."
Alongside Gollum, of course, will be the newest photoreal star to hit movie screens—ILM's green muscleman, the Hulk. The ILM R&D reel screening at ET also highlights animation and rendering done for the last Harry Potter film and the upcoming Terminator 3 as well. Equally significant for the state of CG is ILM’s convincing computer-generated pyrotechnics—an accomplishment that’s proved elusive in the past. Grant notes that ILM’s material is unique this year in that it’s featured in ET as well as being represented in SIGGRAPH’s Technical Papers Programs. "The Papers Programs are viewed as premier technical areas at SIGGRAPH," he observes. "Having something that crosses over between the two areas means it’s phenomenal work."
The pro studios are heavily represented in both the Electronic and Animation Theaters for commercials as well as film work. Rhythm & Hues and Digital Domain have selections in both categories, the latter presenting a demo for the Gatorade spot in which Michael Jordan plays basketball against a younger version of himself. Paris-based commercial studio La Maison has two winning pieces, as do the London-based houses Passion Pictures and 422 Ltd. London’s Framestore CFC earned a record four AT selections, including animation for television programming, commercials, and its work in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Of all the notable winners created by non-U.S. studios (a list that includes South Korea, Hungary, Australia, Canada, and Singapore) the biggest surprise comes from Aardman, the Bristol, England-based studio best known for its stop-motion animated feature Chicken Run and the BBC TV show Wallace and Gromit. Their ET winner, The Deadline, is a comic short airing on Nickelodeon UK, and it demonstrates a skillful adaptation of Aardman’s popular plasticine puppet style to CG.
 Tic Toc by Gunter Grossholz (Animation Theater). |
"The film was made for an Aardman retrospective, and it was designed to show how the company’s heritage wasn’t lost in its newly developed CG department," Grant remarks. As if to underscore that the success of The Deadline wasn’t a fluke, Aardman also landed in SIGGRAPH’s AT with The Tales, and with a series of off-the-wall station IDs for BBC Three called Blobs.
Other studios that have similarly made the transition from stop-motion to CG also got the nod from the SIGGRAPH jury. Tippett Studio’s TV advertising for Blockbuster shows its growing ability not just with CG-animated characters, but with furry characters as well. Meanwhile, Dia de los Muertos, a short from the legendary Claymation house Vinton Studios, presents an intriguing blend of CG character animation and stop-motion.
SIGGRAPH HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SHOWCASE for experimental short films that studios create to test new ideas, and often these shorts (like Pixar’s Tin Toy, Blue Sky’s Bunny, and Sony Imageworks’ The ChubbChubbs) go on to win Oscars. Blue Sky is represented in ET this year by Gone Nutty, a companion short to its hit film Ice Age. But it’s notable that Pixar is absent from this festival, opting instead to present a ‘how-to’ course at SIGGRAPH detailing its latest movie, Finding Nemo. Imageworks, however, is back in the ET with Early Bloomer, a cartoon that—like Nemo—depicts an underwater milieu. The complexities of CG water will certainly be a topic du jour at SIGGRAPH 2003.
It’s undoubtedly a reflection of increasingly powerful software packages that PC-based houses are competing more than ever with the larger facilities in creating complex short films. Two studios built around 3ds Max have ambitious entries: Blur Studio’s Aunt Luisa features beautiful lighting effects, while Red Rover applied computational fluid dynamics to create the watery Plumber— an effort that would have been a budget-buster not too long ago.
Virtual water, well-animated skin, and sophisticated lighting appear again and again among the SIGGRAPH 2003 winners, and that’s true for student and independent submissions, as well as studio work. Grant speculates that this trend is due to a combination of cheaper, faster hardware and “personal learning editions” of pro-grade software that’s being made available to students at affordable prices.
"Many more schools are getting more of these 3D animation programs inhouse," he observes, noting that this means students have access to capabilities like ray tracing in the latest version of RenderMan, or through Mental Ray’s integration with Maya and Softimage. "A majority of the students’ pieces have lighting in general that has gotten better, like skin with subsurface scattering," says Grant. "They’re also compositing things that previously were more computationally intensive for students to do on their own machines—things like depth-of-field renders or nice quality motion blur."
Grant cites the example of France’s Supinfocom, an institution whose student submissions were funded by production company One Plus One. "In the Supinfocom pieces there’s a lot of wonderful work done with lighting, especially in the piece Tim Tom, which was awarded special Jury Honors this year." A black-and-white tale of two characters whose facial expressions are sketched on notepad heads, Tim Tom is both funny and poignant. Filled with dramatic camera angles that evoke classic films, it's the kind of wholly original use of CG that SIGGRAPH celebrates.
Along with Supinfocom, Ringling School of Design had three student winners in the AT and two in the ET, including the funny dreamscape of Poor Bogo. Created with the latest Maya, RenderMan, Shake, and Photoshop software, it’s a charming look inside a child's imagination. In stark contrast, Japan's Kobe Design University submitted the dark fantasy Mekarate, a computer hacker’s nightmare filled with menacing robotics. And from Germany’s Filmakademie Baden-Wurttemberg there’s the riotous Tic Toc, a toon-rendered music video in which the bartenders are sharks and the pub-crawlers are masses of bouncing heads. "It’s definitely refreshing and liberating to see such a different rendering technique that isn’t about photorealism," says Grant, who adds that Tim Tom was so accomplished that "both the students who made this have gotten industry jobs."
Finally, the two ET selections that will likely be widely discussed couldn’t be more different. The first is the festival’s Best Animated Short winner, Eternal Gaze, a black-and-white film about artist Alberto Giacometti. Animated in Maya by independent animator Sam Chen (who describes himself as an ex-Silicon Valley computer geek), Eternal Gaze features faithful digital reproductions of Giacometti’s famous sculptures. The SIGGRAPH jury has taken the unusual step of showing this long piece—15 1/2 minutes—in its entirety.
On the other extreme is a piece that you can’t call art, but it’s definitely progress. A demo called Dawn from chipmaker nVidia was created to show off the realtime capabilities of the company’s G-Force graphics chip. If ever a piece revealed that most chip designers are men, this is it: a cheesecake study of Tinkerbell's older sister. But it also demonstrates just how far the industry has come in being able to render realtime graphics. The multiple textures—from the character’s skin to the surrounding environment—are impressive. Alberto Vargas, eat your heart out.
Despite this high-profile entry, Grant expressed disappointment that there weren’t more realtime CG entries, particularly from the game world. "Most of the submissions were cut sequences—game cinematics—although we did include a nice piece from DIGIC Pictures called Exigo."
Not that this year’s jury was necessarily looking for more work, but Grant thinks they could expand. "I think we could certainly do some outreach," he says. "Even though we’re one of the few major festivals that doesn’t charge an application fee, entrants still have to pay the price for a tape transfer, and that could be costly for students and independent animators. Next year we’re allowing DVD submissions, and I’m guessing that we’ll get more submissions then." Grant doesn’t envision the Animation Festival following in the footsteps of the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery show, which this year doubled its submissions by accepting them via the Internet. "We’ve talked about that for the last couple of years," he says, "but one of the difficulties there is maintaining consistent resolution. We could handle them like QuickTime movies, but in downloading you can have stutters or pauses, and we don’t want that happening to somebody’s animation."
Of course if the number of submissions does rise next year, Grant’s successor as Festival Chair will be even more bleary-eyed than he was when judging ended. "It’s definitely been a challenge. There’s a quote from a friend of mine who previously had this job that keeps replaying in my head: This is one of the great experiences of my life that I will never have again!"
SAM CHEN & JAMEY SCOTT
The sculptor Alberto Giacometti had a reputation for destroying and rebuilding his own work in a self-inflicted distillation process. It was as if he had to spend enough time with his sculpted characters to make them real people, only to catch them and freeze them in their most vulnerable moments.
So it seems inevitable that San Diego animator Sam Chen would be sucked into a three-year crucible to evoke Giacometti in this year’s Best Animated Short, Eternal Gaze. When his first animatic clocked in at 10 minutes, everyone said he was crazy. So he went back to the drawing board and realized they were right—the piece actually needed to be 16 minutes.
The most interesting thing about Eternal Gaze is the way Chen takes a medium that has long been defined by its constraints and makes it feel as limitless and articulate as more classical forms such as photography, painting, even sculpture. He did this by taking up Giacometti's own madness—and that of many artists—pouring himself into iteration after iteration, literally growing Eternal Gaze from his own life experience as he worked full-time on the piece every day for three years.
By the time he built the third act in year three, after teaching himself Maya "and making every possible mistake," he had become a better animator and perhaps a wiser man. Pleased as he was with the nuance he’d created for his climax, he realized that he would have to redo the first act, which now looked to him like the clunky work of his less-experienced self.
A fan of Pixar, Poe, and Tim Burton, Chen immersed himself in Hitchcockian irony, Orson Welles’ lighting, and bi-weekly dosings of Blade Runner melancholy. With Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring playing in his head, Chen switched off his UCLA Computer Science degree and his years of collaborative project management at SGI, and dove solo into the minutiae of Giacometti until friends accused him of channeling the sculptor.
Chen found composer Jamey Scott on the Internet, right around the time Scott was working on Victor Navone’s Alien Song and Myst 3: Exile. Based on the score Scott did for Steve Kim’s Blades of War, Chen thought he’d found the person to replace the Stravinsky in his head with something tangible. The two began a rigorous collaboration to merge picture and sound into an arc that moves boldly through silence and stillness to great swells of emotion. The risk was that the vocabulary they were using—long pauses, great peaks and valleys, lush orchestration and hyper-real expressions—just couldn’t work for CG.
"The film is kind of a slow burn," Chen says. “There’s a space that CG films tend not to have; we let shots linger just a little bit longer.” And then they let the emotion rip, daring the audience to empathize with 16 minutes of wordless soliloquy from an animated rendering of a dead artist.
Getting the right balance meant throwing away hard work. Two days after high-fiving themselves through a long and successful Foley session, the pair realized that the sound design was too real and started over. At a Giacometti retrospective at MOMA, Chen saw all his own mistakes and redid all the sculptures he had modeled from art book pictures, refining them to match the real thing.
The artistic commitment was matched by equal stamina for practical concerns. Where would the orchestra come from? (Scott wheedled friends into playing for free and recorded each of the orchestra parts separately). What would Chen do about the Maya render that took so long on his tiny render farm and still didn’t look right ("thank God for After Effects"). And when the NTSC render was rejected by Sundance, Chen turned it into an opportunity to redo the piece at film res.
"There wasn’t a stone left unturned," Scott says of the process, and Chen reflects: "It was as if you are standing in front of 100 doors, and the right answer is behind one of them. You can’t sleep until you open every door."
For all the monastic immersion, Chen's advice for CG storytellers is down-to-earth: CG art is practical with off-the-shelf tools and a pretty humble amount of processing power. "Don’t wait for the next software version," he urges. "The tools are ready enough, whether you collaborate or do it by yourself."
Cynthia Wisehart
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