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MillimeterA Sense of Siggraph
Jun 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Cynthia Wisehart, Editor
The film that will close this year's Electronic Theater at Siggraph is, for one thing, a 15-plus-minute movie. Even those who love and study animation can find the rigors of Electronic Theater a bit much, even without 15-minute movies — in black and white with no dialogue. This year, however, there are fewer pieces on the program, and ET Chair Darin Grant is pretty sure that people will be able to hang. Make that very sure. It was his decision to screen Eternal Gaze in its entirety, a decision that surprised creator Sam Chen.
But nothing about Eternal Gaze follows any usual script or expectation. It took Chen and his audio collaborator Jamey Scott a full three years to make the film about the elegiac sculptor Giacometti. Chen worked on it as a full-time job every day for those three years; at one point pushing hard to make the Sundance submission deadline. He made no money — he spent money — and then it got turned down for Sundance. He made the whole piece over again at film res.
That's what the production process can be like when you have no priority other than a personal artistic vision. This mindset — the idea that there are no “have tos,” just right or not right — is something that actually shows up in the style of the film. Chen explains it as counterpoint to what happens in many movies today in which “every frame is packed with high production value.” Instead he whittled away at Eternal Gaze until he felt each moment was exactly right; with nothing extra, but nothing missing.
Distillation is actually a big luxury, something that people don't always get to do on a day job with the accountants watching. Chen and Jamey Scott threw away hours and hours and hours of work on the way to 16 minutes. As any artist knows, all those failed experiments and risks do end up in the final piece, like pencil sketches under a finished oil painting. Or like the lumps in the battered clay that Giacometti himself destroyed and remolded until they finally came to life and spoke.
Such compulsion to discover and remake is a thread that trails through the halls of Siggraph as people gather from all over the CG universe in an environment where details and hard-won excellence are prized and shared.
For a comprehensive preview of the show, see our Siggraph 2003 magazine in this issue. It's a big, densely packed conference, and we tried to highlight some of the elements we thought would be most interesting to you. I do urge you to visit www.siggraph.org/s2003/conference and do a little advance work yourself. You're guaranteed to find something there that you won't get anywhere else.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
