Well, I hate to say I told you so, but…a couple of days ago I wrote this entry, France dominates Computer Animation Festival, which is pretty self-explanatory. Now, I’m writing to tell you of the winners in the Siggraph 2008 Compuater Animateion Festival, and guess what?

France dominated.

Here’s the list, all deserving winners. Congratulations to all the nominees on a great exhibition!

Best of Show Winner

Oktapodi

Gobelins l’école de l’image, France more

It was an exciting day when I found out that my short film “Distraxion” was going to be featured in the 2008 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. I had spent the last two years bringing it to completion and I was constantly motivated by the goal of a screening at the CAF. The first year, I was a student in the short film curriculum at AnimationMentor. The next year, I had landed my position as staff animator at DreamWorks Animation and had dedicated my nights and weekends to completing the remaining work on the project. As exciting as it was to learn about my acceptance to the festival, it was even more exciting to learn that in 2008 a new format was being introduced. This new format combined the festival with what was in previous years known as the Electronic Theater. The two showcases would be shown intertwined in high definition digital projection at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theater. more

Unlike the slowly changing, monolithic market for CPUs, the development of graphics chips and cards looks chaotic, with chip designs, products, and companies coming in and out of the market at a near furious pace over the decades since the first graphics technology delivered in 1960.

Over the past eight years or so, however, two companies have come to dominate the market for discrete chips and cards: ATI (since 2006 a division of AMD) and NVIDIA. While the companies continue to slug it out, most everyone else had fallen to the wayside. Now, the two companies own 98 percent of the discrete GPU business, according to on Peddie Research. more

The Nokia Theater hosts the Siggraph Computer Animation Festival’s awards ceremony today at 3:45, when the winners of the Audience Award, the Student Prize, the Jury Award, and the Best of Show award will be announced. I’ve covered many of the films up for these awards in previous blogs. See France dominates Computer Animation Festival and Commercials and Promo Spots are Shorts Too for details and links to some of the actual films themselves.

I’ll take this chance to spotlight some of the nominees I haven’t covered. Carbon Footprint is a time-lapse movie depicting 50 years in the life of a discarded aluminum can and is enough to make you vocal the next time you see some jackass throw something away on the street. It comes from the U.K.-based Jellyfish Pictures, and despite its very short running time, is a strong contender for Best of Show. more

A lot of focus this year at Siggraph has been on stereoscopic 3D and its emergence as a new language of filmmaking. If 3D is a new way of making movies, then the vast visual effects team that worked on Speed Racer discovered a reinvention of 2D filmmaking.

Visual Effects Supervisor John Gaeta calls the style pioneered on Speed Racer many things. Among them: “virtual cinematography,” “photo-anime,” and “2 1/2 D” layering. When he and Dan Glass first started working on the project, it was a liberating experience to force themselves to let go of the need for any kind of photorealistic element. This quality is something ingrained into any visual-effects artist worth his salt from the get go. Letting go of that instinct is like asking a cat to ignore a mouse. more

Autodesk announced Autodesk Toxik 2009 procedural compositing software. Toxik 2009 offers high-performance compositing and visual effects capabilities, particularly for large-format digital film and television projects. When combined with the new Autodesk Maya 2009 modeling software, the two products provide an accelerated and iterative 3D-to-2D workflow. Both products are being showcased at Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles, California, August 12-14 at Autodesk booth #501. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

“He was fearless,” says James Cameron. Stan Winston always had the charisma to talk nervous producers into letting his creature effects and make-up studio create expensive, experimental visual effects for their movies. Cameron should know, because some of Winston’s most famous and groundbreaking work was done for Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Last night at the Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles, hundreds gathered to pay tribute to legendary Hollywood effects guru Stan Winston, who died this past June. The man left a huge legacy of memorable and award-winning visual effects moments from movies such as Jurassic Park, Aliens, A.I., Iron Man, Predator, and Edward Scissorhands. Jody Duncan, author of “The Winston Effect” interviewed Cameron and some of Winston’s other collaborators about the keys to Winston’s success. more

The only thing more popular than laptops and Starbucks at Siggraph this year is the double-feature panel featuring the visual-effects wizards behind Cloverfield and Iron Man . Tippett Studio and Industrial Light & Magic split the bill to reveal some of the secrets behind two of 2008’s biggest FX-heavy blockbusters.

The Tippett team, headed by Eric Leven, gave the impression that the best kind of movie to work on is one with a limited budget and nothing to lose. Such a project was pitched to them as a kind of “Blair Witch meets Godzilla.” Originally Cloverfield was budgeted at $25 million when they got the call from J.J. Abrams’ team to work up the monster, known affectionately as “Clover.” Once the filmmakers got the original tests back from Tippett, the excitement they generated resulted in more money. more

I didn’t get what was new and useful about HP’s DreamColor technology when it debuted for monitors at NAB 2008. (DreamColor was introduced in 2007, but aimed initially at color printing solutions.) There seemed to be a lot of noise being made for better color rendition, but what was exciting or new about that?

I think I’m starting to get it. Attending a talk by HP and a group of DreamWorks artists and technicians–their partners in developing the technology–the differences in the crisp colors and black blacks of the new 24-inch HP DreamColor LP2480zx display and a standard LCD at its side were remarkable.

The new display is described as “true 30-bit”, which means it can choose from a range of over 1 billion colors to display. The result? No banding, and rendering of colors subtle enough to best reflect what the artists want to see on the big screen. more

Suddenly it seems there’s a graphics card horserace again: At the show, ATI jumped back into the race with Nvidia, announcing two strong contenders in its pro line of graphics cards (Radeon is the consumer/gamer card line), the ATI FirePro V5700 and ATI FirePro V3700.

Also new: a re-branded name, from FireGL—the name kept from the purchase by ATI of the pro card line from a German graphics card manufacturer in 2001—to ATI FirePro.

For quite some time, ATI had made graphics cards that other manufacturers could take aim at as the best of the bunch. Most card makers dropped off though in the tough economics of that market, leaving Nvidia and ATI to challenge and leapfrog each other throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. Things got a little shaky after AMD’s purchase of ATI in 2006, however, with AMD’s troubles threatening to pull ATI down. more