Last night may have marked the premiere party for Siggraph ’07. Softimage, Vicon, and Pendulum–along with mova–held their celebration for the Siggraph community at the San Diego House of Blues.

Titled Visual Fxtasy, the event was the place to be, as marked by the nearly 1,000 attendees who lined up all the way down 6th street and even around the corner along a full block of G St. Luckily, Softimage hooked us up with VIP list treatment so we could bypass the wait, but bless those who did stand in the more-than-an-hour-long line, because they helped amplify the classic House of Blues ambience. more

If you hurry (you have until 2 p.m. today) down to the bowels of the San Diego Convention Center (rooms 15 and 16 on the Mezzanine Level), you can still enjoy the Guerilla Studio experience, make some art, meet some collaborators, or just goof around.

With Gibson guitars wailing in the background, I discovered artists, students, and curiosity seekers “playing with lots of cool toys,” as one of them described it. Down there earlier, I watched a young man get his face scanned using a Polhemus handheld scanner so that he could “play with myself,” so to speak, using animation software. I also watched artists sketching on Wacom tablets, people animating stacks of colorful teacups, folks printing out all sorts of CG drawings, sketches, and previsualizations, and I listened in as artists hotly debated new ways to animate organic shapes to do all sorts of “reverse engineering,” whatever that is. In other words, this is the colorful, expressive, and free little corner of Siggraph where anything goes. more

Finally got a chance to sneak over to the Electronic Theater at the San Diego Civic Center Theater last night for the 7pm showing. As with every Electronic Theater from Siggraph’s of yesteryear, the pre-show is just as entertaining as the actual clips.

For ’07 the committee offered a tribute to some of the ground-breaking innovations in game technology–from the ’80s. They projected three different laser-based Atari games onto the huge movie screen and invited industry pros to try their hand at the joystick classics. more

Maxon and Adobe are co-hosting tonight at the Marriott Marina ballroom tower 6:30. Salsa band and some real salsa dancers to show you how.

Prizes–not for dancing–include Adobe software, Artbeats footage and a screaming Nvidia card. (There will be a drawing).

First come first serve, but when it’s full, it’s full.

Press Release

SIGGRAPH 2007 announced today the inclusion of an exclusive preview of “Beowulf”, groundbreaking director Robert Zemeckis’ unique vision of the “Beowulf” saga, in this year’s Computer Animation Festival‘s Electronic Theater taking place at the 34th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 5-9 August 2007 in San Diego, California, USA.

“In an Electronic Theater filled with truly the best of the best in each category, ‘Beowulf‘ is on the absolute cutting edge of what is being produced today,” said Paul Debevec, SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival Chair from the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. “This year’s show weaves together amazing visuals from numerous disciplines into a single mind-altering experience.” more

The premier annual event for the world’s most innovative, accomplished, and amazing digital film and video creators. An internationally recognized jury receives hundreds of submissions and presents the best work of the year in daily Animation Theaters and the Electronic Theater (matinée and evening shows). Selections include outstanding achievements in time-based art, scientific visualization, visual effects, real-time graphics, and narrative shorts.

The Computer Animation Festival is recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival. Since 1999, several works originally presented in the Computer Animation Festival have been nominated for or have received a “Best Animated Short” Academy Award.

Animation Theaters
Sunday – Thursday, 5-9 August
Room 24 & 25

Electronic Theater
Monday – Wednesday, 6-8 August
San Diego Civic Theatre
1100 Third Avenue

For a video preview of this year’s Computer Animation Festival, click here.

The Siggraph 2007 Special Sessions take a behind the scenes look at some of the past year’s top animation and visual effects accomplishments for the feature film industry. Four different sessions will take place in the San Diego Convention Center, each focusing on a different film production–a lineup which includes: Happy Feet, Transformers, Shrek, and Spiderman 3.

For more information on time and locations, as well as more of an in-depth look at the specific topics covered, click here.

Read more about the making of Shrek 3 in Senior Editor Michael Goldman’s recent article in Millimeter here.

Learn more on the creation of Spiderman 3 in Goldman’s article Digital Acrobatics.

The SIGGRAPH Papers program is the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics. This year the Papers Committee accepted 108 papers, a new record. These papers span the core areas of modeling, animation, rendering, and imaging, but they also touch on related areas such as visualization, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and applications of computer graphics.

New for SIGGRAPH 2007
To promote a lively exchange of ideas during the Papers program, we are introducing a system of per-paper discussants. Each paper in the program will be allotted 25 minutes, 20 minutes for presentation and five minutes for discussion of the paper, with the session chair serving as discussant.

For a video preview of this year’s Papers, click here.

For a list of Papers presentation times, click here.