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

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

“Live-action 3D is the future/Teach it well and let it lead the way,” Whitney Houston once sang, I believe. Oops, wrong bad joke. The big joke among people who make 3D stereoscopic films is that it is way more work than making a regular 2D film because you have to make the same film twice.

This summer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was shot in stereo with dual Sony HDC-950 HD cameras mounted on Pace Technologies‘ 3D HD rigs. The movie’s Visual-Effects Supervisor Christopher Townsend was on hand to explain that there is no cheating space when you’re filming live-action 3D. You can’t use any of the solutions normally associated with 2D movies, such as flat matte paintings for backgrounds, 2D compositing, or any 2D cueing traicks at all. Journey to the Center of the Earth is the directorial debut of longtime visual-effects supervisor Eric Brevig and the movie was the first ever full-length stereoscopic motion picture shot in HD to be released in digital 3D. more

Tomorrow 2:40 at the Vicon booth (1101), find out what one of Sony’s most prolific motion-capture veterans is doing with his facial capture product FacePro.

Hauck (Beowulf, Monster House, and Polar Express) and partner Steven Ilous (Polar Express) started Digital Concepts Group last year to address motion capture pipeline gaps, looking for ways to simplify various tasks. First up: facial capture. more

What makes a VP of Production happy? This morning, for Brian Rausch of Vicon/House of Moves it was onboard trajectory building. Vicon is here with the new MX T-Series 160 camera system based on their proprietary 16 megapixel 10-bit Avalon sensor (it runs full res at 120fps; it can do 240fps at half res). Quick math says this is a big jump in performance from the 4 megapixel sensors that established Vicon’s business and reputation.

But back to trajectories. In the not-too-distant past, Rausch explains, each frame was an island; trajectory really meant snapshot (which is hardly the true spirit of trajectory). Now onboard trajectory building is additive, and a successful trajectory can be built from a single camera when other cameras lose sight of markers. “We’ll get fewer labeling issues, markers aren’t going to swap as much, the trajectories will persist and markers will remember where they were, not just where they are.” For how long? Ah, who knows? Depends on movement, occlusion, how many actors. “How long will the trajectory will allow us to be part of its life? We don’t know,” Rausch says fondly, even wistfully. However brief or persistant it’s all an improvement on precision and clarity. more

I never thought about it like this before, but what we know as a close-up shot isn’t really a close-up at all. Phil “Captain 3D” McNally from DreamWorks Animation likes to instead refer to this staple of 2D cinematography as a “big-up.” The object isn’t any closer to the the audience, it’s just bigger.

That’s just one example of the redefining of traditional movie terminology that McNally peppered throughout his talk about discovering the difference between 2D and 3D moviemaking this morning during the Animated 3D Cinema: Imaginary Worlds Brought to Life panel. Because 2D techniques are so ingrained in filmmakers and audiences as the only way to make films, it is ironically seen as real life. In reality, 2D moviemaking is the art of converting a spatial world into a flat one. McNally showed a clip from the studio’s Kung Fu Panda that was quite impressive in 3D, but then revealed the process behind converting a 3D production through the 2D filter- about 1/3 of the clip was the same, 1/3 was slightly adjusted 2D footage, and 1/3 of it was new or extended edits. more

DAZ 3D, a leading developer of professional-quality 3D software and models, and optical tracking technology developer, NaturalPoint today announced the ARENA plug-in for DAZ Studio, an easy-to-use and cost-effective complete motion capture solution. Being shown for the first time at the 2008 SIGGRAPH Conference in Los Angeles, the ARENA plug-in for DAZ Studio allows full body and facial capture, rendering, as well as a real-time workflow perfect for previsualization. To obtain additional information during SIGGRAPH, please visit DAZ 3D’s Booth #910, or to view a live real-time demonstration, please visit NaturalPoint at Booth #733. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

Immersion Corporation, the leading developer and licensor of touch feedback technology (http://www.immersion.com/corporate/), today announced four new products and services for the motion capture (mocap) and animation industries. Attendees of SIGGRAPH 2008 will see the new offerings in booth 1422 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, August 12 –14, 2008. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

The Pixel Farm, a leading developer of innovative Film and Television digital post-production tools, pushes matchmove technology on again, offering a new dimension in Tracking: PFTrack 5.0. Just 12 months after the groundbreaking release of version 4.0, PFTrack 5.0 reasserts itself as the most advanced camera tracking and motion analysis solution available. Already considered an industry standard, PFTrack now reaches new heights of functionality, operability and ease of use, with exclusive new features including: true stereoscopic tracking with the ability to export anaglyphs, a totally new camera solver providing greater accuracy and improved Z calibration, reference frame support, more robust Z-Depth Extraction, pattern-based User Feature tracking and many UI and workflow improvements. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

My pal, Dan Ochiva, alluded in an earlier posting to Vicon’s new F40 camera system with its proprietary sensors, and many mo-cap hardware developments generally. But, in popping in at the busy Vicon booth (#902) today, I was also impressed with the company’s software work with the debut of its new Blade processing technology. Vicon’s approach seems to be to package the whole mocap workflow process inside a single, unified, proprietary toolset under the Vicon umbrella.

Vicon’s CEO, Brian Nilles, says clients wanted to keep data from capture onward inside a single pipeline as it gets pushed into the 3D animation process, and Vicon responded with Blade. The tool, he emphasizes, is scalable to fit with boutique pipelines to those of monolithic studios. And, he adds, it was also designed with plug-in architecture to easily bring in third-party applications, as studios figure out various new ways to integrate their mocap and animation pipelines.

Vicon also launched a mo-cap oriented film festival at Siggraph this week. The company is offering a $10,000 grand prize to artists who create original short films (between two to five minutes) incorporating motion capture data provided by Vicon on its festival web site (www.vicon.com/filmfestival/) in new and unique ways. The plan is to post selected entries on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 vote-getters will be judged by a panel of industry experts, with the winner reeling in the grand prize.

–Michael Goldman