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

As Siggraph 2008 winds down, it’s time for me to take one last, brief mention of some of the more interesting technology and developments at the show. Be sure to read upcoming issues of millimeter and Digital Content Producer magazines for more in-depth information.

While some may claim that there is nothing new at the show, if you walk the aisles with an open mind you’re sure to find trends and new gear that fits the bill. more

Siggraph 2008 drew to a close with a bang Thursday night as ILM hosted a screening of its new Star Wars: Clone Wars animated feature at the Nokia Theater following the final run of the Electronic Theater. The screening featured an intro with the film’s director, Dave Filoni, being interviewed by ILM Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor (and co-inventor of Adobe Photoshop), John Knoll, about their Star Wars experiences. At the private ILM party before the screening, millimeter Senior Editor Michael Goldman had the chance to have a quick chat with Knoll about his impressions of Siggraph 2008 and what parts of the show interested him the most. Hear their conversation.

Laptops are on track to soon replace desktop units as the most popular personal computer type. Over the past couple of years, more powerful mobile CPUs and GPUs have made lighter weight laptops prime candidates to become the machines of choice for pro graphics and NLE users too.
While they didn’t have a booth on the show floor, Dell still garnered interest by the introduction of two potent new members of its line of pro-oriented, ISV-certified mobile workstations, which turned up on display in Intel’s and NVIDIA’s booths. more

I’m sitting in the Electronic Theater with my old pal Dan Ochiva blogging on my iPhone. I mention this only to indicate how trippy it is to realize how fundamentally the world has changed with the technology revolution that entertains us and let’s us communicate in new ways. The festival BTW is amazing … Glad I made it over here…
MG

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

Until recently, most laser scanning systems—whether for use in films, games, or other applications–were pretty big pieces of gear, designed for capturing a car, or on a slightly smaller scale, a full body. While some companies did make small desktop rigs, these mainly captured small objects—say the size of a soda can—that had to be placed on a revolving stage attached to a workstation. Pretty complicated for the most part.

At the show, Quebec-base Creaform, which develops and makes the Handyscan 3D line-up of handheld and self-positioning laser scanners, debuted an innovative, lightweight handheld 3D color scanner that only needs to be attached to laptop to deliver near real-time scans. 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