SIGGRAPH is going on right now, from August 9th to the 13th, and many of us are missing it. Here are a few videos explaining a couple of the tracks. While it isn’t as good as being there, a number of these individual programs will hopefully be captured and uploaded to their official SIGGRAPH You Tube Channel soon. While we wait for that, enjoy these teasers.
Genius and Scam Artist, Visionary and IP Thief (he lead the way; Bill Gates came in a poor second, and had to steal from him what he had stolen from Park Xerox), Steve Jobs was one of a small handful of people who changed the world while I watched. I won’t know until I see it, but I have hopes this movie might be as entertaining as Pirates of Silicon Valley, another film that covered the same topic. I look forward to watching this new iteration of the story when it hits the big screen on October 9th.
This introduction to the SIGGRAPH convention experience starts with a practical guide to organizing to attend any large convention. He uses the same techniques many of us developed going to Comic Con or any other large Sci-Fi or Anime convention, but without having to go through three or four conventions gradually learning through trial and error how to organize your time and map out the convention space. So I recommend anyone who wants to attend a large convention watch the first 10 or 12 minutes of this presentation. He then goes on to break down the process of computer animation into its component parts by type of activity, giving a very clear understanding of how it works. If you have any interest in creating your own animations this is a great introduction. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since ACM SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group, GRAPHics which started life as an organization in 1967, held its first convention in 1974, and became an Internet NEWSGROUP back in the early 70s as well. The latest convention, coming up at the Los Angeles Convention Center the 9th through 13th of August, 2015, will be the 42nd time the event has been held.
Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.
They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.
This Machinema, titled Journey into the Metaverse, won all the awards when it was released in 2011, and well it should have. It is a truly unique piece of video production, and is worth adding to your permanent collections.
With the power put into everyone’s hands by the growth of computer capabilities on an almost daily basis, people who want to create their own movies are starting to have a lot of the same tools as the major studios. What this means for folks who have a vision of the film they want to create is they have to approach the studios in a whole new way. Where it used to be good enough to go in with a verbal pitch for your film (This is like The Birds meets Jaws, and everyone is running for their lives), that doesn’t cut it any more. Now you have to prove you have the story telling chops and a tale worth financing by creating your own little preview, more than a trailer but less than a feature film. One of the best examples I have seen of this recently is Controller, about a girl who wants to escape from the corporation who controls her. To do so, she remotely takes control of her boy friend and forces him to wipe out anyone who would stand in the way of her freedom.
It was good enough that Fox is putting up the money to actually make the piece, so we can hope to see the extended story soon. I don’t know how long ago this trend started, but I first became aware of it when the first 6 minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was created in just under a decade, and the results shown to a movie company that decided to finance its completion. This is definitely a great way for people to spend minimum money to create something that might get them to realize their dream; thanks to The Dissolve for the heads up on this project!
CONTROLLER (控制者) from Saman Kesh on Vimeo.