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Siggraph 2012

Friday, August 17, 2012

Siggraph may be over for another year, but the whilst the memories (some fuzzier than others…) are still fresh, here is a round up of the highs, lows and the themes that still have debates raging across The Mill offices.

Alongside 10 attendees from the New York, LA and London offices, Will Cohen (Managing Director/Executive Producer, Mill TV & Film) took to the stage for a "behind closed doors session". To encourage free flowing debate, attendees had to abide by a strict no-recording no-tweeting rule. Talking on The Business of The Business Will joined a diverse panel from VFX Industry in LA and elsewhere covering off movies, commercials, TV and games.



From behind the elusive closed doors Will reveals, "A huge star turn in the form of a talk by controversial Digital Domain Chairman Jon Textor really helped focus the mind on the future of our industry and what problems companies were experiencing. This was reinforced with a very inspirational talk from former PDI founder/entrepreneur and college lecturer Carl Rosenthal who touched on similar themes."

Round-Up - Vince Baertsoen, co-Head of CG, New York

Siggraph 2012 was great for meeting people and working with everyone from all the Mill offices. Overall the talks were very interesting with some great tech, and some good software releases. However my favorite part was meeting with seniors from different backgrounds; talking about the VFX industry in general and exchanging opinions on how it is evolving.

1 Top Talk:  "Computational Plenoptic Imaging" where we could discover Light-field and trillion frames per second cameras. A great future in film-making is yet to come!

2 Best party: Mill one (obviously!)

3 Top Food: Water Grill

4 Highlights:  The visit on the Friday after Siggraph, to ICT (Institute of Creative Technology), and a glimpse at the great research over there! There was also some great software releases, like the new version of Massive v5.0 and Realflow 2013.

Round-Up - David Fleet (Joint Deputy Head of 3D), Sid Harrington-Odedra (Head of Maya Development) , Jonathan Wood & Jacob Gonzales (3D Artists), London

Siggraph was awe-inspiring. We were all first-timers and instantly want to go back now that we are clearer on what level each type of talk is based at.

1 Top Talk: Sony Pictures Imageworks: The Untold Story of "The Amazing Spider-Man" provided amazing insight into how they made up the day and night New York cityscapes, including numerous sequences that went fully CG.  LAIKA's ParaNorman: The Fusion of Stop-Motion and CG in a Zombie-Ridden World also gave indepth shot by shot detail into creating the Smoke Witch where she was made physically using  various textures to observe exactly how she might move, then recreated with vfx.

2 Best party: Nvidia, Shotgun & The Mill

3 Top Food:  Nickel Diner & the discovery of the Bacon Donut…

4 Highlights: The Art and Science Behind Walt Disney Animation Studios' "Paperman" preview demonstrated an exciting use of Vector paint programming that created a solid blend of hand artistry and computer work. We also saw some incredibly impressive face scanning technology called Faceshift which will definitely take game play to the next level.

5 Lowlight: The first question following the incredible Building Disney-Pixar's "Brave": Pencils to Pixels was someone asking the speakers for a Brave 'desktop wallpaper'...
The Digital Domain Presents "Making the Steel Real: Moving VFX Into Production" also suffered slightly from a lack of lighting and rendering detail. 

Claire Anderson, Talent Manager, London, New York & LA

Having Siggraph in LA on our home turf was a real advantage for us given our LA office is growing rapidly. It also meant we were able to host an open evening to showcase our space and the type of work that we do. It was fantastic to get to meet so many great people at the booth, and then again at The Mill party on Wednesday evening (Its always the sign of a good party when the guests drink the beer dry!) The Digital Domain education lunch at The Farm was also very interesting. A fantastic year all round for the exhibition and conference.