Edit/VES 2004 from Frankfurt

[Anonymous]

Hi guys 😛 Just wanted to write few of my impressions from this years Edit/VES in Frankfurt. For those who still don’t know what this is a brief explanation. VES is European festival for production and visual effect held in Frankfurt am Main 😛
In short guys (and gals) gather there to talk about visual effects, production needs and tricks, basically after presentation is over we gather around bars and talk about what not ;)) and drink (some times allot ;))

The showcases I enjoyed the most on this years VES was Spider Man 2 presented by Peter Nofz CG supervisor and The day after tomorrow presented by Karen Gouleakas VFX supervisor. The one that made me think about other things then VFX only was Blueberry presented by Jan Kounen, director. Really cool guy with completely different way of thinking. Its one of those movies that use visual effects for what they are originally meant to be. To be part of the story and try to tell what by no other means is possible.

What kind of stroke me about Karen Gouleakas is her deep knowledge about CG part of the pipeline. Really understanding what it takes and how it happens. She openly shared with us all the bad things that happened while shooting this movie, thank you for that. This shows that this event is really about our industry and people working in it and sharing information is important if not vital part.

But my real favourite of the event is Peter Nofz. The questions and answers war more CG oriented but when you see how much of the movie is all CG you have to give guys some serious credits. What most impressed me is how guys at Sonyimage works approached to solving problems. The simplest most solution possible. Even do it takes hole lot of time in RD but at the end it was mostly simple solution (even do procedures seem complicated) its the idea that finally worked. Guys even included work of Paul Debevec and improved it to point being able to use it in production environment (Reflectance Field Rendering of Human Faces). Use of occlusion passes in some really cool ways there is even a new term (at least for me) vector lighting. Used for doing corrective lighting in composting stage. Some really cool ideas.
There was so much information on its presentation that it would take me allot more space to write it all.

Anyways one more thing that was interesting was Shark tale from Dreamworks pdi. You can see some clever ways of using Maya paint effects and one lighting trick that I really liked. It kind of includes 3 major passes for rendering. First is occlusion pass (for deformation objects cleverly limited to as few objects as possible ). Then (interesting) light bounce only pass that gets calculated but not used on first render. Instead it returns to light source emitting it and then tuned down or up based on the need. Cool idea I think. And then your usual passes of direct light and fill light…

And last but not least I would recommend everyone to try and see Danish guys cartoon Terkel in Trouble. Its simply hilarious I lought my guts out. Really, really funny.

I like the way this event is developing. This year it included some demoing from Eyetronic and some Laser scanning done by Das Werks people (thank you Tobias) HD was more production/television people oriented with little presentation in English so it kind of was the down point but all in all getting better and better.

I would like to thank Tom Atkin and Rolf Kramers team doing great work on yet another Edit/VES

Kristijan

All this is just my own impressions so don’t take it in the wrong way 😛

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