Day 2 meant the start of the exhibition and the job fair. Highlights included a killer ILM series of lectures showcasing their work on several major blockbuster films, anyone of which would have been enough for most studios. Siggraph is a great place to connect with the who’s who of the industry during the day and enjoy the parties each night – such as fxguide/fxphd’s gathering of the faithful at Lucy’s Retired Surfer Bar.
Exhibition and Job Fair
The exhibition opened today and as expected it is smaller due to the economy – but also due to being out of LA as Siggraph is each alternating year. The busiest place on the floor (other than in the Pixar teapot queue) was the Job fair.
Many companies are hiring and the job fair is a great place to not only submit a reel but also to meet major industry players. Nearly all the booths have senior creatives rostered on to talk to people about recruiting for example we spoke to Rob Coleman (Star Wars Ep 1,2,3) who was manning the Dr. D booth recruiting for Happy Feet 2 (which should be outstanding) and Rob Bredow (Surfs Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) was helping out at SPI booth. Rob will be appearing in an upcoming fxguidetv – where he talks about the new Open Source program from SPI, as well as how complex and how much fun – Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs turned out to be. SPI is now hiring having just completed a slate of films for the summer and is now looking forward for the major work they have slated.
Not all the recruiting is done in the job fair, DD, Pixar and others had special areas of their stands on the main floor of the show with recruiters and career advisors. While there are gaming companies it felt like the vfx companies outnumbered the gaming companies much more than in LA last year.
If you are wanting to obtain a dream job, Siggraph NOLA is an idea venue. The conference is smaller, and as it is outside LA only the serious travel here, so it is easy to connect with senior people and you are more likely to be noticed.
What was interesting is that there are a number of cool new gems of tech on the show floor, on Day one you tend to notice the big players but we have scheduled to return to at least three today that appear at first glance very very promising – I will cover those tomorrow in Day 3 coverage, once we have had time to really examine them.
Papers
The hot topics seem to be GPU rendering and Stereo. Papers are being presented covering stereo in films such as UP, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Monsters vs Aliens, G-Force, Coraline and others.
It seems like Computational Photography is under represented this year which really surprised me, as in previous years this was one of the most interesting aspects of technical research. There was a particularly strong fluid sims session entitled : “Splashing in Pipelines” which I sadly missed but reports from those who attended suggest this might be worth checking out when the talks are released online after the show.
As mentioned ILM gave a tour de force presentation entitled Robots, Cyborgs, and the Final Frontier: An Inside Look at “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, “Terminator Salvation”, and “Star Trek” It would have been impossible to sit through this mini-seminar and not be awe struck by ILM’s teams depth. Much has been written about these films, but it is invaluable to hear the individuals talk first hand about how professionally they approach each project. The ILM presenters were relaxed, open, positive and lacking in sarcasm, attitude or ego. What I found interesting was some of the less discussed aspects of the projects – the character work in Star Trek for example, or how the teams worked with the directors to find the right solutions to extremely complex and hard to visualize problems.
As you can imagine the lecture hall, while vast was packed . It was one of the most attended talks we have seen so far. The other thing I feel I want to do is thank ILM for clearly devoting so much time and effort to preparing the talks. Pulling together so much material and presenting so many before and afters, texture reels, reference reels and partial renders takes a huge amount of time to do for one film yet alone three. Actually as a funny aside in the Terminator presentation a clip was shown with ” large” sections blacked out of a physically accurate 100% naked moving digital Arnold Schwarzenegger with the comment that if the full version of this clip EVER got out on the net the team would be shot, as everything was Soft-body accurately modeled and animated!
Not to be a Pixar Fanboy – but another great talk was by Pete Sohn’s on the pitching and making the Pixar newest short Partly Cloudy entitled Making Pixar’s “Partly Cloudy”: A Director’s Vision Unlike some of the other Pixar papers which are being given by seasoned Pixar Siggraph technical experts, Pete Sohn admitted that while he had been at Pixar for nearly 10 years, this was his first Siggraph. Pete comes from the Story Department at Pixar and during the production of UP he pitched 3 short film ideas, one of which went on to be made and ran in cinemas as the UP feature short presentation.
Perhaps what made this talk so appealing was Pete’s outsider status looking in, both as someone directing for the first time, but also as a non-technical creative producing a Stereoscopic animated short inside the most successful animation studio in the world. He had the audience in stitches laughing about how he came up with the idea, how he pitched it and how he grew the story over time – all told with his own storyboard frames of himself and the Pixar team. So greatly received was his humorous recounts of his Partly Cloudy pitch that at the end of his speech as an unscheduled bonus- he re-gave an UP scene pitch, live to the lecture hall. While most of his talk was on Partly Cloudy – this animated pitch including voice overs and sound effects showed such commitment to story and a complete love of the material that it nearly stole the show.
The key take outs from this talk for me was the faith that Pete had for the process at Pixar. As he himself teaches to new recruits to the company at Pixar you need to “trust the process”. More than most other companies Pixar has a culture and process for making story driven films that works. As hard as it is for any director to let go of any idea, Pete showed that when you did give an idea over to the Pixar Process – it can grow and build into something with real strength. The film is based in part on communication issues between Pete and his mother. Pete’s family is first generation Asian American and the second big take out from his talk was – speak from the heart, from what you know. After hearing his talk you could see the honesty he brought to the film but also to his talk in explaining what worked, what did not and his own issues that stood between him and seeing his idea on the screen. There were some quick stats quoted on the film, but this talk, as with Pixar’s yesterday was more of a film making talk than a technical numbers presentation.
The Party
The Day finished with a great fxguide/fxphd party at Lucy’s Retired Surfer Bar not far from the convention center. It was great to see so many readers and members there at the event. Not only did we have a brilliant turnout and but we were joined by mates from Massive S/W and Sohonet. It is great to get such positive feedback from everyone and no matter how wired one is – the best part of Siggraph is just meeting people face to face and having a chance to talk.
Day 3
Just a reminder that Wed morning is the Photowalk / Photoworkshop – clearly we will post pictures from that tomorrow, along with more technical info and news from the Pixar User Group.
As we travel the show we are also adding photos to a flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/fxguide/