I was at Computer Animation Festival at Vancouver International Film Centre hosted by ACMSIGGRAPH Vancouver. I am by no mean professional in animation at all but I love the computer animations, I guess who wouldn’t. Let me start with the venue first. It is pretty new building and has the most comfortable seats I have sat in the theater and look at the size of the space for your arm. I says those chairs give you good experience to start with. I haven’t seen the films yet, I am enjoying my evening already. After a short introduction and house cleaning speech by the chairman of the local chapter, we have been introduced with couple of gigantic interactive balls that glow when people touch it. We audience brought out our inner desire to play and toss those balls the theater with all the lights off. That ends with couple of near incidents involving crashing the macbook pro on the speaker stand and some special light fixtures mounted on the wall. Overall, it was fun and no electronic equipments were harmed during great interactive ball toss.
Here is the quote from the SIGGRAPH site about this festival:
The premier annual event for the world’s most innovative, accomplished, and amazing digital film and video creators. An internationally recognized jury receives hundreds of submissions and presents the best work of the year. Selections include outstanding achievements in time-based art, scientific visualization, visual effects, real-time graphics, and narrative shorts
The films were awesome. There are films just do the story telling with various kind of animations, films explaining how things were done in big motion pictures, films showing how rendering is done in popular games (Go! gears of war) and films that’s like the never seen scene from big animation firms. There are some films that were doing cool animations (at least what they seems to think) because they can. Those didn’t entertain the audience. In computer animations, those doesn’t need to be awesomely cool. They just need to play together; story, flow & animations.
All the time I am watching the films, my mind is relating those films to my daily life in software development. At the end of the day, we are not competing for the cool factor, we are fighting for the ultimate satisfaction of our end users to get the job done while exceeding their expectations. Just like the films I enjoyed the most today are *NOT* the coolest animations like how they can render the layers of human skins in real time with dynamic shade and lighting.
Post a Comment