VIEW Conference 2007: Day three, Pixar, Harry Potter, King Kong and too much more
There was a hole in the time-space continuum (read it: sleep!) so it’s now the first available moment to tell you what happened in the second part of VIEW Conference here in Turin.
By slowly moving forward the event’s schedule I found more and more difficulties in following all the sessions. I am my own working staff (sigh) so I was not able to follow everything.
Somebody much more experienced than me once told me that a very successful event is the one in which the audience has to make a choice in the sessions to attend. That’s absolutely the case of VIEW Conference 8.
Nonetheless I jumped around from room to room trying to get the juice of everything.
Quite a slow beginning this morning. You know: Italians… a lot of people got late into the main hall where the sparkling Computer Graphics Supervisor of Sony Picture ImageWorks, Danny Dimian presented a very refreshing session on how they created waves and water simulations for the animated feature film: Surf’s Up. Being an ex-cg software developer I must say this is the kind of presentation I really love. Astounding imagery broke down to all building elements. Danny was really detailed in explaining the research he and his staff went through to get a believable model of sea water. You can appreciate the beauty of science when, applied to image making, makes you feel something, or desire something. At the end of the session I felt an urge to go surfing!
The dynamic trio who took the stage after Dimian really gave a wonderful insight on film design and preproduction. I have been studying these things on books and I have been trying to get information from friends and professionals working in this field but, since I lack actual production experience, I find extremely useful to have access to professionals, live, in front of me, who can explain with lots of details their role and the context in which they work. That is why I couldn’t stop to shoot photos to every slide projected on the brilliant screen of the main hall of Torino Incontra conference center. Diagrams, workflows, drafts, examples. The very clear Tino Shaedler, who worked as the production design art director of many big budget films as Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Catwoman, V for Vendetta and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (right now is working at the upcoming movie His Dark Materials – The Golden Compass) really engaged me in a wonderful trip down the complex preproduction and production pipeline of a strongly visual effects-based feature film. I need to study a lot of materials I collected and to follow leads and suggestions I was able to perceive to really render the beautiful panorama Tino was able to depict.
James Clyne is a concept artist, which means he visualize movies before they gets done. No matter what this class of artists are going to say about their role. They are fine artists. Real painters. And designers at the same time since Mr Clyne, for instance, has always been involved in visualizing any possible, thinkable environment, scene, prop or sequence. While I knew James’ work in the field of illustration I really enjoyed the discovery of such amount of vivid visual artwork which basically gave birth to some of the most popular films of the last years: Transformers, War of the Worlds, X-Men 3, Troy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Minority Report, The Fountain, The Polar Express, and the upcoming latest installment of Star Trek. I am a procedure and process geek so I really get my mind blowing when artists as James Clyne explain to you how they work, why they do things in a certain way, what is their relationships with the other artists and technicians in the group. I did really love it. (Oh, and of course one of the most beautiful personal painting done by Clyne is sitting on my desktop since lot of time).
Much less visual in the beginning but really deep in the explanation was the next session by the multi-awarded Grant Major who is not from Weta Digital but worked a lot for this New Zealander studio. After so much computer graphics imagery and digital visual effects it was nice and refreshing to see actual set prototypes, studies and miniature made by hand. Yes! Great presentation spanning from The Lord of The Rings trilogy to King Kong. Mr Major showed with a great amount of examples how to ancient craft of production design became today perfectly integrated and empowered by digital technologies.
At this point I lost a lot of sessions but I had to manage the incredible flow of contacts, news, updates and, first of all I wanted to see what was happening in the other halls. My good, brilliant, friend Enea Le Fons, for instance, kept an always abundant audience involved with a nicely alternate sequence of events in the event. He his a Softimage Evangelist a CG Teacher and a great presenter. Thanks to the presence of the great Mr Kevin G. Clark of Softimage, Enea, was able to put together technical sessions, feature presentations dedicated to film and videogame projects and live interviews with Italian teams involved with productions in the film and game industry. As I had the occasion to observe many times, there is an actual competition between the different halls with presenters, exhibitors and social meetings, well, the Softimage booth and the presentation room were always crowed of excited people asking questions and tearing the cloths from the poor Enea.
And this is the kind of impression I had following not so closely but with attention the other parallel events where meetings and presentations took place thanks to big names of the industry: Autodesk (I met TJ Galda, ciao TJ!), Google with their 3D software Google SketchUp (3D computer graphics for the masses?), NVidia and many more. My god I have so many notes I will need a week to put them in readable words.
Second part of the day, in one of my favorite session I enjoyed something more related to my current job: schools and teaching. I follow closely the evolution of schools for animation, visual effects and computer graphics and collect all graduation reels and short films I can find on the Web. Sabine Hirtes for Filmakdemie Baden-Wuerttember and Larry Bafia of Vancouver Film School took the interest of the audience with animated poetry. Original, innovating, moving, entertaining, astonishing, beautiful work from students of both schools have been showed to represent the level of quality and diversity that can be reached. Their students are the next unique world creators of tomorrow and since they are so good and imaginative I really feel we have good hope for our future. Thanks Sabine. Thanks Larry.
I didn’t have the time to digest and summarize the personal storm I went through by following VIEW Conference. So it still seems a dream of a distant past to me. I spent some quality time (as some Canadian friends of mine like to say) with animation celebrities. I discovered the human beings in them and I really understood why the best studios in the world are producing the best films of the history. This usually happens to me when I get to know deeply somebody by working and living for a long time with them. But in this case I got a sort of illumination which really broke any possible barrier and allowed me to see things in a new enlightened way. Paul Topolos is a great human being, a sincere friend, a romantic and moving artist. He is the lead matte painter of Pixar Animations Studios and while in his first session he talked about the astounding work done in Ratatouille during day 3 of VIEW Conference he talked about his career and the path which lead him to Pixar.
I had the immense honour of being Paul Topolos’ moderator during his session and the gag which just happened spontaneously during the introduction was really funny and absolutely in the right mood for the rest of the show.
Yes it was a show in the most genuine sense of the term. Paul was able to summarize all crucial points of his career and to give such fundamental suggestions and hints to anyone who would want to follow his steps. A painter paints and a matte painter is still painting on the silver screen canvas. While he works with a large teams of creative people and, of course, at the service of the Story lead by the Warrior called The Director, he still needs to understand the storytelling and interpret it through his arts. We got hundreds of beautiful drafts, photographs, illustrations, storyboards, making-of, schemes, diagrams and lots of eye candies which was really difficult to receive without remaining amazed. Paul is a great presenter, I should say a real actor, he got the attention of the crowded audience which tended to react as they were in a stadium rather than in a theatre. I want to see again all Pixar’s movies I want to re-watch Ratatouille, Now. I want The Art of Ratatouille book which Dave the Book Guy of VIEW Conference sold out (Hi Dave : ), I am happy and grateful to have been there.
Please understand: this is about 10% of what I can remember and write down now. If you are nice, maybe, I will tell you the rest. Barolo, Barbaresco, Nebbiolo, Limoncello, Grappa…
(One new good friend of mine asked me why every Italian he meets tells him “Vaffanculo, Bastardo!” eh eh)
Ciao,
Max
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