SIGGRAPH `98 is coming up, and that means the Computer Animation Festival will once again be the showcase for the past year's best computer graphics work. This year, in addition to the festival's Electronic Theater and Animation Theater, SIGGRAPH has expanded the festival to include two new programs. SigKIDS Theater includes films such as Antics, a 90-second short for Nickelodeon, and Dick and Jane Do Math, animated sequences for a PBS series called Life By the Numbers . In honor of the 25 th conference, organizers have also programmed Film Show Classics, a selection of important milestones in computer graphics history.

SIGGRAPH 98's colorful logo charactersare brought to life in 20 short films called"in-betweens."

Finally computer graphics is where we knew it could be, beyond the mechanics," said Ines Hardtke, chair of this year's festival and head of digital imaging at the ACI East and Animation Youth East divisions at the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC) in Montreal. She and a jury of four others, whose names will be revealed the first day of the conference, sorted through 650 submissions to select 134 films for screening. An additional 20 "in-betweens" -- short i.d. films incorporating the colorful SIGGRAPH logo characters, created especially for this event -- will be shown throughout the festival programs, which will run every day of the conference, July 19-24.

Rendering With Natural Light by Paul Debevec. Image courtesy of SIGGRAPH.

Light and Sound Are This Year's Smoke
The festival has grown to be an annual milestone, and to have one's film selected for screening in the program is a great honor. Every year there are a few pieces which are talked about well after the conference is over. Last year, one of those films was Digital Smoke, a simple yet hyper-realistic CG visualization of rising smoke, created by John R. Anderson at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Asked what this year's "smoke" will be, Hardtke cited films which break new ground in the visualization of two elements: natural light, as depicted in Rendering With Natural Light by Paul Debevec (creator of last year's eye-popping FACADE), and Underwater Sunbeams by Henrik Wann Jensen, and sound, as explored in Music for Unprepared Piano by Robin Bargar and Maríenkirche by Tapio Takala.

Firsts for this year are a live Internet demonstration of improvisational animation in The Making of Sid and the Penguins, and Hand-Drawn Spaces, a dual screen motion-capture performance piece choreographed by Merce Cunningham, who will be present with his collaborators to present a special demonstration of the multimedia exhibit/film.