Hand Drawn Spaces choreographed by Merce Cunningham. Image courtesy of SIGGRAPH.

CGI Categorized
Interested in what light transport in a non-homogeneous medium with isotropic reflection looks like? The festival includes several scientific, mathematics and visualization animations like the described The Cornell Box - Up in Smoke. Others include Chaco: A Sacred Center, a visualization of ancient dwellings in New Mexico and the self-explanatory titles News From Hubble Space Telescope and Southeastern United States Fly-By. Motion-capture demonstrations include Space time Swing by Autodesk, made with a new technique for retargeting motion data to characters of different sizes, and Advancing Captured Motion by LambSoft, made with a technology which applies motion capture data to a character's proportions and structures that are different from the performer's.

News From Hubble Space Telescope. Image courtesy of SIGGRAPH.

Other types of animation in the festival include visual effects sequences from movies such as Deep Impact, The Truman Show, Event Horizon, Flubber, George of the Jungle, Mouse Hunt, Quest for Camelot, Small Soldiers and Starship Troopers; location-based entertainment films such as Race For Atlantis, an IMAX 3-D film by Rhythm & Hues, and Wild River by Sega Enterprises; television commercials by Rhythm & Hues, Medialab, Glassworks and Buf Compagnie and game animation sequences such as Grim Fandango by LucasArts Entertainment.

Jakata by Jeff Baker. Image courtesy of SIGGRAPH.

Animation shorts featured in the festival include the latest Oscar winner Geri's Game, produced at Pixar; The Physics of Cartoons , a character animation by Steph Greenberg; Ellipsoid, a geometric metaphor for the busy lifestyle of Tokyo; Pings, a pilot for a future series by Exmachina, Zaijan, Nobuto Ochiai's pilot for a CG feature, The Sitter, Liang-Yuan Wang's examination of the ironic relationship between humans and technology, and 1001 Nights, a musical film with computer animation by Noriaki Kaneko and Tim Miller of Blur Studio, which was featured in last month's Dig This...

Student films include Jakata by Ringling student Jeff Baker, which recently won the gold student Academy Award. A selection of student and graduate research projects created at MIT, New York University, University of Washington, and other schools are also included.

The Computer Animation Festival will end with the anticipated premiere of Bingo, the first animation short fully produced with Alias/Wavefront's new, next-generation animation software, Maya. Directed by Academy Award nominee Chris Landreth (his 1995 film, The End was also created at Alias), Bingo is based on a neo-futurist play called, "Disregard This Play."