NaturalMotion's Torsten Reil.

Here are several impressions I got during some of the other sessions:

"The amount of time needed to render each final pixel of animation hasn't really changed in over 25 years."

"So, welcome to the Tera Era!"

"Audiences are becoming more sophisticated and are requiring more and more. Even my kids can spot bad CG integration. My eight-year-old son told me: 'Oh, the compositing is awful!'"

"The director's appetite is too big! Data complexity is out of hand. But the movie must get made. The solution must be found."

Andrew Duffy presented the beautiful work of his new House of Curves studio, in which a real duck learned to surf on a "real" surfboard, creating havoc on YouTube. He also showed interesting behind-the-scenes details from the Chemical Brothers' music video Salmon Dance. Already responsible for two James Bond title sequences, Duffy will continue to amaze the public with his innovative visual ideas.

Nostalgia was heavily played during the "Music in Games" forum. Andreas Fuchs from the department of sound design of Filmakademie Baden- Wüerttemberg gave a wonderful sound journey from early Pong (1972) to the sophisticated score of BioShock (2007) by Gary Shyman. Afterward, Pierre Langer, Dynamedion Sounddesign, composer David Christiansen and Andreas Lichtenhahn, lawyer of Medienrechtskanzlei Sasse & Partner, discussed various problems of producing game music. While the producers of videogames nowadays stoically demand music like Gladiator meets The Lord of the Rings, the composers find themselves struggling more with complex legal contracts than with the black and white keys of their pianos. Please note: If you are going to be a music-composer for games, first thing you need is a very good lawyer! The musical taste of game producers tends often to a certain "Dolph Lundgren" attitude: Play it loud and with a heavy beat! As the music industry suffers from a big loss over the past two years and the game industry is growing more and more, many new games are now very attractive for the music industry to launch new songs and artists. On the other hand, professional musicians can also become very creative artists in visual graphics in their spare time. Andy Ypsilon, a member of the famous German band Fantastic Four, created his own sophisticated version of a lichtorgel on a Mac using quartz composer software. He connected his own private animation bits with the quartz applications, simply to let some graphs react to some sound. This was used during the tour of the band in 2007, where the Fantastic Four played in big music halls in front of 15,000 to 20,000 fans. The realtime-generated effects were screened onto seven big screens. Problems of sound latency matched with the acoustic problems of each and every music hall, so in general the fans were very fond of the graphic images shown during each concert.

French animator Michel Ocelot gave an autobiographical sketch of his long career, including Azur and Asmar (above). © Nord-Quest Production.

French animator Michel Ocelot, director of Azur and Asmar and the very successful Kirikou movies, gave an autobiographical sketch of his long career, starting with delicate silhouettes films, working successfully in traditional 2D before making the transition to CG without losing his own artistic approach to the medium of animation. In his opinion, every technique has wonderful opportunities. His future task will be to combine all of them to a greater result.

German producer Michael Coldewey explained his difficulties of producing feature animation in Europe. He described meticulously the horrors of national support, tax incentives, different languages and mentalities, small European budgets and artistic integrity. His company Trixter successfully co-produced the acclaimed French-German-Luxemburgian CG feature film Dragon Hunters. At the moment, Coldewey is producing the highly anticipated live action/CG feature film Hexe Lili for the German audience.

The game producers of the German region of Baden Wüerttemberg met with the representatives of the regional state to discuss the non-existing state funding for game developing. Many hard feelings were exchanged during this panel because of the high level bureaucracy in German funding systems. "If the Germany state had given enough financial support for the development of the national games industry, the German game producers would be number one in the world instead of Korea," said John Lee, representative of the Korea Game Industry Agency after having heard about all the financial problems.

Jeff Barnes, co-founder of The ComputerCafe Group and newly elected chairman of the Visual Effects Society, which had its first alliance with fmx, prepared a magical tour beyond Hollywood. He presented the global effect on producing visual effects and animation with the help of German magician Ralf Gagel. Barnes gave an excellent overview about various tax incentives from countries like Singapore or New Zealand. Also low labor costs make countries like India, China, Russia or Mexico more attractive to Hollywood producers as countries with a great exchange rate toward the American dollar. And most of all the community has to face certain facts: "A whole lot of us can do it now!" insisted Barnes, who did some extended research for this presentation. He said that 1,682 vfx companies exist around the globe, and only 464 of them are in the U.S. The industry has to handle shrinking margins, reduced timeframes by higher expectations of the client. He asked several studio executives about their opinion working with studios outside the U.S. There were of course some interesting pros and cons. In summary: everyone accepts that animation and vfx are now a global business. A presence, a front end of the studio in L.A. is very convenient, you need to have trust in the studio, there has to be experience, because it is all about talent! As the big houses handle all of their various effects, small studios have to specialize. For example, Germany's Scanline concentrates on particle water effects. And you have to work out how to handle different time zones. Each project has special demands, you need the right tool for the right job. Like the casting of the right actor, you have to try to cast the right studio. Again, for example, Sony bought an existing facility in Chennai India now called Imageworks India and experienced quite a lot of trouble. Rhythm & Hues built up a facility in India from scratch. This worked out very well.