Pfffirate was nominated for Best Student Film. Courtesy of Supinfocom Valenciennes and Imagina.

Imagina traditionally presents great panels and conferences that attract a crowd, like this one on The Matrix Revolutions. © 2001-2003 Monaco Mediax. 98000 Monaco. All rights reserved.

Pixar’s Victor Navone (seen here with his creation from Alien Song) talked about the animation technique in Finding Nemo. Photo credit: Sofia Saile.

As usual, the work from the European schools was really fantastic in both quality and ambition. Johannes Weiland’s Annie and Boo is quite extraordinary for a student film; 12 minutes long with many impressive dialogue scenes, sophisticated camerawork, effects and soundtrack. It is an unusual love story between a teenage girl and a fantastic creature, and I predict it will win prizes wherever it is shown this year.

Supinfocom can always be counted on to produce stunning graduation films and my favorite this year was Pfffirate — a comedy about an inflatable pirate, which was also nominated in the student film category.

Panels and Presentations The Grimaldi Forum, current home of Imagina, is a stunning light-filled structure with views over the Mediterranean from the upper levels and comfortable, well-equipped screening rooms. Walking along the seafront to the venue each morning was a great start to the day.

The greatest strength of Imagina has always been the high quality of the packed program, which this year included conferences on 3D animation and visual effects, games, on-line content, general interest sessions on virtual characters and AI and several special events.

As usual, I found myself torn between interesting-sounding presentations on several occasions.

I was very impressed by Paul Debevec’s keynote presentation on “Image-Based Lighting and Rendering,” which he previously gave at SIGGRAPH last year. As a longtime fan of his beautiful experimental short film Fiat Lux, I finally was able to fully appreciate the science behind the wonderful images. As a non-technical artist type, my critical appreciation of his elegant presentation was mainly of the “Wow — that’s amazing!” variety, but the more scientifically inclined folks around me were also visibly impressed.

George Borshukov, vfx technology supervisor at ESC Ent., was a keynote speaker on “Universal Capture and Facial Reconstruction in Matrix Reloaded /Revolutions,” and his examples of realistic facial rendering and performance capture — especially of Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith — were memorable. The degree of detail achieved was remarkable — and really bizarre in places. To see a texture map of the actor’s head with the features not static but animating was very disturbing!

In addition to the main program, two special events dominated the opening day: a packed evening session presenting more behind the scenes work from The Matrix Revolutions, with vfx John DesJardin from EON and Craig Hayes from Tippet Studio, which was followed by a world premiere screening of the much-anticipated Blueberry, complete with the stars of the film in attendance and the presence of H.S.H. Crown Prince Albert of Monaco, the president of Imagina.