Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

Terrence Masson has the eye. He really needs it for what he does. Terrence chairs the SIGGRAPH 2006 Computer Animation Festival (CAF), which screens in Boston Aug. 1-3. He’s also head of Digital Fauxtography Inc., a consulting company. Impressively, his book CG 101 is five stars at Amazon. After years of production experience, he can spot those difficult to explain qualities of animation and vfx that scream excellence. Terrence (not Terry) joined ILM way back in 1991 to work on Hook, when a few of you were still in diapers. Clever at problem solving, especially in the complex world of vfx, Terrence became a freelance consultant. Over the past 17 years, he’s worked on 20 major films and consulted with virtually all the big vfx studios. He even came up with the original CG paper cut-out animation style used on South Park. Amazingly, he’s not all that old.

I asked Terrence about the selection process and was impressed by the way he went about it. Being a bit of a hard-ass myself about animation, I was glad to hear that he took a no compromise position both in setting standards and in selecting his panel of jurists. I believe any competition at this level is not a place for kind judges, but rather for tough wizards.

“It all started about 18 months ago when I accepted the offer to be the SIGGRAPH CAF chair. I knew I had to first:

a) decide what kind of show I wanted to shape and

b) who would I choose to serve on the jury?

“Excellence and humor, I think, were the first two things that I wanted to drive towards; and I wanted to choose jurors with similar sensibilities.”

I’m thinking, bravo. Some might think he was stacking the deck in one direction, but by similar sensibilities, he’s not implying the same point of view, but similar notions about excellence and professionalism.

And it gets better:

“About the jury… experience was where I started; I considered people who’ve been deep in production for a long time. I wanted people who’ve seen it all, having dwelt at the very highest levels of quality so long that our standards would be positively stratospheric.

“I also wanted a good broad cross section of people with a wide range of experiences, including:

• Glenn Robbins from Newtonic (broadcast design)

• Larry Cuba from Iota Center (abstract art)

• Bill Polson from Pixar (short animated films)

• Jody Jenkinson from U of Toronto (scientific visualization)

• Thomas Haegele, fmx chair from Filmakademie (European student films)

• Moto Sakakibara from Sprite Animation Studios (Japanese feature film)

• Ed Kramer from ILM (visual effects)

• Dan Krech: founder of DKP (“everything”)

I’d also like to make special mention of Paul Debevec, next year’s chair, whose legendary expertise was invaluable. He sat in as an alternate jurist. We solicited input from others as well.

Personality was very important to me in the jurors because, while I intended to push boundaries and drive hard, I would also be insistent on everyone having fun! I expected each juror to reach out aggressively in their areas of specialty, to seek exciting new animations… to boldly go where no juror had gone before!

“I removed the ‘student’ category from the jury notes so that all work would be judged equally. Another huge ‘first’ was that we allowed electronic submissions this year, which allowed me to personally review all 726 final entries… from 40 different countries. That’s never been possible for a CAF chair before.

“My production team was put together on the ‘strong lead’ production model. So I selected a powerful team of leads: Ryan Kuba as my production lead, with Klaus Steden as tech lead, and Brian Reid as post lead. Each being highly experienced recruited their own assistants from within Technicolor Creative Services, where the jury and post were being hosted. Dana Boadway is our assistant producer and Sam Black (last year’s CAF chair) is our database coordinator. Additional support volunteers were recruited from the larger Toronto community. Together, we became an amazing production dream team.

“In the end, there were many dozens of other key people involved in all aspects of the process, which involved so much more then the all-important jury weekend in March. I personally had a pre-show to design, publications to edit, equipment choices to make and donations to beg for. All of that required a lot of volunteer help. And then I had media trailers to direct, on-site scheduling and design to coordinate, plus at least a hundred other little things to stay on top of. It was a truly massive undertaking by a large team that consistently went above and beyond the call of duty. I can’t thank them enough. Keep in mind this was an all volunteer affair, only the assistant producer had a paid position…

“At the end of the day, it’s content that counts and we put together a stunning collection by any standards. My direction to the jury was for absolutely no compromise, and as a result if we ended up with only a short 20 minute festival, then so be it — it would be an inspiring 20 minutes. Thankfully, we came up with a lot more then that!”