The interaction of CG and live action was one of the topics that summer blockbusters such as Spider-Man 2 brought up at this year's SIGGRAPH. ™ & © 2004 Marvel Characters Inc. © 2004 Sony Pictures Digital. All rights rese

The SIGGRAPH 2004 Computer Animation Festival presents the best work from the recent past. SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies exhibition shows the shape of things to come. For visual effects practioners, the festival offers exemplary artistic and technical breakthroughs, while the exhibition offers a few technologies that that might play a role in the future creation or experience of visual effects.

The Festival
Ask any attendee, "What's the coolest thing about being at SIGGRAPH?" Chances are the Computer Animation Festival, consisting of the Electronic Theater and the Animation Theater, ranks right up there with free penlights and open bars. Of course, you see much of the work in the festival on the screens downstairs in the Exhibition Hall adding luster to products used in the creation of the work. But it's only in the cool dark rooms of the Electronic and Animation Theaters where you really get a chance to rest your legs and take a break from the sensory onslaught that is SIGGRAPH to see what some of your fellow seekers have been up to over the past year or so.

For SIGGRAPH 2004, the festival jury accepted 83 works out of a record 643 submissions from around the globe. Nearly a third of the submissions were from students, nearly half were from outside the United States.

The shorts presented run the gamut from excerpts of major visual effects sequences from feature films to 2D and 3D animated shorts, television commercials and medical visualizations. Some shorts were vehicles for new production techniques, others served as resumes and calling cards for companies and computer graphics students. In this writer's view, if you are part of the industry you need to see the festival if only to energize yourself by watching the accomplishments of others in your field.

Now Featuring…
This has been an evolutionary year for visual effects in feature films and, as expected, the festival contained several selections from effects-driven blockbusters. With these projects, the industry has achieved new benchmarks in fluid dynamics (The Day After Tomorrow), crowd simulations (The Lord of the Ring: Return of the King), melding CG characters with live-action characters (Spider-Man 2), increasingly detailed skin, hair and cloth (Matrix Revolutions, Shrek 2) and all of the above.

The technical advances of these major studio efforts have been covered extensively in VFXWorld and elsewhere, so let's take a walk through this year's lesser-known offerings to see what lies beyond the blockbuster.

Losing It
If you see nothing else from this year's festival, you must see Ryan, directed by Chris Landreth and produced by National Film Board of Canada. Winning the SIGGRAPH 2004 Jury Award and honors at many other festivals, Ryan is a 3D hand-animated symphony of creativity and color. Based on the short, brilliant career of animation pioneer Ryan Larkin, Ryan asks fundamental questions about art and artists in the modern world. Ryan stuns us with a visceral graphic style creator Landreth calls "psychological realism." Characters take on the appearance of fleeting thoughts or familiar nightmares. Even the minor players in the story seem to have curious histories on par with those of Larkin.