Joshua Beveridge’s Things That Go Bump in the Night (top left), Ming-Yuan Chuan’s Cubic Tragedy (top right) and Damian Hook’s East End Zombies(bottom left) showcase the best in student work. Things That Go Bump in the Night © Joshua Beveridge. Cubic Tragedy © Ming-Yuan Chuan. East End Zombies © Damian Hook © NCCA 2004.

Student animations excelled at humor. Joshua Beveridge, from the acclaimed Ringling School of Art and Design, dispelled the classic childhood fear in Things That Go Bump in the Night with the short’s closing observation: “Special Thanks to My Loving Parents.” Cubic Tragedy, by Ming-Yuan Chuan of National Taiwan University, got the insider laughs with its “Do It Yourself Guide” to character animation, complete with the indispensable undo button and a Pablo Picasso inspired ending. The clever narration of East End Zombies by Damian Hook of NCCA Bournemouth University warned and instructed the viewer on how to deal with zombies while illustrating the techniques through stick-figure animation.

Directing team, Dom and Nic of Framestore CFC, combined live action with a paper cutout businessman in their imaginative spot for Renault, Espace La Vie d’Hector. Matt Samia and Blizzard Ent’s World of WarCraft demonstrated the photorealistic fantasy creations coveted by the gaming industry. Nicolas Salis of Foret Bleue used a stark color palette and soaring camera moves to expose a graphic, Metropolis-like industrial world in an abbreviated version of La Derniere Minute. Overtime by Oury Atlan, Damien Ferrie and Thibaut Berland of Supinfocom Valenciennes used black-and-white 3D animation, lots of Kermit-type frogs and changing musical themes to stage a bizarre requiem to deceased puppeteer, Jim Henson. Helium by Adam Janeczek and Florian Durand of Supinfocom Arles and Dice by Hitoshi Akayama of Kyoto Seika University both achieved a hypnotic effect with the shifting patterns of the animations.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest and brightest international visual effects houses presented show reels that revealed some of the technological magic behind the art. On the super high-end, keynote speaker, George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic revealed the making of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith — from greenscreens through finished shots, disparate elements were transformed into rivers of fire, light sabers and even whole worlds. Wipes and the driven cutting style of editor Greg Hyman, accompanied by a blockbuster soundtrack, brought it all together. And if you ever wondered how baby Sunny in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events caught that spindle in her teeth like a dog or how Tom Cruise survived all those colossal explosions in War of the Worlds, the ILM 2005 reel lifts the veil.

Digital Domain presented high profile director David Fincher’s commercial (and the making of) for Hewlett Packard. In this almost completely CG spot, Constant Change does exactly what the title implies — the camera tracks with a young businessman as he walks through his office. All the while the backgrounds and the man’s clothing seamlessly change. In addition to almost entirely CG fire effects, DD showcased the breathtaking planet surfaces achieved by their groundbreaking Tergen terrain generator as used in the aerial adventure, Stealth. Tergen allowed them to create any background, to light it any way and to make any camera move.