The Incredibles was a buzz film at the fest.

Feinberg nicely illustrated Pixar’s steep learning curve when it came to doing The Incredibles with the salient fact that the company had only ever done cloth once before, Boo’s t-shirt in Monsters, Inc, and now it was faced by a whole cast wearing the stuff. So they tackled that, they tackled hair (“A physics project surrounding the head”) and they tackled people, and sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong.

Right was the subsurface scattering routine they wrote to get human skin looking good. They found out that they were going to have to turn it off at certain points on a body, otherwise Elastigirl’s elongated limbs were going to glow rather strangely. So, they then hit upon the bright idea of turning it off under the character’s clothes, thus saving render time. Bonus. Wrong was spawning all the background characters from one model, Universal Man. Not only did Universal Woman never quite establish her own identity as a result, but also as Universal Man was carrying around all the fixes for all his spawned progeny, Pixar found it could only render 10 of them at a time.

Elsewhere, Jim Radford, head of creative CG at The Moving Picture Co. (MPC), detailed how the company transformed the faces of actors into exact replicas of WWII leaders for Tiger Aspect’s Virtual History — The Secret Plot to Kill Hitler (good tracking, having people that looked mostly there already and using filming techniques of the time seemed to be the keys). In its recreation of 1940s footage and blurring of the boundaries between history and drama, it was a highly controversial project — expect to see more work like it soon. And Cinesite visual effects supervisor Matt Johnson, who’d spent much of the previous year laboring away on Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur, happily quoted from a Variety review that stated it was `great to see a summer blockbuster with no visual effects.’ Considering that one scene, the ice battle, was essentially 275 vfx shots cut back to back, Johnson thoroughly deserved to look pleased.

The busiest session of the two days, though, and one that illustrates the preponderance of students in the audience, was the Showreel Surgery run by Shelley Page, the European rep of DreamWorks Animation and one of the top talent scouts in the industry. DreamWorks gets an estimated 300 reels a week, so when Page pleads for animators to keep them short (three minutes max) you can understand where she’s coming from. Other advice included: make it visually exciting, avoid repetition, clearly indicate what you did, list software used, include contact details (you’d be amazed how many people forget that little detail apparently) and always check studio Websites for any submission requirements. And if you’re determined to try getting into character animation, whatever you do, no robots or sliding feet.

“What we really like to see are problem-solvers,” she said. “People who have taken off the shelf software and wrangled it and tortured it to make it do what they want it to.”

EA’s Easley then chimed in with guidance for the games side of the industry. “Show me a walk, show me a run, show me a jump,” he said. “Hit it, then quit it.”

Good advice.

Andy Stout is a U.K.-based freelance journalist, who previously worked in Quantel’s marcomms department. Before that he spent a decade writing about 3D and vfx for numerous U.K. magazines.