The fifth Virtuality Conference comes at the right time; Digital technology and vfx in Italy has been growing. All images © Comitato Organizzatore Virtuality.

There was a time when the Italian city Torino, chief town of the Piemonte region, was the place where the Italian movie industry docked for the first time in the old country, long time before arriving in Rome in 1937, when dux Benito Mussolini founded Cinecittà studios. In fact, FERT Studios of Torino boasted a glorious history that began as far back as 1919, and they were considered for a long time the most active and equipped studio of our peninsula until 1955.

From that time the city has always claimed its role in the national motion picture industry, and political organizations always paid great attention to the evolution of the visual arts such as the technology surrounding the movie industry.

So with such a prestigious background, it’s really not surprising that Torino has become a new center for audio-visual production and digital technology, which began with the birth of Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park (VRMMP), romantically situated inside the historic FERT studios area. With a great structure spread across 8,000 square meters, VRMMP is the biggest investment operated from local political authorities, the Italian government and the European community, at a cost of around 40 thousands Euros. The center is divided into several departments; and the production area is comprised of four large soundstages, two of them equipped with green- and bluescreen for ORAD Cyberset. Another one that’s 200-square meters, hosts 18 infrared cameras of the Vicon 8i motion capture system, while the last one is dedicated to underwater shooting, featuring a swimming pool with a “shooting porthole” for complex scenes.

Virtuality 2004 is comprised of three days of rich and very interesting presentations. Italian and foreign professionals talk about technology and techniques used to accomplish stunning and innovative visual effects sequences.

From a technological point of view, the structure, which is managed by the Italian visual effects company, Lumiq, encompasses several digital rooms and editing workstations with products such as Avid, smoke, Edit and Final Cut Pro, and compositing solutions such as inferno, flame, shake and combustion.

Meanwhile, the 3D department owns 75 workstations with Maya and Softimage, and the cutting edge solution of the entire system comprises 500 node render farms with licenses from mental ray as the rendering engine.

“Italy is not a big technology producer, even if we use it a lot in all fields,” explained Gianfranco Balbo, ceo of VRMMP. “Instead we are great content creators. So the main strategy is to have the Park as a meeting point between digital technology innovation and content; that’s why the city of Torino must re-acquire the abilities to work on them, studying methods and tools to represent [this] content with a new and advanced feel, and to become also widely competitive.”

Activities of the new center are particularly appropriate to digital cinema, TV, commercials, virtual set design, visual effects, videogames, as well as such developing technology as simulation for industrial and urban fields. The project target is to create a “big main team” for research and development, but, at the same time, give birth to a center of prototypes and ideas, something like an advanced “creative container,” according to Balbo.