Virtuality organizer and art director Fabrizio Funtò (left) visits with special guest Syd Mead.

Hence, the fifth Virtuality Conference provided a way of achieving these goals through the support of digital visual effects. Virtuality is one of the very few and rare events of its kind in Europe. Indeed, Virtuality 2004 couldn’t have come at a better time, considering the popularity of digital technology in Italy and the growth of visual effects as a thriving industry.

Virtuality is organized by art director Fabrizio Funtò, and took place in the last week of October in the main Congress Palace of Torino. It is comprised of three days of rich and very interesting presentations simultaneous with the technical-scientific convention of MIMOS, the Italian Movement of Modeling and Simulation.

With regard to visual effects, there were meetings with Italian and foreign professionals, each recruited to show what has been done digitally and to talk about technology and techniques used to accomplish stunning and innovative visual effects sequences. Not surprisingly, Virtuality became a very good sharing experience between different cinematographic cultures.

Several foreign professionals visited Virtuality. There was Robert Legato, who won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects on Titanic, and just completed The Aviator, and talked about the ship shooting on the James Cameron-directed mega-blockbuster.

There was also Paul Debevec, one of the renowned experts on techniques for capturing CG objects with natural lighting in a photorealistic way.

Also present were Anthony La Molinara (Spider-Man, Hollow Man, Stuart Little and Toy Story), an Italian who now lives and works in the U.S.; and Digital Domain ceo Scott Ross (I, Robot, The Day After Tomorrow), whose company won an Oscar for the vfx on What Dreams May Come.

Additional appearances were turned in by Gino Acevedo (Academy Award for best special make up), who was the person behind the creation of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings; Colin Green from Pixel Liberation Front (The Matrix movies), Pepe Valencia from Charlie’s Angels 2 and Peter Pan; Michael Shantzis (software engineering at Pixar Animation Studios) from Finding Nemo and The Incredibles; and Price Pethel, Academy Award-winner for his color code used in NUKE compositing software.

Great importance was accorded also to Italian operators who occasionally work abroad, such as Alberto Noti (formerly at Rhythm & Hues and now at Sony); Luca Prasso, character technical director co-supervisor at PDI; and Filippo Costanzo, 3D art director at Digital Domain.

Digital Domain ceo Scott Ross gave a wide-ranging talk about vfx techniques, his company’s work for I, Robot and other movies and problems facing the motion picture industry business.

And one of Virtuality’s special guests was Syd Mead, one of the most ingenious conceptual artists and production designers of this era (Blade Runner, Aliens, Mission to Mars and Tron). He projected slides and talked about the way he goes about defining a final design idea, showing sketches techniques and brainstorming phases needed to accomplish one final look. Meanwhile, Ross gave an unprecedented lesson in visual effects techniques, talking about the work done for I, Robot and other movies and tracing a great report concerning the actual motion picture industry business and its problems.

Highly appreciated was the meeting with vfx supervisor Scott Stokdyk and his colleagues Dan Adams and Peter Nofz from Sony Picture Imageworks. They unveiled tricks of the trade and solutions they used to build the amazing CGI city used for Spider-Man 2. Funtò asked them to also show mistakes and shots they did twice, so Scott obliged. From an audience point of view it was a great contribution.