Prasso offered some very nice tips, talked about the meaning of character setup as well as the importance of the pipeline and how work at PDI is approached. Then he stunned the audience with how he rigged the Puss-in-Boots character from Shrek 2.

Definitely rich and highly appreciated was the enormous presence of Italian visual effects companies. Virtuality 2004 dedicated the entire last day of the conference, Oct. 27, to seven visual effects supervisors that were invited to share the experiences of their companies: Burning Brain, Digitrace, Direct2Brain, Lanterna Magica, Lumiq Studios, Proxima and Sirenae Film Post. And while Hollywood is currently fascinated with cloning real actors and recreating them in the digital realm, the Italians’ great wish is to merely enhance the storytelling.

“Our digital work supports the story,” commented Guido Pappadà, of Sirenae Film Post, “and the work we do aim is to better the lighting conditions of a scene, enriching an environment or a scenery, doubling actors to enhance crowds, etc. We call it `invisible effects’ because you can’t notice it in the movie. For most American productions, visual effects are the movie, which means that pyrotechnics and giant digital works make the story. Digital post-production techniques are very much used also in our country, but I think it’s important to use this stuff to explore artistic abilities and consider it like a creative tool. The `piano dancing’ scene in the movie The Legend of 1900 directed by Giuseppe Tornatore includes some great shots done by Sirenae.”

Virtuality became a very good sharing experience between different cinematographic cultures.

“At last we manage to convince directors and especially cinematographers that our work doesn’t damage their stories but improves them,” added Paolo Zeccara, visual effects supervisor of Proxima. “Today we work with several Italian movie producers, and started also to differentiate ourselves to push services in other fields. We often work on Italian comedies, which provides a good place to start with… And we’re trying to convince Italian cinema artisans that we can work on their movies, preserving image quality while at the same time adding good effects and visual feeling. Obviously, in our country, we work on very few digital productions if you’re comparing with foreign motion picture industries, but this reflects the great care on detail that we give, typically of our cinematography, and that’s why sometimes a very particular and careful work is required even on very short and simple sequences.” Zeccara stated that Proxima is also promoting the use of digital intermediate techniques, which is a process that today offers great results for movie image manipulation and is slowly becoming a staple in Italy.

Lumiq Studios, which operates in Torino, presented a preview of its first animated feature titled Donkey Xote, co-produced by Spanish Filmax Animation. Intended for a Christmas 2006 release, it will show great advantages in terms of Italy’s technological evolution. “Filmax trusted our skills and gave us a great role in this important project on which there are big expectations,” commented Carlo Alfano, animation supervisor, and Oscar Tornincasa, compositing supervisor. “Our tasks will cover 40% of the entire animation, 50% of visual effects and 100% of rendering and final compositing; that’s why we are constantly looking for new professionals like modelers, animators etc.”

David Gallo and Gianni Ceccano of Direct2brain work so much on TV commercials and music videos that they are attempting to promote the first teaching department of digital cinema inside the famous Italian “National School of Cinema,” which is the most renown movie temple of our country, a place where several important figures of Italian cinema began such as Michelangelo Antonioni and producer Dino De Laurentiis, and where lots of others taught, such as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and Lina Wertmuller. Probably these courses will be launched in 2006, but they are still in the process of defining the teaching team and acquiring equipment.

Michele Buri talked about Lanterna Magica, a little company particularly focused on animated features, which started working on new kinds of projects after their split from Medusa Prods. “Unfortunately our last works, like the ones made from other similar companies, did not obtain great success; it means that there is a big crisis for this kind of business in Italy. We think that, taking technology apart, the success of a movie relies especially on a good story. The technology medium is important too, 3D or 2D or anything you want to use, but it is fundamental to have an author writing plots for stories. Today 3D animation and digital technology can become a real producing standard as traditional arts did during past centuries, and it means that today we can use those new techniques not only to devise, but also to actually create images.”