Scott Stokdyk and colleagues from Sony Picture Imageworks unveiled tricks of the trade and solutions they used to build the amazing CGI city used for Spider-Man 2. They even revealed mistakes they had made.

Francesco Mastrofini and Lino Grandi of Digitrace highlighted the distribution problems in our country. “American movies have big distribution power and it means a huge obstacle for our products to be sold, because their movies crush ours. This is a very dangerous aspect and we must investigate the right way to open doors for a better consideration of our works. Today Digitrace works mostly on 3D cartoon and we are working just to conquer an important position in this business, because we think that today our country can reach out to the European panorama with new visual ways and ideas… This is the reason for us to trust in [specifically-targeted] personnel training.”

“My approach is different… because it is focused on the passion for this work and for 3D animation,” proclaimed Daniele Bigliardo of Burning Brain.” In my opinion, CGI/3D must be seen like the last borderline of visual art communication; it allows [personal] expression and suggests an exciting feel. Today we have lots of way to create a CGI animated feature, and those kinds of projects became a little more affordable for everyone, especially in the final stage, because of the promotional value of the Internet.”

Virtuality 2004 was also a good opportunity for a new Italian initiative to be promoted that is becoming widely famous: I’m talking about Miss Digital World (www.missdigitalworld.com), which is a portal entirely dedicated to the first contest of virtual beauties created with the most sophisticated 3D tools and judged by Internet habitué. The contest was created by Franz Cerami and promoted by Monumedia (www.monumedia.it) and Virtuality to find success in the communication world. Besides marking her presence on several thousand Websites and in major international publications (CNN, Reuters etc.), Miss Digital World aroused the curiosity of the biggest worldwide studios, where several “digital babes” offered their charm. The winner of Miss Digital World 2004, Katty Ko, was designed by Flavio Parra from Chile, and recognized as the contemporary icon of virtual beauty by the online jury.

Italian visual effects companies were well represented by their supervisors. They feel their digital work should enhance storytelling.

Funtò, was very enthusiastic about this new initiative: “The canons of beauty belong to a cultural substratum and are influenced by the formation of each singular person… It’s a common memory; it is similar to our language, in the sense that it doesn’t belong to one individual only, but is a shared thing we use to have connections with other people…”

Other initiatives were launched at Virtuality 2004: “Digital Short,” for example, is a festival entirely dedicated to short movies coming from every part of the world, organized in collaboration with Arcipelago Film Festival (www.arcipelagofilmfestival.org).

This year the conference also paid great attention to professional training of digital operators. We listened to Magid Eslami from Vancouver Film School, Laura Fiori from the new Italian animation department of National School of Cinema (SNC-CSC) and Katrin Arndt of the German Film Akademie. They projected some show-reels created by actual students, talked about all the technical steps that each one needed and artistic growth and describing their diverse programs.

“The maximum grade of realism requested for a motion picture’s visual effects differs from the typical abstraction of scientific simulations,” offered Balbo of Virtual Reality and Multimedia Park. “Nevertheless, scientific simulation can derive benefits from realistic representation of visual effects and at the same time vfx can rely on studies operated by research and development, which is a scientific peculiarity.”

For those reasons, several other presentations are always organized by Virtuality, including digital architecture, electronic defense systems, military simulators and virtual reality, proposed by the Italian Army, Italian Navy and Alenia Spazio, with great contributions from MIMOS.

Gianluca Dentici is the vfx supervisor for Videa, located in Rome and Pescara, Italy.