Worlds collide at fmx. Here vfx wizard Josh Kolden (left) from Crack Creative relaxes with Disney animator Kevin Geiger at a dinner sponsored by Autodesk, a major supporter of fmx.

Then there was a plethora of one-hour presentations going on simultaneously:

Keynote: A Unique Perspective on 25 Years of Animation
Richard Chuang, PDI/DreamWorks

Keynote: How Does Production Technology Influence Creativity and Content?
David Sproxton, Aardman Animations

Keynote: The Globalization of Visual Effects — Pre and Post Titanic.
Eric Roth, Visual Effects Society

Previz for Day After Tomorrow
With Joshua Kolden, Crack Creative

Chicken Little— Artistic and Technical Aspects of a Very Squash-and- Stretch Style Animation in 3D
Arthur Shek and Kevin Geiger, Walt Disney Feature Animation

Organic Effects Animation
With Joseph Gilland, Vancouver Film School.

Digital Intermediate Workflows
With Bernd Schulze, PICTORION Das Werk

Research & Development on Hydro-Fluid-Dynamics FX
Stephan Trojansky and Danielle Plantec, Scanline Production

NVIDIA One Scoop or Two? Gelato
With GPU Gems contributor, Daniel E. Wexler, NVIDIA

Autodesk Media & Ent. High End Finishing with Discreet smoke v7
With Robert Coulin, Dreamwalks Solutions for Moving Pictures GmbH

Mobile Entertainment: Writing for Interactive Content
With Matt Costello, who teaches in the rhetoric and writing studies department at San Diego State University

Film Rendering on GPUs
With Daniel E. Wexler, NVIDIA

New Insights on How to Make a Killer Demo Reel ...
With yours truly and daughter Danielle Plantec (digital effects artist on The Matrix sequels, visual effects contributor to The Day After Tomorrow and currently a 3D supervisor at Scanline)

Mobile Entertainment: Hand-held Games und Movies
With Mathias Huttmann, T-Mobile International

You could find everything from new rendering strategies, to how they make spectacular vfx movies, to character animation spectaculars. I particularly liked the life drawing seminar… er… ah… strictly professional, of course.

A Scary Development
One strong theme running both through the conference presentations and my private conversations was the growing outsourcing problem. As third world companies become more technically skilled and polish their talent, they are becoming a threat to our vfx lifestyles in the West. This trend will impact each of us. When talented people in Asia can produce excellent work and are paid only a few dollars a day, their facilities can afford the most advanced computer equipment and software, and even more threatening: the best teleconferencing equipment.

At the moment Hollywood, in general, isn’t hot about taking on the risk of sending vfx work halfway across the world for processing, but I predict that will change. As film execs get more comfortable with high quality, glitch-less teleconferencing, the cost reduction will become compelling. There are already low budget companies in Hollywood setting up shop in underdeveloped countries. Take NuImage. Scott Coulter, vfx producer for NuImage, found himself in Bulgaria back in ‘91 supervising vfx for one of their low budget horror films. A few months later he was back in Sophia to start up a vfx company to service their needs cheaply. In 2001 he founded Worldwide FX in Sophia, which is now one of the largest and busiest vfx studios in Europe.

Prague is another hot bed of cheap, high-level talent and a lot of Hollywood types have moved there… why? Prague is one of the most breathtaking cities in Europe and it’s a ferment of media development. English is spoken there as well.

Alas, a friend in Germany told me that Prague is no longer so “cheap.” It’s been so successful and turns out such high quality work that their prices are soaring. The boom is so intense that Prague real estate is fetching near U.S. prices. Many U.S. pictures are being shot in Eastern Europe to capitalize on reduced production costs and awesome locations. Brian Wade, the award- winning feature film designer, creator of Scooby Doo and Stuart Little, told me he went to Prague with Van Helsing and found it difficult to leave. So he stayed and now works from there while also teaching at a local college.