All photos courtesy of SIGGRAPH. © SIGGRAPH.

The SIGGRAPH 2003 Electronic Theater presentation started with highlights of the Computer Animation Festival from 10 years ago. After showing selections from the 1993 Festival, a card appeared: “Things Have Changed, Right?!” followed by the card: “Right?!” By including both a question mark and an exclamation mark, the festival team wisely left it up to the audience to decide how far the industry has come since 1993 and where it might go over the next 10 years.

According to festival chair Darin Grant (Digital Domain), the festival “serves as a mirror of what is possible today and a window into what can be achieved in the future.” This translated into 77 selections drawn from 635 submissions. We could do an entire article on festival stats alone (big studios vs. small studios, small teams vs. large teams and so on). For the purpose of this article, however, let’s just note two items. First, more than half of the selections came from teams based outside the U.S. Second, student teams affiliated with multi-location digital media schools accounted for about one-quarter of the selections.

Traffik, Show & Tell and Cane Toads were all driven by engaging characters. Traffik © David Bokser. Show & Tell © Kapow Pictures. Cane Toads © Andrew Silke.

In addition to paying respects to the larger U.S. effects studios the festival also celebrated the capabilities of smaller studios, independents (entertainment, educational and scientific) and student teams. The festival exhibited this wide-ranging digital content (full works or excerpts) in two venues — the larger offsite Electronic Theater and the smaller onsite Animation Theater. The distinction between the two venues is a subtle one. Per SIGGRAPH:

“All [Computer Animation Festival] submissions are juried together and based on identical selection criteria: content, technical implementation, innovation, artistic achievement, production values, creativity, originality, narrative, design, entertainment value and advancement of visualization in the artistic and scientific fields of digital technologies. Entries representing both technical excellence and innovation are more likely to be shown in the Electronic Theater, while entries representing either technical excellence or innovation will be shown in the Animation Theaters.”

Themes Like Old Times
Common themes ran through the festival. For example, nearly every selection (including top-notch scientific visualization work) included a strong narrative element. Plucky characters battling adversity (for example: Scrat in the crowd-pleaser Gone Nutty) provided another common thread. Other selections (Traffik, Show & Tell and Cane Toads among them) combined engaging characters and creative storytelling with a “gross out” factor, complete with blood and gore. These are not your parents’ animated shorts.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some themes resonating through this year’s festival:

• Deconstruction – using digital tools to examine pre-digital media
• Eyes – attention to the look and movement of the eyes of digital characters
• Water – emphasis on digital water and fluid dynamics
• Schools – strong presence by digital media schools
• Shorts – why you should create a short-format project

But before we move to these themes, let’s take a quick look at the technical developments presented in the festival…