The Hulk was part of an ILM highlight showcase. © 2003 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

What’s Working Now
The festival selection “Industrial Light & Magic R&D” incorporated sequences from The Hulk, Terminator 3 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and showed advances in creature skin and muscles, skin rendering, motion capture, rigid and deformable dynamics, image-based modeling, digital doubles, fluid and smoke simulation, 3D compositing and cloth simulation. Framestore CFC’s Harry Potter selection featured its work on the basilisk creature as well as some effective work on digital feathers. Clips from The Matrix Reloaded explored ESC and EON’s “virtual cinematography” approach and its stunning results. Clips from Daredevil featured Rhythm & Hues’ work in volumetric effects, notably with the rapidly changing density fields developed for the movie’s Shadow World sequences. Digital Domain’s tour-de-force work on Adidas’ Mechanical Legs used HDRI, high-resolution textures and motion capture to stunning effect. Finally, NVIDIA’s Dawn showed the potential of graphics hardware with programmable shading and vertex processing – especially in terms of photorealistic skin and hair.

Deconstruction Zone
Several festival selections took apart, explored, and restructured pre-digital media forms. Even the festival’s teapot blueprint title sequences sported a retro “old film” look.

Ode to Summer shows the changing aesthetics of CG. © Global Digital Creations Holdings Ltd.

Selections (and the media they deconstructed) included: Ode To Summer (scroll painting), Un Amour Mobile (mobiles, 2D graphics), Puppet Show (marionette theater), Eternal Gaze (sculpture), On The Sunny Side of the Street and Tim Tom (silent black-and-white comedic short films), The Dog Who was a Cat Inside (collage & sketch), Bjork’s Nature is Ancient (Oxford Scientific-style educational films) and Empire Of The Eye: Andrea Pozzo (Renaissance architecture).

Supinfocom’s Tim Tom, winner of the Jury Honors Award, best represents this theme. Its creators wove a moving story of friendship into a loving yet unsentimental examination of pre-digital media forms — sketchpads, flipbooks, kinetoscopes, film frames, theater, sculpture, stop motion, animation, and (yes) audio tracks. Eternal Gaze, judged Best Animated Short, took a more somber, respectful tone as it brought to life the gaunt and haunting work of the late sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Both Tim Tom and Eternal Gaze exhibited in grayscale, paying homage to film as it looked in the first half of the previous century – and to film’s role as incubator for animation, visual effects and scientific visualization.

These works suggest that digital content creators will continue to explore non-digital media forms using digital tools. Of course, it’s great news for those of us who have always wanted to see what or whom Mona Lisa might have been smiling at. But it’s also a spur to the industry to envision and create the methods and technologies that will help future practitioners deconstruct and reassemble today’s “state-of-the-art.”

The Eyes Have It
If the eyes are the gateway to the soul, the industry is getting closer to the gate, if not closer to the soul. Bringing up the term “photoreal” among practitioners can generate more verbal smoke and heat than asking, “Who’s better — Kirk or Picard?” at a Star Trek convention. Indeed, many attendees expressed the view that convincing digital doubles (much less all-digital human characters) still have a long way to go. Smaller studios, independents and students are even further behind the majors.