Do It Now!
Sam Chen, whose Eternal Gaze won the festival’s Best Animated Short designation, evangelized digital short-format projects. Even small (in Chen’s case, two-person) teams can come up with a winner. According to Chen, doing a short film can be an effective way for artists to teach themselves what they need to know. It’s about far more than getting a gig. He called the three-year creation process for Eternal Gaze a personal “re-appreciation of the fundamentals of space and form.” As Chen exhorted in a “Meet the Artist” session: "The tools are here. Don't wait for the next version of your modeling or animation tool or for the latest renderer. Focus on the art. Do it now!"

Eternal Gaze took home top prizes for animation. © Sam Chen.

What’s Next?
So, what are we going to see in festivals in the near future? Expect to see more photorealistic skin and movement for human characters from smaller shops, independents and students. Expect to see the technologies and methods currently used by the big studios trickle through the rest of the industry. Expect to see more perspectives from international contributors and digital media schools. But also expect to see the unexpected, where upstarts supplant long-time players, where engaging storytelling, unforgettable characters and raw creativity examine the light and dark aspects of life in the 21st century.

This year’s Computer Animation Festival showed a strong connection to what we saw in SIGGRAPH’s Exhibition Hall and Emerging Technologies showcases. Enabling, time-saving technologies such as programmable graphics cards, 3D displays, haptics, fluid simulation software and improved motion capture will help digital artists tell stories. As the cost of these enabling technologies drop, more and more tools will be more available to more people, including students, independents and smaller studios. These tools will allow more digital content creators to spend more time between conception and delivery improving the baby.

Realtime Motion Capture for Interactive Entertainment. © Sony Computer Entertainment America.

The intriguing Emerging Technologies presentations herald a world in which interactive virtual reality systems will play a major role. These technologies will challenge digital storytellers to develop expertise creating interactive experiences. Perhaps in the next 10 years festival attendees will be cheering interactive selections in virtual reality theaters.

So maybe the most important question raised by the festival is not whether times have changed over the last 10 years but, “What are YOU going to do to move the industry forward the NEXT 10 years?”

Rest assured, the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival will be there to document the best of the best and present it to the world.

Freelance visual effects producer Rick Baumgartner was recently nominated for a 2003 Primetime Emmy Award for his work on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: rick@vfxproducer.com.