After a full day of fascinating panels, VES festival goers were treated to an opening night party, complete with a big jazz band. Photo credit: Sarah Baisley.

For its 2006 Festival of Visual Effects, the Visual Effects Society moved its yearly event to Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater. This year’s expanded festival included special screenings and exhibit booths set up in front of the venue, giving attendees additional things to fill their time between the various panels.

In “Virtual vs. Real Sets: Combining Production Design With Visual Effects,” production designers discussed the digital impact today and how it has broadened the collaboration between directors, cinematographers, production designers and vfx supervisors.

Alex McDowell, who is at the forefront of previs and the non-linear, digital workflow, marveled at how visual tools since 2000 have become financially accessible. They represent the full arc of 3D space. It’s a much more visceral experience for the production designer who has worked with David Fincher (Fight Club), Steven Spielberg (Minority Report, The Terminal) and Tim Burton (The Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). “You get to inhabit space that hasn’t been built yet and fix things far in advance of production.”

Jim Bissell described how the upcoming 300, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the 480 B. C. Battle of Thermopylae, goes even further than Sin City. Seventy percent consists of painted backdrops shot in industrial space. They were able to save money by manipulating images: creating abstract terrains and armies of 3,000 Greeks. They took the DI and crushed it to desaturate the look to resemble the graphic style. They also painted shadows into the sets to instill an operatic quality.

Jack De Govia discussed how a low budget crime drama such as the upcoming Anamorph (supervised by Richard Edlund) benefits from higher level digital work, keeping him on target. Meanwhile, John Myhre, who worked on Memoirs of a Geisha, was able to add all kinds of visual elements because of the digital tools available.

The VES’ first international panel, “VFX Without Borders,” moderated by vfx supervisor Van Ling, featured Tarun R. Agarwal, joint managing director/vfx director, Rajtaru Studios, Mumbai & Dubai, India; Kristijan Danilovski, founder/vfx supervisor, FX3X, Skopje, Macedonia; Franck Malmin, td and vfx supervisor from Def2Shoot in France; Carlos Iturriaga, vfx supervisor, Ollin Studio, Mexico City, Mexico; and Lifeng Wang, founder/president, Eastar, Xing-Xing Studios, Beijing, China.

They each discussed their specialties, local vfx communities and how they are trying to grow their business, emphasizing that expanding the global community is in the interest of all vfx artists.

In the “Virtual vs. Real Sets: Combining Production Design With Visual Effects” panel, Alex McDowell, at the forefront of previs and the non-linear, digital workflow, noted how visual tools have become financially accessible.

Iturriaga said Ollin Studio has expanded from Mexico City to Los Angeles with the opening of a new office as a result of ads and feature work with Warner Bros. Ollin specializes in vfx, previs, concept design and DI. The studio uses Maya RenderMan, Flame, Inferno and Shake. Iturriaga showed a commercial reel, including a Corona beer commercial described as “Lord of the Rings meets Mariachi.” Interestingly, he suggested that Mexico is actually losing digital artists to the U.S.

In terms of Macedonia, Danilovski said FX3X handles vfx, roto, paint, 3D tracking, compositing, CG animation and MoCap. The work entails commercials, invisible vfx and pipeline sharing with other studios.

Def2Shoot looks at the U.K./U.S. model in specializing in CG, mattes, animation (for music videos) and other work. They exchange techniques and artists with partners and they use game industry techniques for animation and rigging. They use Autodesk and IBM and work with students from Gobelins.

In discussing the state of vfx at Rajtaru Studios and throughout India at large, Agarwal confirmed that language is still a barrier that prevents Western studios from hiring them, but that they offer a pool of software developers and are producing better quality 3D work. In particular, Rajtaru Studios offers modeling, lighting, texture maps and greenscreen.

At Eastar in Beijing, the industry is small for vfx but there’s a lot of TV work. Plus the studio recently did 16 shots for Fantastic Four comprised of onscreen graphics and did The Long March documentary for The History Channel involving classical painting style for landscapes.

“Looking Ahead at the Future of Visual Effects Tools,” moderated by Darin Grant, who heads production and technologies at DreamWorks, focused on GPU and realtime rendering, new tools for post control, opening up platforms, remote graphics software and the “virtual director.”