Festival goers were also treated to an opening night party, complete with a big jazz band, as well as a series of showcase screenings running concurrently with the panels on experimental films, animated shorts, new and international shorts and the ACM/SIGGRAPGH presentation of The Story of Computer Graphics featuring CGI pioneers.

Dennis Muren took part in a panel of effects legends that took place the final day of the 2006 VES Fest The panel was in consensus that smooth stop-motion animation was a huge leap forward in movie history.

The final day of the 2006 VES Fest kicked off with a panel of effects legends, talking about the growth of the industry from stop-motion to CG. Moderating the panel was cinematographer and founding member of the VES, Bill Taylor. On hand to share their experiences were: Chiodo Bros. Prods. founder, Stephen Chiodo; Randy Cook, visual effects supervisor on Lord of the Rings and King Kong; Tim Johnson, director of Over the Hedge; T. Dan Hofstedt, animation supervisor on Monster House; and visual effects legend Dennis Muren, whose credits include Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Abyss, Terminator 2 and War of the Worlds.

The panel was in consensus that smooth stop-motion animation was a huge leap forward in movie history. The new technique allowed filmmakers to create more fanciful tales on larger scopes without relying on the limitations of what a man in a suit and make-up could convey. The next huge leap forward in film visual effects came with the advent of computer animation, which allowed for smoother and more realistic animation. However, some of the panelists still hold a love of the pops and shutters of handmade stop motion. Muren said that the imperfections created a sense of awe in the viewer, reminding us that there was an artist creating the movement.

Yet, Cook expressed his love for the move to CG. The biggest benefit he admits was the removal of all “the nasty stuff.” For him, this “nasty stuff” included the amount of time it took to simply make a creation jump from one place to another. Between wires and rigs the time was extensive for a movement that wasn’t expressing any emotion, but was just trying to get the character from point A to point B. Additionally, Cook is excited with freeing qualities of CG technologies, which will allow smaller groups of filmmakers the ability to make their own personal tales.

When looking into the future, the panel agreed that the age of stop motion used as a special effects method in live-action films is over on any large scale. However, with new technology that allows stop motion animators to create movement more easily without the use of hidden wires, the art form has the potential to grow in new directions, giving an avenue for artists to explore more fanciful tales.

Johnson sees the future of computer animation going into two different directions. There will be more of a demand for photoreal animation for live-action films while animated films, no matter whether the production method is CG, stop motion, 2D or even motion capture, will move into more stylized looks.

At the Cars panel, animator Travis Hathaway stated that the focus on the film was on character and story and how director John Lasseter wanted the cars to remain cars. © Disney/Pixar. All rights reserved.

When challenged by an audience member on whether Monster House should be considered an animated film, Hofstedt replied that the film presented a new, exciting area to explore. Johnson defended the motion capture techniques as just another style of creating films no different than live-action, stop motion or 2D. Both Hofstedt and Johnson stressed that one should judge a film on whether the method served the story.

In the end, no matter what style one uses, Johnson probably summed up the feelings of all involved in animation the best when he said, “the drug of animation is seeing a character move.”

As for the next panel, which highlighted Pixar’s work on Cars, the animated characters sure moved — emotionally that is. Like all of the previous Pixar films, animator Travis Hathaway stated that the focus on the film was on character and story.

Hathaway focused on how director John Lasseter wanted the cars to remain cars. Some exaggerated movement was used to enhance performance, but Lasseter really wanted the world and its characters to look real.

This push to more realism made Cars Pixar’s most complex and details film to date. The film was 450 times more complex than Toy Story with the average rendering time per frame at 17 hours.

The Cars panel started off with rendering supervisor Jessica McMackin, giving a detailed presentation of just how complex the production was. Some frames took as much as 600 hours to render with 15% of the shots running out of memory. An average film grade shot for the film was 9G. The 145,000-frame film took three million CPU hours to complete.

The waterfall was the most complex of all the shots. The actually waterfall was composed of four separate components — the falling water, water splashing off the rock walls, water hitting the river below and the mist that was subsequently created. The shot was so detailed that it could of brought down all of the computers at Pixar if the render team was careful.

Two of the chief challenges on the film were the increased use of ray tracing and the increased lighting sources, which not only came from outside sources, but the characters’ headlights. As for Ray tracing, the technique allowed shadowing under the cars and in the crevices to appear more realistic. Shadows on the ground faded as they got further away from the object. However, the biggest increase in rendering time came from radiance, which bleeds the color of an object onto a nearby surface. Ray tracing increases the rendering time because it’s calculating more and more points of impact and reflection of light. With 3,050 rendering processors working on the film, Cars was a constant challenge for the rendering team to keep on the track.

After racing with Cars, VES Festival guests raced, leapt and flew with the visual effects team on TV’s Smallville. Excellent moderator Kymber Lim, exec producer at Entity FX, lead the artists, which included: Mat Beck, president of Entity FX; Ken Horton, exec producer; Eli Jarra, visual effects supervisor; and John Wash, on-set supervisor.

The biggest factor on a show with the amount of effects as Smallville (which included 750 effects shots in season five) is time. Episodes are shot over eight days in Vancouver, followed by two days of second unit work and one day for inserts. Afterward, the director comes to Los Angeles for four days of post, before an episode is handed over to the visual effects team.

Entity FX is part of the production process from script to delivery, which on some occasions has come on the day before the show is set to air. Beck and his crew look over the scripts and advise the production team of the realities of producing what the writers have concocted. Because of the tight time constraints, previs is only used on really complex shots.

A great deal of Entity’s work is done on the season premiere and finale episodes, with the fifth season premiere requiring more than 100 shots. At certain times during the season, Entity can be in various stages of production on up to six episodes.