David Crane (l) and Steve Cartwright.

I was off to an early start this morning – the good news being the hearty breakfast I wolfed down when I learned more about Adobe’s new Director 11.5 release. Dr. Allen Patridge of Adobe ran the presentation, and he went over some of the things users can expect from the new Director software. He approached this from three angles: Dominate, Accelerate, and Impress.”

Tom Hanks as Zachry and Halle Berry as Meronym in Cloud Atlas, distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures and in select international territories. Photo by Jay Maidment.

VIEW conference director Maria Elena Gutierrez has announced that senior visual effects supervisor Dan Glass of Method Studios will give a world premiere presentation on the feature film “Cloud Atlas.” Directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, the Warner Bros. release received a 10-minute standing ovation at its Toronto Film Festival premiere. “Cloud Atlas” is scheduled for wide release beginning in late October.

“We’re thrilled that Dan Glass is coming to Torino to present the visual effects work on this innovative film,” Gutierrez says. “Dan’s brilliant career in visual effects has included supervising work on “Tree of Life,” “Batman Begins,” and the “Matrix” sequels, so he has much to share with us. He joins a stellar list of speakers this year at what promises to be a deeply rewarding conference.”

Other notable additions to the speaker’s list include:

Half-Blood Prince's fire sim isn't the the only talk of the town at SIGGRAPH.

The exhibition opened today and, as expected, the show is small but quaint -- similar to San Antonio a few years back. Nothing wrong with that: it's manageable and in keeping with the New Orleans flavor. While the number of exhibitors is smaller than usual, it's a nice mix. You can traverse the floor in about half-an-hour. And there are plenty of students flocking the job fair, which is where most of the action is -- and rightly so, considering the job market. In fact, a few of the large studios such as Lucasfilm and Sony Pictures Imageworks, opted to have a presence solely at the job fair.

Fjorg gets saucy!

Day 2 of the animation competition kicked off at 9am with a loud drumbeat and Afro Brazilian performers. The sound drew a large crowd in to watch the performances. The animation teams had worked through the night on their films so the very lively dancers lent some much needed energy to the competitors.

Tomorrow is the final day for the unique CG short film animation training project created by Czech animation education group Anomalia and taught by Arconyx Animation Studio head Kenny Roy. The two week project was part of a summer marathon of animation courses at Anomalia, all taught by experts from top world studios such as Pixar, Valve and Aardman Animations.

By Tony Willis

Blipvfx Productions

Well as always Hong Kong is a great host to people from around the world and as always puts on a fabulous show. I arrived in Hong Kong and have not stopped meeting people for 4 days, which is great.

The first day saw me wandering around the digital media hall, which I have to say was bigger better prepared and a lot more digital content was around. Many more animation companies, lots of visual effects companies and of course cameras films and hardware for stereoscopic filming. In fact very hi technology was all around, but also low technology was also in abundance, (Hong Kong always has its own solutions) this bodes well as much of this was Hong Kong based, and you absolute need a multiply approach to this type of work.

I managed to meet many old friends there and touch base with many new friends, so the social aspect of Filmart is excellent, even if you find out that these new friends was only down the street from you.

So here I am, curled up with a real printed version of the Ottawa International Animation Festival schedule, which I picked up at a local grocery store.

And a red marker.

One more page, last page. It's a handy-dandy candy pink, blue and green, colour coordinated idiot proof festival schedule with all the dates and times.

I can see that half of my choices conflict with each other.

I'll sign off now while I make extreme choices and chop dream screenings.

By Nancy Phelps

Devoted solely to student work, the festival is the brainchild of well known animator, illustrator, and renaissance man Rastko Ćirić in conjunction with Vuk Maksimovic, master wood carver and furniture maker, who is the representative of the Fortress for this project.  It also received support from the Serbian Ministry of Culture.

It's a two hour train ride from Montreal, Canada's cosmopolitan capital to Ottawa, the national capital. Forget the stock images of the Parliament buildings, the Mounties, or the concrete barriers in front of the block long US embassy.