Search form

SIGGRAPH's Guerilla Studio Provides Interactive Collaborations

Creation abounds during the SIGGRAPH Guerilla Studio, an interactive creation studio that provides attendees with the opportunity to create art in every subdiscipline imaginable. The Guerilla Studio will take place as part of the 34th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques held Aug. 5-9 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California.

Attendees will have the chance to utilize powerful workstations, versatile software, and the expertise of several artists, scientists and engineers to create imaginative concepts in 2D, 3D, 4D, and n-dimensional media. This year's Guerilla Studio program provides attendees with creative freedom throughout several technologies and creative areas.

"We are very excited about some of the new additions to this year's Guerilla Studio," stated Rebecca Strzelec, SIGGRAPH 2007 Guerilla Studio chair from Pennsylvania State University - Altoona. "The Guerilla Studio is one of the few venues that allows for attendee interaction. Add to that collaboration with some of the industry's finest and you have a unique atmosphere for creative production that you wouldn't find anywhere else."

Highlights from this year's Guerilla Studio include:

* Artists In Residence Program

Area Chief: Phil Carrizzi

This year, the Guerilla Studio is hosting six emerging and established resident artists who come from 2D, 3D, digital, non-digital, production, one-of-a-kind, large and small scale-traditions. These artists will have their own group workspace, integrated into the overall studio design, to help facilitate the best possible mix of their personal visions and skills, group and collaborative energies, and the array of technical resources represented in the Guerilla Studio. They will blend their dynamic individual studio practices, in media not always well represented at SIGGRAPH, with the emerging technologies and public nature of the Guerilla Studio to help their work evolve and provide inspiration to attendees. The 2007 Artists in Residence are: Harriete Estel Berman, Matthew Hamon, Philip Mallory Jones, Mike and Maaike and Michael Wright.

* Animation Area

Area Chief: Gene Cooper

Explore both the very high tech and the low tech of animation techniques, processes, and technologies. Only 5-10 minutes to spare? Sit down and have some fun at our stop-motion animation stations as you build a quick animation to take home. A little more time to spare? Meet one of our creative specialists, who will be ready to open up the engine compartments of their own work, get into the nuts and bolts of its design, and then hand over the keys to see what you can do. Just interested in watching? Attend one of our presentations showcasing a number of projects and techniques. Browsing for new tools? Sit down at one of our open stations where you'll be able to explore some of the latest and best of tools available. Anyway you cut it, there's something for everyone. Most of all, have fun creating, exploring, and taking advantage of the amazing tools and projects that are available in the Guerilla Studio.

* Collaboration Area

Area Chief: Lyn Bishop

Often the creative process is singular and individual, but when the work becomes collaborative, the resulting imagery becomes more than the sum of its parts. In the Collaboration Space, attendees share collaboration, cultural exchange, and cooperative art-making. Artists and attendees collaborate, in real time, on networked projects with students from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. Live collaborative sessions with Srishti take place each morning. We invite you to drop in anytime to get involved with the international collaboration or local collaborations with other conference attendees and artists.

* Drawing Circle

Area Chief: Dave Nutty

As in the past, the drawing circle will be available to attendees to drop in and sketch away their thoughts and/or stress or doodle up the next masterpiece on an informal basis. This year, we've added a few projects that allow attendees and artists to contribute to a community image montage and other projects throughout the week.

* Guerilla Editions: AKA the 2D Area

Area Chief: Karl Lang

This is the heart of the Guerilla Studio. Images produced by artists in the Guerilla Studio are received via our gigabit network. After receipt, the images are processed and rendered as fine-art pigment prints. We use the latest technology, fine-art papers and archival pigment inks that resist fading for hundreds of years. Master printmakers and even a color scientist manage all aspects of the color workflow and printing. Technologies from Epson, X-Rite, Colorbyte, and other companies are used to produce museum-quality prints. If you have questions about color management, calibration, file prep, or image permanence, ask the staff at Guerilla Editions.

* 3D Area

Area Chief: Makai Smith

In the 3D area, attendees are invited to work with state-of-the-art 3D data-capture systems, modeling packages, and rapid-prototyping equipment. In this creative environment, you can generate 3D digital objects either by modeling in the latest version of various full-featured software packages or by using 3D data-capture devices to scan actual objects (bring an object, or yourself, or sculpt an object out of clay; we'll even provide the clay). Then your computer models can be "manufactured" in three dimensions (translated into physical reality) with a bank of rapid-prototyping machines, printed two dimensionally using various large- and small-format printing processes, or animated.

* Lenticular Printing

Area Chief: Raleigh Souther

Create spectacular 3D lenticular effects with lenticular training from Chris Williams (Knowledge Gaming) and Raleigh Souther (Get Flipped! Inc.). They show how to create 3D depth in any 2D images, explore the process of mastering any file for a full 3D or animated lenticular effect, and help attendees produce a finished lenticular 3D image. Attendees can also use Get Flipped! Pro Studio software to experience a 3D environment and an actual 3D lenticular image capture. Daily signups (15 minutes or two hours): 1:00 6:00 pm Sunday, 9:00 am - noon and 1:00 6:00 pm Monday through Wednesday, 9:00 am 5:00 pm Thursday.

* Motion Capture, Courtesy of PhaseSpace

Area Chief: Tracy McSheery

PhaseSpace invites you to try out the PhaseSpace IMPULSE motion-capture system in the SIGGRAPH 2007 Guerrilla Studio. Sign up now to secure your 15 minutes of fame! We will light you up with our active LED system, and then give you the floor to do with as you will. After you are done, you will receive the motion capture data that was recorded during your performance.

* Show and Tell

Area Chief: Bob Gould

Need information? Can't find what you need? Want to see what has been going on in the Guerilla Studio? Too overwhelmed to know where to begin? Show and Tell encompasses all of this and so much more!

* Sound Area

Area Chief: Terry Nauheim

An interactive sound installation that uses the model of sound greeting cards as a vehicle for sound transactions. Attendees take part in a collective soundscape through playing sound greeting cards as musical instruments. Inspired by music boxes, we chose the sound greeting card because is a contemporary example of mechanical playback. The music box also offers a limited version of a tune through its limited tonal range and playback length. We are interested in these limitations and find commonalities between them and digital sound formats. For example, low sample rates and compression formats are designed for portability and accessibility while giving up the integrity and quality of their original sounds. On the other hand, this economizing of sound has yielded a new audio palette that can be heard throughout popular culture, including computer-game soundtracks, ring tones, talking toys and pop music. Our sounds are fragments of field recordings brought into the Guerilla Studio. Through attendee selections and playback, the origin of these sounds will be recombined to recontextualize them into the SIGGRAPH 2007 context.

* TeraDRE

Area Chief: Laura Arns

The TeraDRE at Purdue University is a distributed-rendering environment with more than 4,000 render nodes. Distributed rendering greatly reduces the time needed to produce a large animation and frees up lab machines for other uses. Attendees are encouraged to both bring material from home to be rendered and create new material in the Studio for rendering via TeraDRE. Submit your rendering jobs to the TeraDRE and then "pick up" your completed renders at a later time via the web. Jobs can be submitted for a variety of environments, such as Maya, Blender and POVRay.

Complete details available in July.

* Video Area: Software Playing Nice

Area Chief: Terry Vandenakker

The G-Vid Team uses mainly filtered video footage with an emphasis on compositing different footage from different software applications. Final editing is done in Final Cut Pro. The team and SIGGRAPH 2007 attendees shoot the background elements and live action in DV in and around the conference. Then we create characters in Flash and LightWave 3D, but we do a simple cell-shade rendering to save texturing and lighting time. We create narration to carry the story, so there will be no need for more time-consuming lip sync. Keeping the background and foreground elements separate, we then composite in After Effects to add depth and to intensify colors as the characters' emotions change.

SIGGRAPH 2007 (www.siggraph.org/s2007) will bring an estimated 25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents to San Diego for the industry's most respected technical and creative programs focusing on research, science, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, education and the web from Aug. 5-9 at the San Diego Convention Center. SIGGRAPH 2007 includes a three-day exhibition of products and services from the computer graphics and interactive marketplace from Aug. 7-9. More than 250 international exhibiting companies are expected. Registration for the conference and exhibition is open to the public.

ACM SIGGRAPH, the leading professional society for computer graphics and interactive techniques, sponsors SIGGRAPH 2007.

Bill Desowitz's picture

Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.

Tags