VICON, developer of Academy Award-winning motion capture systems and part of the Oxford Metrics Group, announced TWISTED MURDER as the winner of its international VICON Film Festival. The film was created by Paulo de Almada, an animation artist from Los Angeles, California. He was awarded the cash prize of $10,000 after the judges voted unanimously in support of his outstanding entry.
The winning entries can be viewed at www.vicon.com/filmfestival/
TWISTED MURDER is about a detective who discovers his girlfriend has been murdered. As the title suggests, there is a twist at the end as the killer is uncovered. With a running time of just under five minutes, de Almada has created a film that is technically impressive, entertaining and packed full of motion capture.
"I didn't have a lot of experience with motion capture prior to creating this film, but the freedom and versatility it allows to add, move and position CG characters in a scene is incredible. The quality of the VICON motion capture data is fantastic, and it integrated very easily into my Maya 3-D animation pipeline," said de Almada. "The VICON Film Festival gave me the opportunity to work with motion capture for the first time and it definitely opens a world of new capabilities for visual storytellers, and is continually becoming more practical and accessible to filmmakers and game creators of all calibers."
Eric Furie, from the School of Cinematic Arts in California, and a judge for the VICON Film Festival said, "Having reviewed the entries, my choice for first place is TWISTED MURDER. I believe that from an artistic, technical and mocap viewpoint, it is the strongest. He really took on a lot and managed a great amount of success."
The second place winner was Ichiro Sato of Japan, who was awarded a copy of 2d3's matchmoving software boujou for his short, THE EVENING BEFORE THE HANGOVER. Ichiro impressed the judges with his simple, yet effective approach to using motion capture, and entertaining use of animated characters.
The VICON Film Festival 2008-09 will be soliciting entries primarily from the education sector. More information will be announced at the SIGGRAPH Conference, August 12-14 at the Los Angeles Convention Center; VICON will be exhibiting in booth 1101.
