Festival of Visual Effects: Day 1

This weekend is the VES Festival, held this year at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills. I took some time out to take in all the presentations, and over the next couple of days I'll be going over what they were about! The Friday session was very good, as I'll describe below!

2:30-4:00: Rendering Cinematic Game Experiences in Real Time
Moderated by Van Ling

This hour and a half long panel delved into the work necessary to create two of Activisions games, Call of Duty 3, and Spiderman 3, both for the XBox360 and Playstation 3. Steve Pierce, CTO of Activision, explained some of the differences between this generation and the previous generation of console hardware, and how they differ. From parallel CPU processing, to a GPU 51 times faster than the previous generation, all rendering images at double or triple the resolution in 720p at 60 frames a second. They also mentioned that they're not limited by the space on the discs anymore, but mostly by the transfer rate from the discs to the machines themselves.

5:00-6:30: VFX FOR SPECIAL VENUES
Moderated by Jeff Kleiser

This panel, consisting of David Smith of Busch Entertainment, Doug Trumbull, Rob Engle of SPI, and Jim Bowie of Electrosonic, went into extensive detail about the creation of visual effects for special venues. First up was David, who's introduction and talk wasn't the most informative about visual effects perse, and seemed more of a corporate speech given to entice the audience into understanding what Busch Entertainment brings to the world. I did find out that Busch owns and operates nine parks in the states, including Seaworld and of course, Busch Gardens.
Trumbull talked about his intensive work in special venues, specifically the Back to the Future Ride which will be closing its doors at the end of the summer! He talked about the immersive quality of ride films, and how he accomplished the ride using miniatures, and the logistics of creating a ride film in dome IMAX, when only a certain amount of light was able to hit the screen otherwise you'd get cross reflectance, from light bouncing off one side of the screen and hitting the other.
Engle talked briefly about his role in 3D stereoscopic films, mostly about how they created a full 3D version of films from their 2D counterparts, in roughly a quarter the time! I can relate! The stereo conversion for Meet The Robinsons was very short.
Jim Bowie talked about the types of immersive environments prevalent in special venues, and showed examples of his work and others in the special venue field that his company has helped design. From large format regular screens, to IMAX dome projections, and hologram displays like Chioptics Pepper's Ghost illusion, which consisted of a display technology of an inverted pyramid capable of displaying holograms.

7:30-10:00: SURF’S UP Screening (Sony Pictures Imageworks) with Q&A
The last panel of the evening consisted of a screening of Surf's Up, from Imageworks Animation, followed by a quick Q/A from the supervisors. Most of the technical discussion will be held at Siggraph, but they did discuss some aspects of the film. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it.. Much better than the other penguin movie. The water in the film took approximately 2 and a half years to achieve. The film is also shot in a documentary style with handheld cameras, so the layout department used a rig to film the animation in realtime to give the illusion of a handheld, documentary, camera. This film did have film grain added, which adds to the illusion of a documentary film.

Over the next two days I'll be summing up my thoughts and what else happened at this years VES Festival of Visual Effects! The Saturday and Sunday panels were amazing, and I hope you all had a chance to see it. If not, next year should be just as great!