At 4:30am my cell phone tried to wake me, without success, but it succeeded ten minutes later shortly before I stuffed in some clothes, my ten portfolio DVDs and my bag of hygiene products. Then I tried giving Martina, who was one of my two passengers, the ordered wake-up call, unanswered twice. The third time she picked it up and sounded not even as sleepy as me. Donsch, my other passenger, was waiting outside the campus building patiently for me to arrive, 18 minutes late for I forgot to print out the addresses of the convention center and my hotel which really saved my ass.

The Plan

Autobahn

Donsch & Martina enjoying Stuttgart,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Cruising around Salzburg’s Lehen district we found Martina wandering around looking for us and picked her up, still a little over the top from her weekend project:

She and seven other people from class had used the weekend to produce a claymation short film for the instant36 film festival where participants get 36 hours to make a film. That insane effort left everybody involved about not more than two hours of sleep the whole weekend.

Driving on the autobahn to Stuttgart was fast till Munich, following a much slower travel speed because of the tempo limits that made driving on fresh black asphalt a test for your strength of will to restrain yourself from hitting the gas pedal. Donsch and I were discussing effects of radiation on the human body and the nukular power plants along the way while Martina took a nap before we entered Stuttgart city limits at around 8:50am.

Stuttgart is a beautiful city, hid from the autobahn in a valley combining the flair of Mediterranean villages with its houses along steep hillsides facing vineyards; Munich’s cleanness and neatness and even a touch of San Francisco when you roll down the hill on a windy road with rail tracks in the middle.

Thanks to Navigon we reached the Haus der Wirtschaft shortly after 9am and I headed straight for a parking place in what’s probably Germany’s most expensive parking garage: today cost me twenty Euros. Painful especially because I’ve learned from Moritz, a fellow student and native of Augsburg, that there was some kind of student parking lot where they charge you only 2.50 € for the day. Ouch! Maybe tomorrow…

Until our little group of three got their tickets it already was 10am and the show had started. Martina decided to visit the Aardman recruiting session while I was eager to see Euphoria, a software for simulating human behavior at runtime, in GTA IV in action, explained by one of its developers, Torsten Reil from Naturalmotion.

Games and Korea

A break at Starbucks,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

In the short break I met Ivana and Marion from the 4th semester who were so matching in their preppyness that you couldn’t help smiling. I was lazy and tired and wanted to move as little as possible and so I stayed along with the girls for Advancements in High Quality Rendering where Wil Braithwaite of nVidia laid out a workflow for near realtime rendering using heavily the GPU. Obviously we weren’t the only ones who once were raging about why it takes so long to render one crappy frame with MentalRay while there’s so much neary photorealistic stuff going on in the next games in frickin’ real time.

Haarm-Pieter Duiker from Digital Domain took over the second part of this unit and was showcasing the hyped and until Friday unreleased Wachowsky-flick Speed Racer. It was so colorful and over the top that it really hurt your eyes. Duiker was explaining how they managed to get the most realistic car-shader possible and showed composits from the movie that look so artificial that a simple phong-shader would’ve done the job equally well in my opinion.

After a break I let myself talk into Public Game Funding in Korea, held in a small room by Ken Kyunam Choi from KAIGA, the Korean federal department of gaming. Choi seemed to me like a real nice and even passionate guy but his presentation was as humble as his English skills (not that bad though!). His PowerPoint presentation remembered me a lot of any Korean manual to a piece of hardware: Strange Arial-ish typography, fine dotted stripes in the background impossible to tell whether that was intentional, too much text and too many numbers filling each slide and the charming overuse of diagrams. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t uninteresting, still I had to fight though this hour when some of the audience kept asking the poor guy the same questions over and over again he just couldn’t answer properly. But I’ve learned that the Korean government sees games as part of culture, provides gaming addiction prevention centers and educates teachers and parents on how to play games with children. That’s totally different than the local policy in Austria regarding games…

In the break the three of us located a Starbucks nearby where I guzzled a venti caramel macchiato which really put me back to life along with some mango-chicken wraps. I even considered purchasing a sitar because right next to the coffeeshop was a store selling all kinds of instruments.

Already history

The Haus der Wirtschaft,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I really regret that we we returned twenty minutes late for the following presentation, 30 Years in CG by a passionate and very entertaining Glenn Entis, who founded Pacific Data Images in the early 80s. He switched to EA before PDI was swallowed by DreamWorks and made stuff like the Shrek series. And recently Glenn quit his job at EA because he wanted to try something new. I like that attitude!

Alex Laurant continued afterwards talking about his transition from drawing T-shirt designs in the 70s, to illustrating editorials, studying typography, getting involved with multimedia in the late 1990s, then switching to ILM where he supervised the VFX for Minority Report, and now he’s working for Lucas Arts, in more or less the same building. Unfortunately he had to cut quite a bit of his presentation but I was able to get some hints and tips for my current freelance work on Frontiers for GoldExtra.

The Fusion of Technology and Cinematography by Scott Singer was mainly about the underlying pipeline of DreamWorks and when you should buy those guys from R&D some beer¹. I tired to hunt Scott down after his lecture in order to inject one of my many portfolios but there are always people from India who get there first and keep chatting and fooling around until the next presentation starts and the target person leaves – better luck next time.

Highly anticipated and extensively cheered was Sharon Calahan’s lighting and cinematography work for Pixar’s Ratatouille. Even though my eyes began to close now and then at random I learned a lot and got inspired for my upcoming compositings, like the way you make fruit and food look appealing.

2D or not 2D, this is the question

With Martina, who also had troubles keeping herself from falling asleep and tipping over we both went to the lounge for a strong espresso and missed the fist part of Marlon West’s demonstration of the new old Goofy: How to make a Goofy short in an all digital process that looks like it was done in the 50’s. Following his presentation he showed the final short film again and I was highly amused because they did a tremendous job at not getting crazy with next-gen compositing. Another time I tried to catch the speaker and this time it worked after waiting for a nerdy guy from Locomotion to finish his schmoozing. I told Marlon how much I enjoyed the new Goofy short and how great it was to me that Disney returned to full feature 2D-animation with The Princess and the Frog². And I was asking for a job as an intern at Disney – I am as shameless as I am desperate. He suggested me to show up tomorrow at the recruiting table³ which is better than nothing.

Eye Candy

The last unit today was titled Shelly’s Eye Candy andit kept its promise. Shelly Page of DreamWorks collected all over the world outstanding animation pieces and showed them to the broad audience. There was so many great stuff in the 45 minutes that I relly hope I remember everything:

• Framestore CFC’s music clip of singing fish, dancing sea horses (I love horsies!) and a beat-boxing fugu.
• Gunniess tipping point commercial, where a rural town has its own kind of domino day. It’s addictive to watch and the payoff really pays off
• Another Gunniess commercial with yellow men being fired at huge drums and falling down huge guitar strings only to dissolve in yellow particles. Nice to watch but the slogan “It’s alive inside!” along with the thought of dissolving yellow men in your beer is a little… tasteless.
• The Pearce Sisters, a dark and brutal, yet dear and funny animation about two ugly sisters who are fishermen. Great style, interesting story!
• Rockband, the intro for the game of the same name, featuring Deep Purple’s Highway Star with some near photo realistic and some stunning animation and rendering. Short but funny. And you’ll love to watch it over and over again.
• The Man with the Chicken Head (or something like this, only French), is a very surreal and very freaky animation about a chicken in a world full of identic looking men who like to go to the Jazz club and listen to some triangle solo. Weird. Hence funny.
• HUGH, some French animation mix between 3D and 2D after an Apache traditional story. Well executed but it was heavy on (French) dialogue without subtitles. It was something about the sky (le ciel) but nothing that spectacular.
• Blind Spot, a funny animation of a guy robbing a little shop, accidentally shooting people and getting away with it. But it’s the “why” and “how” that really sells it.
• Camera Obscura, an obscure (haha) and simply breathtaking French b/w-styled animation. If you have the possibility then watch it!
• The Cold Rush. A headhunter finds the frozen corpse of his target in the snowy mountains and tries to take it down so he can get the reward. Funny as Fargo because of the tragedy.
• International Trickfilm Festival. A Pixar-styled car crash in slowest motion with a crazy colorful jumping horse called Trixie. It’s so weird that you won’t keep that giggle hidden inside you to yourself.
• Oktapodi. Two octopussies (I love this inappropriate plural) in love in a small Italian town are separated by the fishmonger and try to save each other. Fast-paced action and humor – I loved it!

I hope that’s all of them.

What have I learned today?

Dusk at the Hotel,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

• That I know now where the local Starbucks is located.
• Be quick or forget it.
• That some women, if together, spend more time on the toilet than a man can possibly evaluate.
• That some other women spend a fraction of that time on the toilet.
• That games (usually) just play back interactively something that had been recorded in some ways. Euphoria simulates in runtime.
• That doing invisible visual effects is like cleaning somebody’s dirty dishes.
• That color scripting also makes sense in games.
• That the HUD in games shouldn’t clash but also shouldn’t completely merge with a level’s color toning.
• That doing much more by doing much less is key.
• That organic details (like flowers, seeds, stuff like that) add a great sense of realism.
• That it’s the information you give the audience is important, not the details.
• That you may let things go completely dark in compositing.
• That playing with what you should do and what you shouldn’t do in terms of lighting and layouting sometimes is worth it, rather than separating everything visually.
• That sometimes exposing for the shadows is more interesting than exposing for direct light.
• That every room in Germany seems to be cooler (in a sense of a chilly icy blizzard, not in a sense of hip trendy style) than my room in Salzburg.
• That almost every clock works in realtime.
• That coffee still is my friend.

1. e.g. when you have them to implement a quick and dirty hack to a fully functional element in your core libraries. [back]
2. which wasn’t even schmoozing at all because it is true! [back]
3. with probably 200 others [back]