Attending  Vancouver’s ACM SIGGRAPH SPARK FX '09, Vancouver's second annual visual effects film festival been really inspiring and educational to the three of us Masters of Digital Media students, Vincent, Yamin and Yangos. We think the amount of information we attained in just a week was significant and we are fortunate it took place in Vancouver for the second time.  The following are the 7 events we attended.

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Ever wondered who makes those super high tech interfaces that are being used in movies that are able to magnify an image indefinitely and cross-reference a myriad of pictures at a fraction of a second? One of the most know interface designers is Mark Coleran who worked on movies such as the Minority Report, The Island, The Bourne Identity and Déjà vu. Mark was generous enough to share his showreel with us and shared his process he uses to create those interfaces. He spoke about the value and importance of the subtle motion of the various elements of the interface, how important pixel to pixel accuracy is to how sharp it will look on screen and the tweaking required so that it blends perfectly with the real shot in the movie. Mark talked about the basic process of creating the high-tech looking digital interface for the screen.  He starts of by creating the vector assets in Illustrator and then exports them to Photoshop to sharpen the stroke and add grain and texture.  The final and most elaborate part is importing them into AfterEffects to animate them and create special effects for them. After so many years of doing this he has learned to rely on his extensive library of animated icons and effects that he tries to recycle as much as possible making his work very efficient. The level of organization required for such as a task is immense which is what led him to help in the creation of a new organization tool coming out soon called flow. For the last part of his process he compresses the movie immensely and limits the colors to 256 so that they are easily playable from very cheap low powered PC’s that just keep playing the looped movie of the interface in a set of on set monitors.

One of the most valuable thing that he mentioned in the speech for Vincent was that the level of proficiency in a certain software for example after effects does not really influence the final output since what really matters from an artist’s perspective is to have a true sense of identifying the visual arrangement of every shot, how things should naturally move etc. all which help to achieve convincing and aesthetically pleasing results. For Yangos it was very interesting how well he has learned over the years to organize his assets, naming everything properly and logging them down so that he can easily reuse them in the future. Yamin found his work to be an incredible source of inspiration to be used when designing the interface for her industry project for the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad. Get a glimpse of Mark’s work here and read his blog when it goes online shortly.

Digital Cloning                                            
Anyone with a strong love for math would have loved this talk. Christophe Hery has been the Computer Graphic Supervisor in ILM(industry, Light & Magic) since 1993  and has worked extensively in optimizing the render engine used to render the Lemony Snicket's Baby to the Pirates' Davy Jone.  The first part of his speech was very technical describing in detail the Mathematic algorithms used to calculate how different lighting scenarios should naturally refract from 3d skin emulating real life as much as possible. These techniques are used in the renderers that ILM uses to create some really amazing photorealistic 3d characters that are almost indistinguishable to a real person.  Christophe’s research in this subsurface scattering technology is the one of the most complicated procedures in 3D computer graphical character creation and was  a real eye opener to the three of us on the necessity to have really strong technical people to create the engines that are so integral in the creation of photorealism.  

Pan’s Labyrinth CafeFX
Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the most successful low cost movies in 2008 and has won three Academy awards, three BAFTA awards and six Goya awards. The magicians behind the special fx work done for the movie were the people from CafeFX. CAFEFX. was created in 1993 and was a  very small scale company that kept growing steadily with small scale work which lend them the deal with  PictureHouse, a European movie company, that wanted to create a-class effects but with a low budget. Even though the budget was low the team set a goal to create something truly spectacular and with Gulielmo del Toro on as the director the final result was far beyond the initial expectations.  Jeff Barnes the captain in command in CafeFX gave us an inspiring speech around the exciting challenges in creating the mythical creatures and landscapes of the world of Pan’s Labyrinth. He explained the process they used to create a visual compliment to the real world horror by creating really terrifying 3D characters(stick bug, faeries, giant toads and a wooden baby) giving a perfect of suspension of disbelieve to the audience. It is really hard to tell apart the live shots and the CG all due to Guilielmo’s insistence to use real life effects as much as possible and use 3d replicas that seamlessly combine to create an amazing visual amalgamate. Vincent really appreciated the faeries’ morph animation since he thought that the lighting and the motion brought  this non-existing character to life. He noted how all the character’s animation were done by key frame animation and enjoyed how elegant the result of that process came to be. Yangos enjoyed the combination of on set effects and cg and how indistinguishable and complimentary they were to each other; on the closeups you can see the sophisticated animatronics but as soon as you move back that same detail is retained and simulated with CG. Yamin was intrigued by the exponential growth the visual effects company attained by creating such high quality effects in such a low budget making a lot of people in the industry seeking the same lucrative deal.

Weaving the real and the imaginary
It was a great honor and immense privilege for us to attend Dennis Muren’s talk. Dennis is the Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, and the recipient of 8 Academy Awards for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. In 1999, Muren became the first visual effects artist to be honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  Such a high caliber man could only give us a stellar presentation sharing his 6 tips on how to overcame what he thought are the most important challenges in creating stellar special effects.The six challenges are 1) New visible idea. 2)Emotional reaction 3)The Audience’s perspective 4)The director’s style 5)Look real 6)Want to see more. In creating new effects Dennis advised something we already do here at the mdm. Look for inspiration everywhere and especially the web. He showed us how he used inspirations from youtube and how he has a library of thousands of pictures he has been slowly collecting over the years from the web that he finds inspiring in their ability to transmit emotion to their viewer. The importance of emotion was the next thing he tackled by showing us examples of how great directors that he worked with like Spielberg frame shots that speak the language of the heart. He then emphasized how the audience perceives thing and how innate it is hardwired in us to distinguish reality from from a fake image and how detail plays a role in achieving a realistic look. He says nature should be our real inspiration and that we should pay very close attention on how things look around us. Also a great respect for the director’s vision is always necessary and a lot of time should be spend in understanding and complimenting his/her vision creating a strong unity between the narrative and the visual. A good example of that is the opening of StarWars. The way the now famous opening was created compliments the feel of the movie and introduces the story background. Finally not having everything in focus and not giving everything away from the beginning creating a magnificent sense of mystery makes the audience want for more.  
Dennis was truly inspiring to us and even if the things that he said were common sense we usually forget those simple rules that are core to creating an inspiring piece of work. Take that from the man whose repertoire include Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T, Jurassic Park and so many more classic movies that lead up to his latest consulting work at Pixar for Wall-e.     

Fluid Dynamics
Fluid dynamics has always been considered to bea cutting-edge technology in the movies and the game industry. Realflow, one of the most sophisticated fluid simulation pieces of software has been liberated and can now be used by mere mortals for a comparatively low cost. That was Mark Stasiuk’s goal as the CG supervisor in Fusion CI studios and a key person in the development of the widely available software. Mark descibed the journey of the creation of the software that started in its use in large-scale computer renderings to create very basic digital water effects. That tough and time-consuming process put him on the path to optimize and minimize the requirements of the software which led to realflow. In comparison one multi-core desktop cpu using realflow now can render complicated fluid collision animations in an hour, compared to a few days of render 10 years ago. He then showed us real flow used in mainstream movies such as Poseidon and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  It was a good insight in the complexity of generating natural looking water and the challenges they had to overcome to create the results they have today.

Myths and Monsters
The speech was given by Shane Mahan the Effects supervisor in Legacy Effects. He discussed his process in creating the first animatronics and movie set props such as the famous Terminator 2 scull and the amazing armor in Iron Man. He described the various elements involved in making the magic we love, including the different forms of inspiration, the meticulous design and the detail in its construction. We felt surprised on the magnitude of impact real life props can give to the movie and reminded us that there are other ways besides cg to create fake reality. Here at the mdm we were fortunate to have been shown the impact that physical prototypes have in the hot workshops that were given to us by the Autodesk guru.

History of VFX
Last but not the least, Mr. Keith gave us a vivid class of the revolution in visual effects history. Starting with a fantastic hand drawing animations  Keith guided us through the history of VFX and stopped to mention the important milestones in each one. The most remarkable achievements in visual effects according to Keith the following ones: Terminator, Jurassic Park,Toy Story,Titanic, The Matrix, Gladiator,Final Fantasy, The Lord of the Ring,Finding Nemo,Pirates of the Caribbean,The Lord of the Ring  the return of the king,The Day after Tomorrow, Harry Potter, Star Wars, War of the Worlds, KingKong ,Sunshine, Beowulf ,Wall-E.
For us it was mesmerizing and somewhat nostalgic to see how VFX have at one hand progressed but at the same time remained as inspirational and as essential to the magic of the movies and video games as they have been since they were created.