From Michael F

Hi Sue...

Talk about gaping, drooling mouths wide open; as a newbie myself, it was an amazing first experience of SIGGRAPH on every front. No photos though, I’m afraid. Is that a sign of newbie, or jaded?

The focus for me was to get a different perspective on the things that obsess me as a producer, as an animator, as a filmmaker and that I think are part of the general animation cinema consciousness. I didn’t attend any technical papers or courses as you did, or educator’s sessions, like Chris Hinton did. I went to three panels that touched on various aspects of copyright, digital rights management and ethics in working with new digital tools when it comes to, as my documentary colleagues have been known to debate, “veracity”.

Digital Rights, Digital Restrictions
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=panels&s=panel1

So You Want to Create Content: Licenses, Copyrights, and Other Things to Think About
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=panels&s=panel3

Ethics in Image Manipulation
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=panels&s=panel4

I attended one and a half sketches on medical technology advances with digital tools. Mesmerizing, and an excellent pill for putting what we do as filmmakers into the proper perspective. Spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours making animated water look more natural for a Hollywood feature seem so trivial next to work being done to improve training and evaluation for pediatric surgeons doing infant heart surgery. Talk about everything in its proper place.

Push, Pull and Touch Technologies
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=etech&s=sketches2

[And yes, I understand that there is much cross-fertilization amongst the digital disciplines, but when an ILM digital researcher gets $5 million handed to him and a medical researcher scratches and begs for $750,000, it makes a difference in effect.]

Finally, I attended three panels/presentations on the tensions between art and digital creation. They were fascinating and exciting and invigorating, and a perfect antidote to how I felt after sitting through the Electronic Theatre screening and 4 of the 7 Animation Theatre screenings. Animation at SIGGRAPH seems to be so much about “the craft of using digital tools excellently”, and almost not at all about using those powerful digital tools to make art. [And in this, I consider telling a compelling, engaging and complete story to be artful.] I think that’s the most disappointing thing about SIGGRAPH for me. But as I discussed with a friend, maybe that’s why Ars Electronica and others of that ilk exist, as counterbalance.

Generative and Genetic Art
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=art&s=panel3

Conceptual Investigation: Technology, Message, and Meaning
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=art&s=sketches5

New Media, New Craft
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=art&s=papers6

It was a great opportunity for me, and I appreciate that David Verrall sent me and Chris Hinton on behalf of the studio. I learned tons, and I met two amazing people in Bonnie Mitchell (chair of this year’s Art Gallery and a huge fan of cNote who worked very hard to get the film in) and Graham Daniels, creative director of Addictive TV, doing some of the most amazing sound/imagery mashups I've seen so far.

Next year would be wonderful! And thanks for letting me post as you.

Michael Fukushima

Thursday1

Here are some of the highlights of the last 3 days.
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/resources/hdr/hdrmpeg/MPEG for High Definition - Backward compatible HDR Mpeg compression.
The results of the mpeg compression were great. I think this is the winner of the different compression methods as it is backwards compatible.

http://www.thinkforward.org/Art - Creating organic mosaics using algorithm created by artist. He has developed a way to take an image, define the 'edges', add a mosaic and have the algorithm find the size and color from the underlying image.

http://www.crudeoils.us/Art - Crudeoils 3D drawing of a dark space using laser pointer.
He used red and blue 3D glasses.

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PolarizationSIGGRAPH06/Technique for matting - Realtime triangulation matting using passive polarization
Blue screen - green screen and now polarized screen - no spill on subject!

The big theme for Siggraph was definitely capturing and manipulating still and video images to extract mattes, recover data, or visualize this data in a new way. The techniques used were often extracting black and white images, extracting the edges, using gaussian blur and then reassembling the image to remove motion or camera blur etc.

The newest software and techniques are now using the OpenEXR format. Check out the software "Nuke" http://www.d2software.com/.

One interesting plugin for photoshop was Color Space CAD
http://www.fytos.com/color It used a 3D model of the color space to manipulate the image and created much nicer color changes than any other color filters in photoshop.

Monday3 View From My Hotel Room

Tai Chi in the morning
& Kids and more kids

Monday2

Went to lunch with Chris Hinton and company. We met by accident and now my lunch that I brought and never ate is smelling badly. It somehow is OK because I am now listening to the Panel - Digital Rights, Digital Restrictions. There is a problem with Digital Rights Management - no kidding.
And so it goes.

Monday at Siggraph 2006

The course - Computational Photography
Wow - This course brings together the many new photographic techniques in the sciences and digital photography. It is turning the world of photography on its ear. We don't need lenses, a sensor becomes a detector, we mess with the pixels, and get infinite focus, high dynamice range with 3D images.
Check this web site out.
www.merl.com/people/raskar/photo
Check with you later.
sue

Sunday by Sue

I spent the first hours at the HDRI course. I was under the impression that there were alot
of courses on Sunday. It turns out I was looking at the list for the whole week.
Go figure. Must go. I have a breakfast date with the rest of the crew.
ttfn