Fri. Aug. 6 Travelday. Took the subway at 5.07 am, lifted off Arlanda 7.30, left London 12 and unlocked the door of the dorm room in Los Angeles at 5 pm. Took a walk in the neighbourhood, grabbed a burger and hit the sack at 9.
Sat. Aug. 7 Day off / Registration. Had a walk around downtown, and a look at MOCA, where they keep a decent Rothko. Registrated at Siggraph, was given a sign to wear around the neck and 10 lbs. of litterature, CD-Roms, including a video cassette.
Sun. Aug. 8 Course: "Fundamental Issues of Visual Perception for Effective Image Generation" This was mainly about what colours to use in pie charts. Pretty boring, but if know want to know just ask (notes to all courses are on one of the CD's). In the evening opening/reception in "The Millenium Motel - Emerging technologys" not very funny.
Mon. Aug. 9 Course: "A Visual Effects Galaxy" People from Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic among others described nifty tricks you can use if you're making movies and have plenty of moolah. For example, about the fur rendering system that was used in "Mighty Joe Young" how to make trees with procedures for "What Dreams May Come". How the dust in "Antz" was created and a comparison of the different fx work in the first Star Wars movie and the new one. The latter was maybe the most interesting, for the first Star Wars up to 170 layers of film was used for some fx scenes, the new was done exclusivly in the digital domain.
In the evening, this years jury selected compilation of computer animations and fx was screened. The best of the best. They came in all sizes, cuts from Hollywood movies, commercials, cartoons, visualizations. Nothing you could call contemporary art, except maybe a short manga inspired thing from Japan. ("Tokitama Hustle" ) The piece the Jury liked best involved bouncing mirror balls in a cathedral with crystal prisms. ("Fiat Lux" ) Some of the movie clips showed interesting stuff about how effects where made though, and some of the cartoons where quite funny. ( "The Duck Father" by Tomoyuki Harashima )
Best in show was without a doubt the venue, The Shrine Auditorium , a mindboggling Morocco-Jugend creation with at least 3000 seats. The building is protected, and some aging hippies maybe will remember it as one of the prime spots for the Doors and others once upon. Not much was needed to feel stoned in there.
Tue. Aug. 10 Course: "Color Science for Film,Video and CGI". This was a somewhat technical presentation on color. Those colors that can be shown and those that can't. How different monitors have different color, Sony green is not the same thing as Hitachi green. The most important point was maybe how to set contrast and brightness. The course material is available in printed form for the so inclined.(notes to all courses are on one of the CD's). The exhibition opened Tuesday, so when possible I sneeked in.
Wed. Aug. 11 Panel discussion: "Hot topics in Graphics Hardware". Five men haggled over what was happening, everyone had a different opinion. In the afternoon I plowed the exibition thoroughly. There was a lot of motion capture stuff, strange costumes with reflective balls or strange rods and wires. Different 3D companies fought with their programs. Data storage manufacturers and quite a number of magazines and education facilitites hunted for customers. Animation houses hunted employees. The two ladies of questionable reputation whom Tuesday, just when the exhibition opened, tried to get me to visist the "Valleyballs" bar with, interestingly, two balls in the logo, were no longer around. I confonted a dude in the Roland Digital booth about the green discoloring in our new printer - they had the same model on display - he didn't know shit.
Later that evening, back at the dorm, I had a couple of boilermakers (Negra Modelo and Old Granddad), and went over my notes and the exhibiter catalogue systematically. I selected the following interesting Exhibitors: ICE - releases a totally ICE'd After Effects in September, everything is accelerated, even motion blur and slow motion. Hash Animation master - a cheap but remarkably complete 3D character animation package, was available for a special convention price. Eyetronics - showed a system where 3D models were generated with a standard video camera (or digital still camera), all you had to do was illuminate the object with a special raster slide in a slide projector. Fancy math took care of the rest. Matrox RT200 - video editing card and software, mpeg2 and DV in realtime, dissolves without wait. Works like Media100 but costs 1295 USD (10.000 SEK) Sharp - had a flat display for 3D. Images looked like our visualization system but no need for funny glasses. Princeton University - exhibited a 8000x2000 pixels multiPC display. I saw the embryo for it at Supercomputing -97. More info on the web. BeOS - seems to be moving, has a video editng program and drivers are imminent. Measureand - showed a steel tape that could tell the computer its position and curvature, very nice for modelling.
Thu. Aug. 12 Fair attack - last day of the exhibition. I ordered the ICE'd After Effects for USD 995, 500 exhibtion rebate. I bought Has for USD 175, price in Sweden 2500:-. The Measureand modelling tool was 4200 USD so it had to wait. I picked up CompressIT, a image compression program for PC and Blender a free 3D package, released recently to great acclaim. In "The Studio" where you could try out different packages, 3D and 2D printers I checked out the Epson 9000, it uses the same printing technology as our Roland FJ50, and, damn it, it had the same greenish greys. I took the evening off and saw "Inspector Gadget" (two x-large popcorn out of five)
Fri. Aug. 13 Before lunch I saw "The Story of Computer Graphics" a two hour expose premiered at Siggraph99. It was screened using a HDTV projector. HDTV is finally happening, it looks very good indeed and will compete with film soon. (The most hyped movie house screenings of Star Wars- Phantom Menace was digital HDTV). Time to go, departure from LAX 6 pm.
Sat. Aug 14 Travelday. Arrived in London at noon, sat around till 6 pm, hopped to Stockholm and entered my private domain in Rinkeby at 11, had a few belts and went to bed. Mission completed.
Post Scriptum: Eyetronics - 3D modelling system is expensive. You send your image, shot with the raster projected, to them in England and they make the model for 1500 SEK. You need five or six to build all sides of an object. Minolta has a much more interesting alternative - together with MetaCreations they have developed a system where you get a 3D model complete with textures, from a camera-software package that does the whole job . The color problems with the printer was solved: settings, settings, settings...
