AXA Evolution

AXA_EVOLUTION  on Vimeo.

Tronic created this lovely piece which takes the viewer through the major inventions of man in a very origami style.

Whats really interesting is the approach in which the transformations are handled. We are so used to looking at mechanical transformation, thanks to Transformers and the over flow of commercials, movies, concepts based on mechanical modes of shape shifting.

The change in shape that we see in this commercial is very organic and fresh to the viewers eyes that it remains captivating till the end also what adds to the animation is the way the edges fold out even after the shape has completely formed bringing the sense of fragility and weightlessness.

For French Insurance company AXA, Tronic conceived, directed and animated this spot to address the desire to remain relevant in a constantly advancing world. The spot highlights the rapid evolution of mankind by showcasing an origami man transforming himself into some of the most important inventions throughout history. Ending with a question mark and a resolve on the AXA logo, the spot informs the public that the future is uncertain – but AXA is present now and through any changes to come.

Wolfman NEW Trailer

The Wolfman Trailer

This is one movie am really waiting for. This year ending seems to bring a good bunch of movies - James Cameron's Avatar, Wolfman, 2012...amongst all of them, I really am looking forward to Wolfman, as it has a good cast, good storyline and its eye candy. On the other hand - 2012? I dont know... just seems eye candy to me without anything else.

Lets wait and watch. In the meantime enjoy the trailer.

TED Talk : Paul Debevec animates a photo-real digital face

Creating a convincing CGI human has always been the holy grail of computer graphics. I say, convincing, because many attempts have been made before but they all end up in the realms of creepiness.
Its is tough to create a CG human mainly because we are used to recognizing human emotions and the little nuances of our expression that the moment we see something off, we find it robotic and lifeless. All our lives we have been interacting with other humans that we have strong memories of  human reactions, which is why its easier to create CG aliens and other creatures because they are all based on concepts and one's imagination and no one really knows their behavioral attributes.

Attempts before [Final Fantasy, Beowulf] have all been a roller coaster ride in the Uncanny Valley - The Uncanny Valley is part of a hypothesis of robotics that posits that a human will have greater empathy for a non-human entity (like a robot) as its appearance and emotion become more humanlike. The "valley" refers to a strong negative response humans have to an entity that is nearly human, but still inauthentic enough to seem unnatural and therefore "uncanny".

Paul Debevec is a researcher in computer graphics at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. He is best known for his pioneering work in high dynamic range imaging and image-based modelling and rendering, Debevec's work have been used in several major motion pictures, including The Matrix, Spider-Man, King Kong etc, his research with Facial Re-lighting and Dispalcement driven performance is really mind numbing and fantastic, slowly bridging the gap in the uncanny valley of photo real CG.

Recently the development the Light Stage where an array of lights would record an actor from the waist up delivering a short performance and then relight the performance in post production to match any lighting setup, since the performance was shot with a vast array of lighting combinations per second.

All these developments are bringing us closer to making a very convincing computer generated human. The above clip of Emily is the closest I have seen in terms of a believable result, the acid test would be to see how it holds on an extended performance.

Nocturne - Short film - Canon 1D Mark V

 

Its getting really interesting to see where the DSLR-film-making is going. Check out this short -"Nocturne", shot entirely on the yet-to-be-released Canon 1D Mark V (actually supposed to be called Mark IV, but the Japanese avoid the number four as it sounds like death in Jap) 
The film is by Vincent Laforet, the Pulitzer prize winning photographer and VFX artists will find the well know Stu Maschwitz (The Orphanage, Magic Bullet - Founder)

The film was shot at 6400 ISO (a seemingly common trend of oh-so-high-iso feature)

Psyop and Adidas create the impossible.

 

Adidas "Together" Directors Cut 2008 Olympics - Impossible is Nothing!! from PSYOP on Vimeo.

the making of video has gone offline for now, will put it up once it back.

I remember watching the Adidas commercials for the Beijing Olympics 08, like all Adidas commercials they were brilliant. The Ad compromised of 3 of the big Chinese athletes who speak about their promise to perform for their country at the Olympics, knowing that their fans and country is there to support them through the games.
The idea was more or less literally translated to visuals in the final spot. The post-production was handled by one of the best in the business - Psyop and they really pulled it of brilliantly. The ad had the atheletes being held up by the people, lifted, carried and push up by their hands and you can see their emotions come through with their support.
The team at Psyop shot live people for the foreground and created digital doubles for the background and in collaboration with Boolab painstakingly sketched over the final composite to create the desired look.

It always helps to shoot as many live elements  as possible on set.  Leave the CGI for the background and for the fillers.  Its easier to control the look and quality that way. Nothing can get as good as the real stuff. Not only can you use the live plates to composite, they also can be used as a good reference for the CG in terms of motion, size, look and feel.

Trivia - 

Total no. of Ads. - Four.
No. of Artists - Sixty Five.
R&D  Time - Three Months.
ToolKit - XSI, Maya, Massive, After Effects, and Flame.


Ps- Check out the other videos posted by Psyop on vimeo

DJ Hero

A disc shattering (literally) animation from London's Framestore CFC for Activision's DJ Hero. Its nice to see gaming going beyond the control pad. I really loved Rockband  and DJ Hero seems interesting.

The animation is done really well, it has a very industrial-gritty theme to it, I was expecting a very flashy disco-isque  opening cinematic..oddly enough I was even expecting a retro approach to it...dont ask me why.
But this really gets you in the groove.
The production scale seems massive and I like the way the  design of the animation revolves around all the DJ instruments and gadgets - huge scratch pads - vinyl bases - speaker towers and freeways looking  like criss crossing wires. Well designed, well though of. Love the look.

Some trivia -

Who - Framestore CFC

No. of Artists - 25 CG artists
No. of Shots - 76 shots, 
Timeline - 15 weeks 
Misc - 4800 individual dancers, 5.1 Dolby Surround, HD video.

Future UI

All of us remember Tom Cruise interacting with information using his fingers in The Minority Report. With the advent of the iPhone a couple of years back, this piece of "sci-fi" came into the consumers hands and the way we interact with cellphones changed. All the major mobile manufacturers started moving towards a multi-touch UI, which has made the human-machine interface, should I say, organic. As expected this is being eagerly awaited to be implemented on the desktops and laptops we use everyday. While there are a few solutions to go around the current mouse-trackpad-stylus but they still aren't effective enough as the way we use our cellphones.
One of main issues is ergonomics - the seating position or the usability position. Holding a 13" screen in our hands will definitely be a pain in the neck and keeping it upright like our current monitors will give you a bad shoulder after prolonged use.
The mouse and keyboard have dominated this arena for decades mainly because the programs and the operating systems we use don't give us the flexibility and the nuances of multi-touch because all of our programs are very X-Y axis oriented, if developers can add in a Z axis bringing in space and depth it would change the way we receive, store and manage our data. To actually implement it, it would require a complete OS re-write, as expected and users will have to be willing enough to shift from the conventional UI to the next generation. Even if we are, the migration time will take time unless the existing OS manufactures release a new version of their OS with these features being implemented over time. In a way we can see Mac OSX going that way with the evolving Dashboard and Expose capabilities and Microsoft if they can get it right with Windows 7.

Imagine if this migration happens. It will bring in a new era of computing and the softwares we use everyday will become intuitive and will bring in more of a fun factor. We live in exciting times.
Watch this video on 10\GUI by C.Miller explaining his concept of a radicle new user interface.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Art vs. Technology - the eternal battle

Let me start off by quoting John Lasseter "Art challenges technology, technology inspires art."

A lot of people have told me that once computers and gadgetry come in, art loses its value and its a different story all together. I strongly disagree. Let me just keep CGI in this perspective or argument.
Good art doesn't lose its value no matter what the medium is, it doesn't matter if one is using sand or electronics to create or express an idea. The genesis of art is creation.

Lets compare the CGI medium to painting, where in a painting you have an artist with canvas and colors painting a scene, with CGI, we have a team of artists using technology as a paint brush to create digital art. I would say at times its tougher to create something impressive with computer graphics, especially when concerned with huge undertaking like a movie, because you dont have one artist who is creating a masterpiece but tens or at times hundreds of talented artists working towards a single idea. One might argue saying the Director is the master-painter, but the director is a part of the core idea and working with this huge team to generate a work of art.

The challenges that current CGI tools face are the fact that they are not very artist centric, but more technical in their approach often forming a notion that its very 'un friendly'. But if we look back at the CGI softwares in the early 90's, forget the 80's, one would be surprised to see how far we have come in just about 10 years. Its a huge leap. Early faces of computer graphics seen in movies like Star Wars (the famous Death Star Trench simulation, which took months to create) was very very technical, mainly depending on lines of code and nothing else. Looking at this, how can someone compare an art form that is about 20 or maybe 30 years old to something that is hundreds of years old or even compare it to 2D animation which is about 100 years old.

CGI softwares are becoming more and more user friendly as the days go by, with interactive creation environments and node based workflows that allow you to work the way you think thus maintaining your idea or thought process. Computers are becoming increasingly fast to deliver your mental image at almost real time. At the end of the day it largely applies on the way it is utilized and how it expresses an idea and not just used because its the "in" thing.

Traditional art has evolved through the ages, for centuries man have moved on from cave painting to sculptures to various other forms. The CG industry is at its infancy. The best way to sum this up is as Rob Cook put it, “We are at the engineer's model of Computer Graphics not the drivers level.” To explain, imagine starting a Model T Ford in the early 1900's, You would need to crank the engine up with out dislocating your shoulder, then run and jump into your four wheeled wagon, pull and push levers to get going, then concentrate on the steering wheel. All of this and still moving at a snail's pace. This is where we are currently in the CGI industry. We are still a good distance away from keyless entry, push the ignition, let the cabin temperature adjust itself, floor the accelerator and race with the might of 800 horses :)

Imagine how much more futher we have to go and how exciting its going to get.

AMD - GPU Based Crowd Simulations

Everything is moving at a good pace towards GPU based computation and rendering, A graphics processing unit or GPU is a dedicated graphics rendering device. GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for a range of complex algorithms. Harnessing the power of the GPU will make computer graphics scalable.
The talk was delivered by a group of researchers from AMD who did their Crowd simulations using the ATI HD 4800. The behavior of crowds can be loosely equated to fluids. The crowd elements or characters are referred to as ‘Agents’. Here AMD created Frog-Goblin agents affectionately called ‘Froblins’
The Froblins in the demo had a global navigation attribute set on them, guiding them to a particular destination, based on their final destination and distance the Froblins ‘sense’ their surroundings and adjust their velocity based on the terrain and other agents running around in the scene. This behavior is based on the Binning Algorithm.

The Abstract for the definition of the Binning Algorithm -
“We consider the design of online master algorithms for combining the predictions from a set of experts where the absolute loss of the master is to be close to the absolute loss of the best expert. For the case when the master must produce binary predictions, the Binomial Weighting algorithm is known to be optimal when the number of experts is large. It has remained an open problem how to design master algorithms based on binomial weights when the predictions of the master are allowed to be real valued. In this paper we provide such an algorithm, called the Binning algorithm, and show that it is optimal in a relaxed setting in which we consider experts as continuous quantities. The algorithm is efficient and near-optimal in the standard experts setting.”

The agents also have a congestion behavior, they sense the other agents direction and form a pack and move together towards their universal destination. The Froblin’s direction is determined on the minimum to collision and angle in relation to the global navigation direction and keeping the shortest path in mind. The terrain, density and hazards in the environment determine the factors on the Froblin’s journey. To explain ‘hazards’ the researchers demonstrated the introduction of a ‘Ghost Froblin’ that caused the agents to panic and run all over the terrain. Then fumes were introduced in the atmosphere, the unknowing agents that walked into fumes seem to wander aimlessly while the others avoided the fumes.

Scene Management.
The scene had 60 K agents all over the terrain. When it comes to such large numbers the question of scene management comes into picture. You wouldn't want to render millions of polygons if its not seen or occluded due to terrain or distance from camera. AMD developed various geometry shaders to solve the issues. Many rendering scenarios, such as battle scenes or urban environments, require rendering of large numbers of autonomous characters. Crowd rendering in large environments presents a number of challenges, including visibility culling, animation, and level of detail (LOD) management. These have been traditionally CPU-based tasks, trading some extra CPU work for a larger reduction in the GPU load. However, the per-character cost can be a serious bottleneck in that scenario. Furthermore, CPU-side scene management is difficult if objects are simulated and animated on the GPU as they are in the Froblins demo. This demo uses Direct3D® 10.1 functionality to perform view-frustum culling, occlusion culling, and LOD selection entirely on the GPU, allowing thousands of GPU-simulated characters to be rendered with full shadows in arbitrary environments.

View Frustum Filter - Characters that are not in the Camera Frustum (P.O.V) are removed to save render loads.

Occlusion Culling - Removes occluded characters depending on provided depth buffer.

LOD Filter - Agents are filtered based on their distance from camera with 3 levels of details.
Shadow Culling - Shadow map resolution is based on the distance from camera , which works on a combination of View frustum and LOD filters.

The Froblins demo was designed to showcase many of the new techniques for character-centric entertainment made possible by the GPU available on the ATI Radeon HD 4800 GPU series. In large-scale environments with thousands of highly detailed, intelligent characters, the Froblins are concurrently simulated, animated and rendered entirely on the GPU. In order to create a beautiful and engaging environment, the demo employed many of the advanced lighting and shading techniques you might find in the very latest high-end games. Spherical light maps were used to capture high-quality global illumination. These light maps provide rich lighting response on the surface of the highly detailed terrain and characters and integrate seamlessly with the dynamic soft shadows.

Download the Froblins demo here (EXE, 324MB)
Download the Froblins video here (H264, 136MB)


AMD Froblin demo requires Windows Vista® and an ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series product with at least 512MB of video memory, ATI Catalyst™ 8.11 or higher, a dual- or quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM.

DM Fest Talk

Recently I was asked to give a short talk and participate in a panel discussion on “Digital Production” at the Digital Media Fest here in Singapore. The other panelists and speakers in my session were - David Sproxton, Co-Founder & Producer of Aardman Animations Ltd (UK), Kenneth Liang, Executive VP of TV Channel 5 Programming and Production of Mediacorp and Stefano Virgilli, Director of Ultimate Video FX and Manager of Adobe User Group Singapore.
The other speakers in the fest included Timo Vuorensola, founder and producer, Energia Productions Ltd (Finland) who is currently making the indie film ‘Iron Sky’ and Hugh Hancock, Founder and CEO, Strange Company (UK), the man behind the Machinima Project.

A great bunch of people doing some revolutionary work. I will be doing a write up detailing the other talks and the growth of Web 2.0. For now, here’s the talk I delivered.


How do you then express something as abstract as an Idea? Often times words cannot do justice to a great idea.. The mind has its own language which may not necessarily translate the IDEA in its most potent form when articulated through verbal communications. What words fail to do, the hands empowered with the right tools, can speak the best of all.
The consumption of media has been growing exponentially such that there are now more storytellers and eager audiences than there ever has been in the history of mankind. This is not an evolutionary process. Rather, there is a continuous revolution. Entertainers are constantly seeking for new dimensions to tell the story better and to make the IDEA come across in ever more exciting ways. We are living in the Digital Media era, where visual communication is at its most exciting, with the internet rocketing it to stratospheric heights.
Digital technology has empowered every single man woman and child with story telling capabilities never before possible. . A couple of years ago if an independent filmmaker wanted to make a film he would have to consider bearing the costs of a film camera with all the additional costs of processing etc. Today, consumer cameras shoot High definition for a fraction of the cost. For a higher production values filmmakers can even look at the relatively inexpensive RED camera which will shoot at up to 4K resolution, allowing for amazing visual quality to be enjoyed by all. Projects like Machinima, which brings real-time gaming technology to the desktop user to tell a story in the way he or she imagines.. Its unbelievable and amazing at the pace at which the industry is moving. This convergent technology bringing real time animation, lighting, rendering and story telling on the same table is revolutionizing the way we experience and consume media. Soon we will be making cinema at the speed of thought and we are quite close to achieving it. We have come a long way from cave paintings haven’t we?
With the current advancements and growing popularity of stereoscopic entertainment, audiences are placed in a space where the audio visual information is getting closer to our senses. Over the last 12 months most of the popular CGI, compositing and color grading tools have included a well balanced and convenient stereo work flow, thus indicating the direction at which the entertainment industry is moving, a couple of well known game publishers have already started a huge amount of development in the field of stereoscopic imagery. Though stereoscopy has been around from the 1800s it has been slowly developing itself with technology to bring convenience to the viewer .
All this growing technology at our fingertips brings artistic expression to the masses and the visual information that one experiences is overwhelming. Through this evolution, one factor has always remained at the utmost priority which can decide the making or breaking of the medium. Content. Story.
At the end of the day, all the technology, medium and formats are just tools to convey your story. You can have the best of the gizmos but if your story fails to keep the viewer hooked, everything is useless. As artists, at times we get seduced by the advancements in computer graphics and media and start exploring and showcasing the abilities of the tool, which is fine to familiarize ourselves with this new toy but lets not forget that this is an art form, a medium to express our idea. it is still the idea and story that is more important than subsurface scattering and HDRI. Those are just aspects of the technology. If you have amazing lighting and textures but a story that falls on its face, then you have no audience but yourself and some technology driven artists who are there only to gauge how long each frame of yours took to render. But at the same time you have sphere that is brought to life with brilliant story telling. You are a winner.
We have always made ‘realism’ our benchmark. Realism will always be a factor of story telling but will not be the prime goal. Keeping your audience engaged in your idea of reality is a lot more important and promising. Give your idea a life of its own. A reality of it own. Idea is always first, technology is second. With every advancement we are marking pages in history, lets give our audiences something to remember.

Production Philosophies

Production pipelines and philosophies vary from studio to studio. Boutique studios tend to have a very flexible pipeline compared to large scale studios with huge amounts of technology and work load.
Boutiques are places where one can learn more and gain good ground in terms of knowledge cause you are not just doing one thing but you help out where ever possible and your exposure to clients is a lot more compare to large studios where you are just a spoke in the wheel but then it depends from one individual to another. Generally it does help to at least know what comes before and after you in the pipeline. At times, studios need to have a leap of faith. Some studios invest in different technologies or people just to get a project and in doing so they strike gold. Some might argue but examples of studios who have done the same - Framestore CFC, Blur, Dneg, The Mill etc.

It is very important it is to maintain a good atmosphere within a studio. End of the day studio heads need to realize that you have an artist working for you because you cant do the job yourself and never give an artist the feeling that he\she is just an operator and can be replaced by anyone. If anyone thinks as such, you are in the wrong industry. Along with good atmosphere comes the interest to work and the ability to strive forward. Infrastructure is another key element in running a good studio, you need to have the right infrastructure to do the right thing....in this area there is NO compromise. The right kind of systems, accessories help the artist spend more time on his art than waiting for a process to happen and lose the creative flow. On really big projects, the teams should be broken down to smaller teams with their own supervisors so there is no bottleneck in terms of the production, for e.g. - artists don't have to wait for one Supervisor to come and check his shot, he has his own shot supervisor who does it for him and then its passed on up the hierarchy. This way it provides training for future Sups and co-ordinators.
Planning and testing the technology to be used in a project is another crucial factor, This helps you foresee some of the problems you would face further down the pipeline.
Debriefs are as important as lunch breaks they help the management to know what went wrong and where and
how things can be corrected for the next project. Never take anything for granted.

Production strategies -

Know who you client is, know what their influences are and where they come from. This will help you deliver the product at it best. Understanding your client is an important factor this will help you to know how far you can push your project and also what you can do as a company to make it better, this I have learnt from
experience.

Know what the final product should look like. This is a very important factor, it can save you time and money. This way you go straight to the idea than wandering about in the darkness for awhile and then rushing up at the dawn of realization. Know the technical complexity involved. When you know what the final product should look like you will also know what technical complications you might face down the pipeline. This helps you to plan your work and asses your infrastructure, this way you don’t promise the moon and give the client a pebble.

Schedule schedule schedule...this is very very important without a schedule you are the worst studio ever...

Once you have the above factors sorted out, sit with your technical team and the HR dept. and discuss what would be required and where you could get it from, doing this you save a lot of surprises.
HR dept.well...so that they know how many people would be required and what has to be catered for and also they know the people involved. HR dept. are very important in a company.
Set out review processes, review schedules, everyone from the Junior to the supervisors should know the review processes and the schedules involved in the project. Internal review are important. By saying internal reviews its not ONE person doing but its a group discussion to see how the project can be made better. There is no "Me" team in a
creative group, one person can never take all the technical and creative decisions. It needs to be a group, so the best result can come out. Meetings are important, with the client and with the team. With client, so that you know what they are expecting and with the team so that you know what direction you are taking.
Always have a Plan B. There needs to be a backup plan for everything because nothing works the first time. You need to have a back in case for major delays. Talking about delays - let you client know about it. Never hide anything form your client especially is you are screwing up and you know you cant fix it on time. Let you client know because its never you alone in the production, there are always others depending on your work, within the company and outside of it. If you as an artist are falling back let your supervisor know so necessary steps can be taken to avoid a disaster.
Embed your team with the pipeline in their heads. everyone needs to know how the company functions. You are in hot water if your artists just know what they have to do but don’t care about the dept. before or after them.

If you notice each and every point is co-related. It is very crucial to support and understand your team for the smooth functioning of the company.

An Evening with Jeremy Birn

The last year I met up with Jeremy Birn, the author of the well know book ‘Digital Lighting & Rendering’, who is also the Lighting TD at Pixar Animation Studios. He had visited Singapore to deliver a talk on the ‘Past, Present and Future of CGI’. Here’s a gist of it all -

I had been to a talk yesterday. A talk on 'The past, present and future of CG' by Pixar's Lighting Technical Director - Jeremy Birns, some of you might be familiar with his book - 'Digital Lighting & Rendering'.
Around 7 of us from VHQ Post along with some 100 others from the industry here, attended the talk which was held at Nanyang Polytech. By 6.30 pm Jeremy Brins took the stage after all the formal welcome speech by the organizers. Jeremy Birns - pot bellied man wearing an "Incredibles" T-shirt.

Started off with a video that had Brad Bird talking about Ratatouille and a bit on the making of. Jeremy Birns started off talking about the History of CG, from the beginning of computers, how things progressed from Apple II to Atari 800 to SGI and how Pixar became Pixar.
He also spoke about early CG and some of the first character animations (My sexy lady for the super-bowl commercial in the 80's) There was also a lot of talk on how much of influence ILM has had on Pixar and also about how Pixar was initially a part of ILM but was called 'Computer Graphics Group' until Steve Jobs bought it from George Lucas and let John Lasseter and Ed Catmull make Pixar the way it is. Then we went on to know how John Blinn wrote a program that gives you Bump Mapping which we use today, this actually shows us how young the industry really is.

Then he spoke on the current state of the industry and how people are looking at CG animated films as way of making money - a 'la some 7 to 8 penguin movies that came out at the same time. But he says that at Pixar, from their first animated film - Luxor Jr. to Ratatouille, all they are worried about is the story, then comes the technology, if the story fails...no matter what technology you use it'll fall apart eg. Final Fantasy - Spirits Within, Polar Express etc. He also spoke about how Disney actually killed 2D animation after Lion King because they thought the medium was not required anymore, which was wrong because it was their story and execution that killed it. But now after Pixar became a part of Disney things have changed....why? because Lasseter and Catmull are now looking at Disney operations, Disney might have bought Pixar but its Pixar's management thats running it. So as one of their first steps they reopened Disney's 2D division.
As for the future of CG, after one of the audience members asked him, he said outsourcing will not change the industry, it might just move the work around, but for how long? because the work that is being outsourced isn't Technically challenging work its just laborious work soon technology will automate it and they wouldn't need to out source it anymore cos it'll be all automated. For eg. The Foundry already has a Furnace plugin that assists in the automation of rotoscopy...not that it'll al be done by the software but you need lesser people to do it. Companies in India, or china can join the big league if they emphasize on quality not quantity (he actually said this). because end
of the day quality wins...and history has shown it.

After the seminar, we had some refreshments. At this point of time Jeremy Birns was just sitting around, so I went up to him and we had a real good 20-25 min conversation about the industry and about Pixar's lighting Pipeline. He said that for lighting they heavily depend on Shake, a highly customized version of shake, and everything they can think of is rendered in passes and all lighting artists use their 3D software and keep switching between shake for their final lights. I also asked him about LPics (if you remember the GPU based lighting engine which gave almost realtime feedback, that had a paper at SIGGRAPH 2006) he said they have just tested it and are in the process of implementing it in the pipeline as its still under further development. By the way he said Pixar doesn't use a Normal map pass for lighting as it doesn't give good results with Fur and hair. After all this, I got a SIGNED COPY OF 'The Art of Ratatouille' from Jeremy Birns.

Anyways, after the talk I was pondering about the whole thing and my conclusion - The guys who first pioneered are still around and are still making stuff for us to use and advance forward. I personally think that we should take some amount of responsibility and pick up the baton and continue to contribute to this amazing society than just use it as a tool everyday. Looking at the history of CG it is very young and its still new. It was just 20 years back that people were still modeling with lines of code and mathematical equations than just having a fancy UI. Its just 20 years back that the first time people saw Photoshop on a Macintosh, which gave rise to the compositing softwares we have today. The industry is still growing globally....and we as artists, we as members of this industry should take it as our responsibility to build and push this technology higher so that the generation after us can take it to even higher heights, if we drop the baton now, we fall back and lose our place in history.

Stereoscopy - Two sides of a story

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Stereoscopic imagery in the movie industry. James Cameron making The Avatar in Stereo, commonly called 3D, but also commonly confused with Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), Pixar has also lined up a couple of animated movies to be released over the next couple of years which are going to be made in Stereo.

Stereoscopy as wikipedia would say it - Stereoscopy, stereoscopic imaging or 3-D (three-dimensional) imaging is any technique capable of recording three-dimensional visual information or creating the illusion of depth in an image. The illusion of depth in a photograph, movie, or other two-dimensional image is created by presenting a slightly different image to each eye. Many 3D displays use this method to convey images. It was first invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1840.

The way I see it, the future of entertainment is definitely going to be Stereo, Why? Because of the fact that people always look towards something being as real as possible. With the improvisation of technology, directors and producers now make convincing visual effects to 'fool' the audience into believing the story, the advances in the field of audio give you the aural sense of being in the space and thus making the experience more convincing.
The next step is obviously the visual arena and nothing can put you in the environment as good Stereo can. The experience is good enough to take you away from all reality... as long as its good and well calculated stereo or else your head will split into two in a couple of seconds and you'll be cock-eyed for the rest of your life. The thing about stereo is the way you capture it, is very critical, it can define the parallax of your image, the amount of "3D-ness" required. A lot of compositing softwares such as the Foundry's Nuke and color grading softwares such as Assimilate's Scratch support and cater to Stereo compositing and color grading, due to the growing interest in the field.

I happened to be lucky to actually work with stereoscopic imagery in 2005 with Mr. Paul Bourke, who works a lot with stereo panoramas and High Dynamic Range Imagery (HDRI). The experience is simply brilliant and nothing can come close to it. We were working on a stereo panoramas of the Hampi acheological site in India, where stereo panos were captured and then we composited CGI characters, who were also rendered in stereo through our CGI softwares and then composited on to the panoramas.
The applications of stereo is infinite, it can help scientists in fields of research and development. Archeologists can look at ancient remains which can be reconstructed in stereo, to be studied as though it still exists intact. Medical professionals can operate with better accuracy using stereo representations of the insides of the human body. It can help to take flight/driving simulators to the next level with its realistic depictions of space and time.
In terms of entertainment its boundless. I visited the Stereo show at Sentosa Island in Singapore, where you not only have a stereo film playing but also other elements such as water and wind to make the experience really fun.
Maybe in the near future we would be using stereo contact lenses to give us the full effect of stereoscopy instead of the aviator like looking goggles. The implications are boundless.
The future for sure is going to be amazing. Its only a matter of time before the technology becomes widespread, it already is, with the amount of movies lined up.

To more about how stereo works visit here.