SIGGRAPH, Always a Great Show

I am finally recovered from the crazy-busy week that was SIGGRAPH. In fact, SIGGRAPH for me starts in May and doesnt quite end until a good week after the show ends. At CGW, SIGGRAPH is much more than a five-day event. Emails begin to double in quantity, then triple, as vendors unveil their show plans and begin to reveal new products. Of course, the CGW SIGGRAPH issue is always larger and more robust than our typical issues. And, for the past several years, we have taken on the production of the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival guide - no small task, either.

I am now trying to decompress - finally. But before I do, I wanted to provide some of my thoughts and observations from the show. And then I will get ready to reset the calendar for next years event in Vancouver.

Saturday, June 20 After a whopping four hours of sleep, I left my house for the airport at 4:30 am. The heat wave was still blanketing the East Coast, and the outside temperature was 85 degrees in New Hampshire! After an uneventful flight (thank God!) I arrived in Anaheim to a nice, cool day - at least the heat and mugginess did not follow me.

After a meeting, it was time to do the annual CGW Get Connected! Event for the SIGGRAPH Student Volunteers. This marks the sixth time CGW has done this event, and this year there were approximately 300 students in the room to hear presentations by our all-star panel: Jenny Fulle, founder of The Creative-Cartel; John DesJardin, visual effects supervisor; Bobby Podesta, CCO of ToyTalk (formerly of Pixar), and Guy Williams, visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital. These people have worked on a ton of tentpole films: The Matrix, Ghost Rider, Surfs Up, Spider-Man, Stuart Little, Batman Returns, A Bugs Life, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Mission Impossible: II, The Lord of the Rings, I, Robot, King Kong, Iron Man 3, The Avengers, The Hunger Games, and more. These industry rock stars discussed their personal journeys within the visual effects realm, providing advice and information that is sure to help the students in their own journeys. The students were attentive and embraced the opportunity to hear from these experts. Afterward, they had the chance to ask the panel questions in a Q&A that, as always, had to be cut short due to time. But, despite their busy schedules (John DJ DesJardin had driven up to the session directly from Comic-Con, then drove back after the presentation), the presenters stayed until the last students question was answered after the students approached the stage following the session. My thanks goes out to them for graciously giving their time back to the students!

At the Get Connected! Session, CGW raffled off a ton of prizes, including a DreamColor monitor (from HP) and three high-end graphics cards (one from Nvidia and two from AMD). Plus, we had a bunch of other items from Weta, The Creative-Cartel, and Sony Pictures, including DVDs and cool swag from the new Smurfs movie! Then the students were treated to a pizza party co-sponsored by CGW.

Sunday, July 21 SIGGRAPH held its third Business Symposium, which started early Sunday morning and lasted until about dinnertime. CGW long-time contributor Evan Hirsch (Executive Creative Director, Engine Co. 4) served as this years Business Symposium Chair. The Symposium is geared to higher-level execs and studio heads. To encourage open discussion, only a handful of select press were invited, including me. The daylong event featured discussion on platforms and content creation/delivery. A really dynamic speaker was Captain Thomas Chaby, executive officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center who discussed disruption on the battlefield - with the takeaway obviously being dealing with unplanned events in this industry. There were other discussions, too. But there were two items of particular interest. The first encouraged attendees to stay linked together via IntroNetworks. Providing the information was Mark Sylvester, CEO of IntroNetworks. In case that name sounds familiar, it is. He was a co-founder of Wavefront Technologies. Attendees were encouraged to use the community-building software, given to them free of charge for the year. The other was a mentoring program, and the execs in the room were encouraged to mentor or become mentorees; SIGGRAPH attendees were also prompted to sign up, so that matches could be found, pairing up those with common interests and objectives. What a fantastic idea!

Monday, July 22 The day started when I met with HP in their suite at the hotel. The company was showing off their latest Z Workstation: the HP Z230, in a tower offering and a small form factor. Pricing starts at $999 for quad-core configurations, and they are expected to be available this month. HP also showed off the first professional monitors of the new Z Display family: the HP Z22i, Z23i and Z24i IPS Displays.

I then zipped to the pressroom to get my badge. En route to the keynote, I stopped at a stand that had My first SIGGRAPH was ribbons. I found mine (1998, Orlando). Then I dashed to the keynote. Wow! How fabulous it was to take a trip down memory lane with giants in the film industry. They were there to share their experiences and early work - really early work, most of which was their student films.

I then had a speed dating session with vendors outside the pressroom. It was kind of nice not having to run around the show floor to various booths. Instead, I sat at a table and they played musical vendor, rotating in and out. Imagination Technologies provided sneak previews of its Caustic Visualizer for Maya and Max, and discussed its developments in raytraced graphics. PipelineFX talked about Qube 6.5, its renderfarm management software, released recently. Chaos Group continued to impress with its V-Ray renderer. Also impressive was Fabric Engine. I got a small preview of what they were doing last year, and it was

LINK:	http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2013/SIGGRAPH-Always-a-Great-Show...
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