Turin, Italy - Some of the most visionary people in computer graphics, visual effects,
and computer animation will gather in Turin, Italy, from November 4 to 7,
for the four-day conference on digital convergency called
VIEW, following the annual film festival October 30 to November 1.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary as Italy’s leading computer graphics
symposium, VIEW offers sessions with award-winning talent from Pixar
Animation Studios, Electronic Arts, Industrial Light & Magic, Sony
Pictures Imageworks, Rainmaker, Double Negative, and Blue Sky Studios.
“Every year, the conference is special,” says conference director Maria-Elena Gutierrez, “but I’m especially excited by the group of people who have agreed to join us this year.”
Keynoting the conference is composer Michael Giacchino, who received an Oscar nomination in 2008 for his score for Ratatouille. Earlier this year, audiences heard Giacchino’s original scores in the films Up and Star Trek and the TV series “Lost” and “Fringe.”
Highlighting the conference are computer graphics pioneers Glenn Entis, who co-founded PDI, was chief visual and technology officer at Electronic Arts, and now heads a digital media business investment fund, and Ken Perlin, 2008 recipient of the computer graphics achievement award from SIGGRAPH and professor in the media research laboratory at New York University.
VIEW is also thrilled to present visual effects award winners, Industrial Light & Magic’s Roger Guyett, who supervised effects for Star Trek and Jeff White, associate visual effects supervisor for Transformers 2. And for gamers, Henry LaBounta, chief visual officer at Black Box, an Electronic Arts studio; and EA’s Jonathan Knight who will present “Dante’s Inferno.”
In 2009, stereo 3D went mainstream, and the VIEW conference is excited to announce that representatives from three studios will talk about five features animated with computer graphics and projected in stereo 3D. Bob Whitehill, stereoscopic supervisor at Pixar presents three-dimensional storytelling in Up, Toy Story and Toy Story 2: Jayme Wilkinson, stereoscropic supervisor at Blue Sky Studios, sends Ice Age into stereo 3D; and Rob Bredow, CTO, and Danny Dimian, senior CG supervisor, at Sony Pictures Imageworks describe the process of making Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. These films will all be screened in stereo 3D during ViewFest along with Disney’s A Christmas Carol.
The conference complements the artistry from these studios with practical workshops on animation with animators from Pixar and Double Negative, augmented reality with Turin’s own SEA02, Pixar’s RenderMan, Google’s Sketchup, and NVIDIA’s GPU technology. In addition, Brenda Harger, professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University, returns to lead her popular improvisational acting seminar for animators.
“We’re so proud that artists and innovators from around the world choose to spend time with us during what has become such a seminal event in computer graphics in Italy,” Gutierrez says. “I think this year we will have the best conference ever.”