(Special Prize of the Jury) Bjork's Nature Is Ancient, directed by Lynn Fox and produced by Blue Source Films. This music video features intricate Adam and Eve creatures that have an abstract, primitive form, created using Maya and a plug-in shader developed in-house. Image courtesy Blue Source Films.
(Best Direction) The ChubbChubbs, directed by Eric Armstrong, Jacquie Barnbrook, and Jeff Wolverton of Sony Pictures Imageworks. In the animated short film, the earnest hero Meeper valiantly tries to warn the patrons of an intergalactic watering hole of impending danger. The production was created with Maya and proprietary software. Image courtesy Sony Pictures Imageworks.
The crème de la crème of computer graphics were honored at this year's Imagina Awards, the traditional high point of the Imagina international festival for digital images, held annually in Monaco. This year, more than 380 works were submitted for the competition, including feature films, short animations, music videos, and commercials, illustrating the wide variety of computer graphics being used today.
Students from Supinfocom, a computer graphics school in Valenciennes, France, dominated the competition, winning three of the 10 prizes, including the Grand Prize for "Tim Tom," a short film that pays homage to stop motion and digital techniques introduced by animation pioneer Tex Avery.
More than 1800 professionals and students attended the conferences, exhibition, and awards ceremony at Imagina, often referred to the SIGGRAPH of Europe. This year, a new emphasis was given to video games, with session topics covering research in artificial intelligence, the sociology of massively multiplayer games, and future directions for game content and interactivity. Interactive television and applications for broadband Web and mobile devices were also widely emphasized. —Katherine Tyrka, European correspondent for Computer Graphics World.
(Best Commercial) Dolce Vita, directed by Bruno Aveillan and produced by Quad for the advertising agency Australie. The digital effects illustrated by this three-image sequence were created by La Maison, which used Softimage XSI for the CGI and inferno for compositing. © 2002 Australie, Quad.
(Best Animation) Sprout, directed by Scott Peterson and produced by Michael Garner of PDI/Dreamworks. This short was created with various software programs, including flu, PDI/Dreamworks' proprietary fluid simulator. Image courtesy PDI/Dreamworks.
(Best Feature Film) Stuart Little 2 by Eric Armstrong, Jerome Chen, Jay Redd, and Michelle Murdocca of Sony Pictures ImageWorks. Imageworks extended its fur, feather, and cloth technology to generate the film's leading characters. Image courtesy Sony Pictures Imageworks.
(Best Rendering) Robota, directed by François Roland and Joe Baar, and produced by Sparkling, a subsidiary of the French animation facility Sparx. The effects and animation in this film were created with Maya, RenderMan, flame, and After Effects. Image courtesy Sparkling.