Speakers - PIXELvienna6

Benjamin worked as cutter for several austrian production companies and television networks, Such as Dor-Film, ATV, Pro7 Austria, PulsTV and others, before studying animation at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.
In 2011 he founded the group “Neuer Österreichischer Trickfilm” together with Johannes Schiehsl ans Conrad Tambour. His film HELDENKNAZLER has won many awards at international film festivals. He directed the belgium-german-austrian television series “Lilly The Witch” as well as the title sequence for the new Tom Hanks-movie “A Hologram for the King”. Currently he is working on animation sequences for the documentary “Tracking Edith” by Peter Stephan Jungk.

Johannes Schiehsl started doing his first animated films with Lego and colored paper at the age of twelve. He created the legendary point-n-click adventure game “Professor Brösl” and the award winning 3d animation film “Fintio” together with Conrad Tambour during his graphic design studies at the “Höhere Graphische Vienna”.

He went to the Czech Republic to start his animation studies in 2005, and continued his studies at the renowned Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, where he created several very successfull short films “A6/A9”, “Birdstrike” und “Zoopraxiscope”.

His graduation short film “366 Tage” was screened at many festivals and received several awards. It became the first animated film ever to be nominated for an Austrian Film Award. The story was inspired by Johannes’ own social work service as medic for the red cross.

Since then he worked as a director on the series “Lilly the Witch” and “Ich kenne ein Tier” and is currently developing his next film. He is honoree of the culture price by state of Lower-Austria and is teaching animation in Vienna and Hagenberg.

With now over 15 years experience in the fields of visualization, modeling and programing Matthias F. Richter founded ticket01 in 2006. Since then he has developed a vast number of customized solutions for customers in the whole CGI industry. Apart from a complete cluster-rendering solution that proves its value in production use every day ticket01 has developed plug-ins for Maya, 3dsmax and Softimage for international customers. In the course of years ticket01 has also designed and crafted several plug-ins like Stitch, Boole, Konstrukt and more that have become popular tools in the fields of architecture, the automotive industry and the games industry. Matthias also works as a consultant to assist TDs and developers in implementing custom in-house tools. He also gives courses at several universities and helps students in any field to push the limits by using ticket01’s plug-ins or creating their own.

• Talk - A hands-on introduction to Maya development using MEL and the C++/Python API

  This talk aims on giving everybody an understanding of how to quickly create valuable Maya plug-ins that can massively improve your production pipeline. Whether you want to write a simple data importer or exporter or you need to implement the latest solver in cloth simulation – this talk will get you started. After a presentation of Maya’s most important features – the nodes and the Dependency Graph – in a nutshell, Matthias will illustrate what language to use best for different tasks and how to even combine them to harness their full potential. The talk will be accompanied by lots of easy to understand code examples in all three languages. Experience in any high-level programming language is beneficial but not necessary.

Conrad Tambour attended the Höhere Graphische Bundes- Lehr und Versuchsanstalt Wien XIV and graduated with a degree in graphic design.
In 2002 he released the computer game “Professor Brösl”, which he codeveloped with Johannes Schiehsl and got nominated for the Golden Nica at Ars-Electronica.
Subsequently he was working as an animator for e-learning Projekt DMA of Kunstuniversität Linz and began to study animation at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.
His graduation film “The Visit” featuring the voices of well known Austrian actors Erni Mangold, Erwin Steinhauer, Klaus Ofczarek and Ingrid Burkhard was awarded with many prices and received international attention at more than 70 festivals.
In 2011 together with colleagues Benjamin Swiczinsky and Johannes Schiehsl he founded the animation studio “Neuer Österreichischer Trickfilm” that focuses on establishing a story driven animation business in Austria.
Since then he has worked on numerous projects for the company and as a director of the TV series “Lilly the Witch”.
Conrad Tambour is a honoree of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau prize. He teaches Visual Concepts and Design at the FH Hagenberg”

Andreas Deja was born in Germany and started his animation career with working under Eric Larson, one of Disney’s legendary “nine old men”.
Deja completed several tests and went on to do early character design, costume research and animation for “The Black Cauldron.” His next assignment was on “The Great Mouse Detective,” for which he animated the mouse queen and her robotic twin. Deja helped design many of the characters for “Oliver & Company” and did some animation before spending a year in London as a lead animator on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”. On “The Little Mermaid,” Deja oversaw the animation of Triton, a powerful figure that required expert skills in draftsmanship and acting ability. For Disney’s Academy Award-winning animated musical “Beauty and the Beast,” he served as the supervising animator for the first of his many Disney villains, the very pompous and narrow-minded Gaston.
Deja continued to explore his darker side by designing and animating the evil vizier, Jafar for Disney’s animated-musical hit, “Aladdin” (1992). He went on to supervise the animation of the power-hungry villain, Scar, in “The Lion King,” which has become not only The Walt Disney Studios’ most successful film, but quickly earned a place as one of the industry’s biggest films of all time. For his next assignment, Deja relocated to Disney’s Paris animation facility for a stint overseeing the animation of Mickey Mouse in the Oscar nominated short “Runaway Brain”.
Following that, he returned to Burbank, where he took on the challenging assignment of bringing life and personality to the title hero in “Hercules.” He went on to design and supervise the animation for Lilo, in “Lilo & Stitch,” which has been hailed as one of the Studio’s most entertaining and imaginative features.
Deja contributed animation for several characters in Disney’s live-action/animated musical “Enchanted,” and served as one of the supervising animators on Goofy’s big-screen return in the short film, “How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre.” He was a supervising animator on Disney’s hand-drawn animated feature, “The Princess and the Frog”.
Deja supervised the animation of Tigger for a new Winnie the Pooh feature, which was released theatricaly in 2011.
In 2007, he was honored with the prestigious Winsor McKay Award

• Talk - Lessons from Disney’s Master Animators

  Walt Disney’s group of animators, also known as “The Nine Old Men”, were top
  artists in their field. Their high standards for character animation for feature films as well as shorts set the bar for the medium.
  Taking a close look at their techniques and individual styles reveals how important and relevant their contributions are to anyone who is working in animation today.
  No matter if you are a CG artist, a stop motion or traditional animator, there are valuable lessons to be learned from these Hollywood pioneers.

Simon Yuen, originally from Hong Kong, grew up in Los Angeles, United States. With a computer science and an art background, Simon has worked in the entertainment industry creating visual effects for 14 years. Specializes in character creations, he is currently a Lead Character TD at Blizzard Cinematics. Simon was previously Lead and Senior Character TD at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Dreamworks Animation, and among many other CG studios. Some of his movie credits includes: Kung Fu Panda 2, Hancock, Spiderman 3, Monster House, The Cave, Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, Reign of Fire… and many more.

• Talk - Realistic Deformations with Pose Space Deformation

  In creating 3D characters, one of the most challenging issues is creating high quality and realistic deformations. Most current tools today suffer from a lack of control, ease of use, and due to the lack of functionality, fails to deliver realistic results. This is where Pose Space Deformation (PSD) comes in. It is a method that allows great direct-ability and overall fast performance compare to most muscle / skin simulation solutions. Pose space deformation also yields great results that typical skinning solutions alone cannot achieve. In this presentation, we will go into great details of what PSD is, how does it work, and what you can achieve with this method based on real world visual effects examples.

Helge Maus works with his company pixeltrain (www.pixeltrain.de) as 3D-/VFX artist, author and trainer in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Most of his work is done with Autodesk Maya, Maxon Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effetcs and The Foundry Nuke. Moreover he teaches a couple of additional software like Vue xStream, Syntheyes and 3D-Coat.

He has worked for more than 12 years as a freelancer for Adobe Systems and is a member of the beta team for Adobe After Effects and Maxon Cinema 4D. As a trainer he has worked with clients like JURA AG, Vitra, Jung-von-Matt, adwerk GmbH, FES GmbH and many more international companies. His books and video-trainings are published by Addision-Wesley and Galileo Press.

• Talk - Workflow solutions with Cinema 4D and Vue xStream

  In the last couple of years Maxon Cinema 4D has grown to a powerful and production-ready 3D- and Animationtool. Because of its modular design it offers for every 3D- and VFX-Artist powerful extensions that make everday tasks quickly to solve. Besides convenient tools the animation system of Maxon Cinema 4D R13 includes a complete NLA- and motion-layer-system. In release R13 the character tools are extended by a powerful template-driven rigging system and an easy to use cmotion walkcycle generator. Moreover it offers an intuitive user interface and is extremely stable.

  E-on Vue xStream’s strengths lie in working with natural phenomena such as landscapes, vegetation, clouds and atmospheres. Therefore, this tool is often used in matte painting and Set-Extensions. Hollywood-Productions like Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Australia and Terminator Salvation to name just a few are demonstrative examples of the powerful effects E-on Vue xStreams is able to create.

  In this workshop Helge Maus shows possible workflows between Cinema 4D and Vue xStream, which of course are adaptable for other 3D applications.

Christian De Vita was born in Rome in 1973. Having studied cinematography at the prestigious Instituto della Cinematografia e Televisione in Rome, where he specialises in animation hoping for a carrier in comics.
Making full use of his dual nationality Christian moves to London. Here he immediately finds work at Ealing Animation thanks to grandfather of British animation and occasional drinking mate, Bob Godfrey.
After working on several television series for the likes of Telemagination and TVC Vagra and having produced interstitials for Channel 4 sports programmes he joins a small crew animating U2’s promo Hold Me Kiss Me Thrill Me Kill Me produced for the movie Batman Forever. This is followed by Warner Brothers’ Space Jam. Christian proceeds to work on number of run of the mill television series for the BBC, CITV and Cartoon Network that help hone his skills as director and storyboard artist.
With Onehandclapping he produced both animation and live-action projects: short films for anti-vivisection charities, comedy shorts for Nickelodeon, pop promos for the likes of Sony BMG, Columbia Records, Universal, commercials for Tribal DDB and COI, as well as writing and producing shorts for Warner Bros. Entertainment amongst many.
It is in 2007 that Christian is asked to join the production of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox; he temporarily leaves McKeown-DeVita to join the story team then works directly with Wes from Paris on leading the team.
In 2009 and 2010 Christian fulfills a one of his ambitions and works on storyboards for Tim Burton on his upcoming Disney stop-motion movie Frankenweenie. Christian is currently head of story at TeamTo in Paris working on the new series of Cartoon Network’s Angelo Rules!

• Talk - Creating the story of Fantastic Mr Fox and Tim Burtons Frankenweenie

  Christian will be talking about his work as a story artist. What makes a good story and how to convey feelings with images. This includes staging, lighting, editing, compostition and many other things. He will do this with examples from is work experience, showing many examples to illustrate the concepts visually.

Beginning in 2005, Cornelia Denk worked as a researcher on pre-computed global illumination algorithms for RTT. She continued her work as Research Manager from 2008 to 2010. Denk’s new role as Technology & Innovation Manager involves technical trends and innovation strategy. She is also responsible for building up strategic partnerships with industry accounts and universities. Denk has a degree in Computer Science and Multimedia, which she obtained at University of Applied Science Augsburg, Germany.

• Talk - The Power of High-end Visualization in Virtual Material Design

  Digital materials are key for high-end visualization in many industries – but how to digitize and render real, physical samples efficiently? How to provide the correctness to build up future-proof material libraries and automate processes? Where to draw the line between high performance visualization and simulation? Digital samples need to be modified and edited in an intuitive, creative manner. Different technologies are already available to handle these challenges and support the creative work of material designers and artists. Check out the latest developments and their applications.

Roman Saravia is co-founder and Head of CG at FriendlyFire with 25 years experience in CG productions. He was one of the first who established 3D solutions for the Austrian advertising market.

• Talk - Reanimating John Lennon

  This talk is about bringing dead celebrities back to life. Using the example of John Lennon, FriendlyFire will talk about their experiences, stumbling blocks during the development and the dogged fight in the uncanny valley.

London based visual effects artist Martin has worked in various fields of the creative media industry before pursuing a career in computer graphics. Originally from Graz, he gained experience in Sweden, Ireland and New York as motion graphics artist, editor and interactive installation designer. He quickly realized that he is passionate about visual effects and moved to Bournemouth/UK to study Digital Effects.

For the past 4 years he has been working as a Lead Technical Director for Framestore London, one of Europe’s biggest visual effects studios. He has specialized on look development, lighting and effects animation and has been involved in several award winning commercials. Early this year, he was Lead Effects Technical Director for “Coke Siege”, Coca Cola’s full CG Superbowl commercial. He was also involved in creating “The Tale of the Three Brothers”, a stylized sequence for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Part 1” and was CG Lead for Kia’s award winning commercial “This or That”, creating photoreal, human-sized hamsters rapping the streets of New York.

• Talk - Fur, feathers and effects

  Martin will be talking about how Framestore London uses Sidefx Houdini to create high-end visual effects for advertising. He will show examples and breakdowns from past commercials such as “Coca Cola Siege” and explain how they took advantage of Houdini’s procedural work flow and node-based interface.

Peter started out at Digic Pictures as Shot Technical Director (TD), then played a major role in helping to introduce the Massive crowd simulation software into Digic’s pipeline. Coming from a diverse background that includes a Masters degree from Australia’s prestigious film-school AFTRS, Peter this year gets his first chance at directing one of Digic’s high-profile projects – although that is something he cannot yet talk about.

• Talk - From Movie to Pixel

  a “galactic zoom” into digital filmmaking at Digic Pictures.

  In this diverse talk that should have something interesting for everyone, Digic’s Peter Sved will talk about the digital filmmaking process at Digic, a company that specializes in top-end, fully 3D rendered game-cinematics. Starting with the broader aspects and issues around script and animatic development, he will go through the shot assembly process, all the way to final renders, making some interesting stops along the way, including his experiences with Massive.

Stepan Kment holds a MSc. degree in computer graphics programming from Czech
Technical University in Prague.
After studies, he worked in DMP, prestigious DVD mastering studio, where he designed and
adapted menu graphics for hundreds of DVD’s for whole world, including Lord of the rings special
edition among others. He designed and mastered European first DVDs with HD content as early as
in 2004-2005.
He is the lead motion capture engineer at Bohemia Interactive currently. He optimized their Vicon
setup and recorded moves for various movies, games and commercials, including Wanted (feat.
Angelina Jolie), famous Assassin’s Creed 2 Venezia teaser video; recorded motion of men, horses
and even dogs.
These days, he is working hard on real time pipeline of BI’s brand new Raptor motion capture
system from Motion Analysis, the third BI operates.

• Talk - The challenging art of freedom

  The presentation deals with the development challenges associated with creating an openly structured gameplay in a military simulation game. It provides overview and assessment of general requirements, technological limitations and design solutions employed in the development of the Bohemia Interactive’s past titles. Animations and environment are discussed in greater detail.
  An insight to real time animation presentation subsystem in Arma engine is provided. Attendees will be given various examples and case analyses of real in-game situations, which may help them either to design gameplay to avoid possible issues or to design animation subsystem of their real-time engine in order to handle such issues acceptably.
  The overview of the terrain creation method is provided as another example of the unique approach to Bohemia Interactive’s gaming projects. The requirements of game design and relationships of the gameplay and terrain are widely discussed, with the in-game examples of the resulting virtual landscapes. Also, the AI-related aspects of the terrain design are brought to attention of the attendees.
  The speech is concluded by the examples of the discussed areas in the development in Arma 3. The acceptable level of abstraction in a game presentation is discussed as a viable approach in a large-scale simulation.

Ivan Buchta currently works as a creative director of Arma 3 in the company’s studio in
Brno.
He holds an MSc. Degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of J. E. Purkyne in Usti
nad Labem. During his studies, he took part in analysis of old maps and use of GIS outputs in
the game engine of Operation Flashpoint. He cooperated on several community modifications of
Operation Flashpoint, externally constributed to the terrain development of the tactical military
simulation tools Virtual Battlespace (VBS) 1 and 2.
In the independent Czech game developer Bohemia Interactive, he took part in the development
of Arma 1 and its expansion Queen’s Gambit as terrain designer. He also worked as lead designer
for Arma 2 and Operation Arrowhead military games. He currently focuses on taking the hardcore
tactical simulation to a new level with Arma 3.

• Talk - The challenging art of freedom

  The presentation deals with the development challenges associated with creating an openly structured gameplay in a military simulation game. It provides overview and assessment of general requirements, technological limitations and design solutions employed in the development of the Bohemia Interactive’s past titles. Animations and environment are discussed in greater detail.
  An insight to real time animation presentation subsystem in Arma engine is provided. Attendees will be given various examples and case analyses of real in-game situations, which may help them either to design gameplay to avoid possible issues or to design animation subsystem of their real-time engine in order to handle such issues acceptably.
  The overview of the terrain creation method is provided as another example of the unique approach to Bohemia Interactive’s gaming projects. The requirements of game design and relationships of the gameplay and terrain are widely discussed, with the in-game examples of the resulting virtual landscapes. Also, the AI-related aspects of the terrain design are brought to attention of the attendees.
  The speech is concluded by the examples of the discussed areas in the development in Arma 3. The acceptable level of abstraction in a game presentation is discussed as a viable approach in a large-scale simulation.

• Talk - The Visual Effects of “We are the night”

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  “We are the night”, starring Nina Hoss and Karoline Herfurth, is the first german attempt at a vampire movie in a long time. VFX Supervisor Alex Lemke will talk about the creation of about 250 Shots for the film, covering a wide variety of techniques, and the special challenges of producing them.

Currently, Carl is a Unity evangelist at the award wining company Unity Technologies. Carl has 10 years experience working in game development and game education around the world. As an Autodesk Certified Instructor and Unity Ninja, Carl has taught specialized courses on game development for educational institutes and leading game studios. At “The Gaming and Animation Institute of Fredericton” college Carl runs the eMentorship program that provides students workshops on game development to boost the quality of their portfolio.

• Talk - Unity

  Hands-on demonstration on the development of a multiple platform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, web, Facebook and standalone. The steps include but not limited: programming, art assets import and updating, particles, GUI, AI and the build for multiplatform.

Born in 1971 at Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille, Eric de Broche des Combes is an architect who has worked with some of the most respected architectural studios in the world, creating strikingly emotive vizualisation for over fifteen years. Eric made his first renderings for architects in his native France while still a student at the School of Architecture in Marseille. Following graduation, Eric moved to Paris and established Auralab, which, with its strong emphasis on graphic design over pure 3D, went on to seduce architecture firms such as OMA, MVRDV or REX to name just a few.
After several successful years as Auralab, he formed Luxigon with three other architects and designers. Since it’s inception in 2007, it has quickly become one of the leading studios in its field.

• Talk - Architectural visualization: then, now and the future

  A brief history of architectural representation and visions of what may be still to come.

With more than 10 years of production experience in computer animation, Juergen Hagler is an Associate Professor at the Department of Digital Media at Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. He became the programme coordinator for the Digital Arts master’s degree programme in 2009. Since 2008 he is actively involved at Prix Ars Electronic and since 2009 he is curator of Ars Electronica Animation Festival.

• Talk - Evolution of the Prix-ArsElectronica

  Evolution of the Prix-ArsElectronica with focus on Computeranimation.
  Presentation of the 2011 selection.