Talks - PIXELvienna12

Best of ACGA
Expanded Animation Conference Selection
VFX Class Film Academy Vienna Showcase
Animation Class University of Applied Arts Vienna Showcase
Case Study Nachsaison by Daniela Leitner

After a brief introduction participants are invited to create and draw their own flip books.

How I got into the industry, what I feel has been most beneficial to staying in it, and dealing with contract extensions and imposter syndrome. I would like to keep it quite informal, so more Q&A than speech.

In my talk, I will briefly go through the variety of projects that I have been a part of over the years; from 2D to 3D, from art shorts to international TV-series.
I will devote the better part to the recent years working with the LEGO “Ninjago” TV-series for Wil Film, and how we have made virtual plastic bricks with yellow faces come to life; from a pipeline perspective, production-wise – and especially in my job as a director on the show, from the very first season up until now, as we are creating Season 8 at full throttle.
In that context, I will speak about how I execute my job, when the task at hand is to create strong emotions, believability and passion in that strange, artificial universe, build on pixels and paper: Animation.

Nicolas will take you on a journey through their 17 years of experience in the film industry. How they started, their failures, their sucesses, how they made it and what they did get.

I will talk through how we designed creature for Fantastic Beasts and King Kong Skull Island.

After showing some of his professional work, Brian will take his audience through a character design development as well as share insights into his design process.

For more than 10 years, Blender’s popularity has grown alongside the Open Movies created at Blender Institute. In this presentation, Francesco Siddi will illustrate the unique blend of art and technology that made the latest production, Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, an online success.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn the basics to create a complete narrative from start to finish – in only three panels. Cesare Asaro (artist, Finding Frank and His Friend) and Kirstie Shepherd (writer, Spaceman Jax: Through the Mantagon Minefield) will guide you through the mechanics of visual storytelling so you can make an immediate connection with your audience, get right to the heart of your narrative, and create stories that appeal to a wide audience. Working with your own digital equipment – or paper and pen – by the end of the workshop you’ll have a final product that you can share right away.

The journey of how the indie animation studio, Sun Creature, made the fantasy webseries, Tales of Alethrion, by using and exploring the possibilities of crossmedia and crowdfunding campaigns. Since then, the studio has grown bigger and is now making feature films, series, and more, and has become well established.

Computer generated images have become a natural part of our lives and, at the same time, 3D printing technology is maturing and enables producing prints using various materials with a wide range of appearances. In this talk, I summarize some of my research on the tech behind generating photorealistic images and controlling appearance of 3D prints. I show that these two seemingly different topics share the same basis: accurate simulation of the behavior of light. Origins of this computational problem can be traced back to the development of first nuclear weapons in the Manhattan project, and to names like von Neumann, Fermi, or Ulam. I will show how some of the lessons learned from the very origins have been used to boost performance of production renderers.

Old Man’s Journey, our fourth game, was special from its kick-start from Indie Fund to winning an Apple Design Award shortly after launch. After 10 years of developing games with small teams, we used all our experience to produce a game that is close to our hearts and was able to find an audience in the currently crowded market. We used clear constraints and an iterative development cycle to produce a touching and personal experience for our players. From the beginning, we had the games market presence and PR strategy in mind and were able to reach players, journalists, and store editors through development. Now, almost one year after its launch, I will look back and share our experience, knowledge, and numbers from Old Man’s Journey.

Despite spatialisation being essential for an overall VR audio experience, the way a sound designer actually designs sounds for giving proper feedback is even more important. This talk covers how a sound designer can bridge the semantic gap between the actual sound that can be measured and the sound being perceived and interpreted by human beings and how this relates to VR. It covers how to universally create a language in sound that everybody can understand, despite cultural differences and different backgrounds and make that work for your game.

This talk shows methods of a sound designer to create sounds to be universally understood by a game audience.

The presentation will be about realizing visions in and with cinematic trailers, how to improve and outdo expectations and combine all aspects of storytelling and visuals into top-notch trailers. With examples from projects as Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, Final Fantasy XV and a very special project not released yet this speech will not only give insights into the technical creation, but also directors intentions, meaning and explanation of our own style of visual storytelling, creating the personalities of characters, and many more in an understandable and instructive way. We will give you a glimpse into the world of creating high quality, technical as artistic, cinematic trailers.

From Practical to Digtal, 10 Years Creating at Weta Workshop. I’ll be discussing the world of concept design for film pre-production, and my personal path of beginning that journey in the practical realm of model-making and sculpting in plasteline clay. As the film industry evolves and incorporates more digital effects, many film workers, including myself, transitioned to more digital techniques. I’ll share how knowledge of practical effects can actually support digital concept design. I’ll also discuss how I use Z-Brush, Photoshop, and Keyshot regularly in the design pipeline. From my experiences working on such films as The Hobbit Trilogy, Avatar, District 9, and recently on Power Rangers (2017) I’ll discuss how important it is to have an over-arching passion for the creative process. Aside from film work, I’ll also touch on using digital sculpting for Collectibles, creating digital assets for video games and tabletop games, and even Public Art Sculpture.

I want to talk about the in game animation process for Aloy on Horizon Zero Dawn.
Talk a little on how it all begun and how we built something from scratch.
I want to focus on Aloys in game movement and how we found her animation style.
Ill also walk you trough my personal animation process when I was animating Aloy.
We’ll also go into the animation systems we used and how and why we made them. Sounds fun?
Ill see you at my talk!

The ocean in “Vaiana” played a pivotal role in the film, yet other effects challenges lied ahead. Creating a character made of water, a character made of lava, a character made of foliage, and an epic parting of the seas required a tight collaboration across departments and exploration in design and composition to bring the Director’s vision to life.