I’m off to Annecy for another week packed solid with VR demos, film screenings and talks with the Google Spotlight Stories crew! I’ll be on a panel called “VR: the New Animation Playground” on Wednesday at 11am. We’ll be showing four projects at the Bonlieu Salle de Création: “Isle of Dogs: Behind the Scenes in VR” (Wes Anderson, with Felix & Paul Studios), “Piggy” (Jan Pinkava and Mark Oftedal), “Back to the Moon” (FX Goby and Hélène Leroux, with Nexus and the Google Doodles team) and also a sneak peek of the story I’m working on right now, “Age of Sail” (directed by John Kahrs, in collaboration with Chromosphere). The creators will also be doing a panel Wednesday at 6pm: “Animation Everywhere!”
If you’re on that side of the planet, come hang out! (But bring an umbrella, I hear it’s gonna be raining all week!)
One of the highlights of my time at DreamWorks was getting to help an amazing team of animators design their next-generation animation software, Premo. The software we’d been using up to that point, Emo, was originally written at PDI in the 1980’s. While a lot of talented engineers had improved it over the years, there was only so much they could build on top of a foundation so old that it predated the GPU! We often dreamed about what the ideal animation tool would be like, if we could somehow start again from scratch.
Incredibly, in 2008, we got the opportunity to do exactly that, and the idea for Premo was born. Rex Grignon led the design effort, and brought on Jason Schleifer, Fred Nilsson, Jason Reisig, Simon Otto, Dave Torres and myself to flesh out the zillions of tiny details that matter so much. We worked closely with engineers Bruce Wilson, Seath Ahrens, Morgwn Mccarty, Brendan Duncan and many others (see this article for the full list!) as they brought their own expertise to bear on all those tiny details, and turned our fluffy wishful ideas into real working code. After years of development, the animators on How to Train Your Dragon 2 got to take Premo for its inaugural flight, and were spoiled forever by the best software any of us had ever seen. We knew we had something very special on our hands, but I wondered: would anyone outside the company ever know about it?
Now, a decade later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has honored Premo with a Sci-Tech Award!
Here’s a video of the awards ceremony, with Sir Patrick Stewart introducing some of the team:
And here’s a terrific blog post from Nimble Collective (the company that Rex, Jason and Bruce went on to co-found after DreamWorks) about FIFICRD, our shamelessly awkward acronym for our fiercely held beliefs about how great software can and should be:
I can’t believe the Annecy Animation Festival is less than a week away! And man, it’s going to be a busy week. Most days you’ll be able to find me in the Bonlieu Salle de Création: Tuesday, June 13 (showing Gorillaz “Saturnz Barz” on Daydream), Thursday June 15 (showing a VR teaser for Jorge Gutierrez’s Son of Jaguaron Vive) and Friday June 16 (showing Sonariaby Scot Stafford and Chromosphere, also on Vive). Stop by and say hi if you’re there!
The theatrical print of “Pearl” will be screened next week at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in a collection of family-friendly animated shorts. I’ll be there at the 10am Sunday screening at the Castro Theater, along with some of the other filmmakers, for Q&A. Stop by and say hi if you’re in the area!
I’ll try to answer that and other questions, alongside a really interesting mix of writers, artists and technologists on a panel hosted by the VR Filmmakers Meetup this Thursday, February 16 in San Francisco. Tickets available here. Hope to see you there!
In other news, we’ll also be showing Pearl at the Kaleidoscope VR Summer Showcase, which travels around the world to London, Seoul, Berlin, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. I’ll be at the SF event on September 30th.
Pearl has also been nominated in three categories (Narrative, Mobile, and Original Score) for the Virtual Reality Foundation’s third annual Proto Awards, coming up on October 8th. The nominees all look amazing. I can’t wait to meet them!
Pearl will have a big presence at SIGGRAPH this year! We’re doing our making-of presentation in a Production Session on Sunday, July 24th from 10:45-12:15, and showing it on the Vive in the VR Village all day from Sunday through Thursday. Pearl will also be shown at the Appy Hour event on Wednesday, July 27th from 5-7 pm.
I’ll only be there Sunday-Tuesday, but I’m sure looking forward to it!
The Annecy Animation Festival will have a flurry of VR demos and presentations this year, including recent work from Google Spotlight Stories, Aardman, Nexus, Penrose, Baobab, and more.
Several directors and producers from Google Spotlight Stories will discuss their experiences on a panel on Monday, June 13 at 6pm.
The next Spotlight Story, Nexus’ charming Rain or Shine, will have its worldwide debut alongside NFB’s Minotaur on Wednesday, June 15 from 10am to 5pm.
And oh yes, lots of good old linear, non-interactive rectangular films will be shown at the festival too! Here’s the full program. I’ll be there Sunday through Thursday. Vive le lapin!
This just in: next Wednesday, June 1, we’ll be screening “Pearl” in 2D, 360º and VR at an SF-SIGGRAPH event in San Francisco. We’ll also be doing a talk with some behind-the-scenes footage. Seating is limited, so if you’re in the Bay Area and want to attend, sign up now!
Okay, one more update for those of you in New York: we will also be doing the first ever live public demo of Patrick Osborne’s Spotlight Story “Pearl” in full 360° at Tribeca’s Interactive Playground on Saturday, April 16th. We’ll be there all day.
Here’s where you can find tickets to the event. Hope to see you there!
Cassidy Curtis's splendid display of colorful things.
I’m off to Annecy for another week packed solid with VR demos, film screenings and talks with the Google Spotlight Stories crew! I’ll be on a panel called “VR: the New Animation Playground” on Wednesday at 11am. We’ll be showing four projects at the Bonlieu Salle de Création: “Isle of Dogs: Behind the Scenes in VR” (Wes Anderson, with Felix & Paul Studios), “Piggy” (Jan Pinkava and Mark Oftedal), “Back to the Moon” (FX Goby and Hélène Leroux, with Nexus and the Google Doodles team) and also a sneak peek of the story I’m working on right now, “Age of Sail” (directed by John Kahrs, in collaboration with Chromosphere). The creators will also be doing a panel Wednesday at 6pm: “Animation Everywhere!”
