Tag Archives: siggraph

animation, events, personal

Tribeca was amazing. Next stop: SIGGRAPH!

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Fresh off our official world premiere at Tribeca Festival, our next stop is SIGGRAPH 2026! We’re doing a Production Session about Dear Upstairs Neighbors on Thursday, July 23 at 11:15am, and the film itself will be showing immediately after our talk, in the Computer Animation Festival, Animation Theater 4 at 12:30pm. Also, some members of our crew who also worked on the Wizard of Oz at Sphere will be doing their own session on Sunday July 19 at 4:15pm. If you’ll be at SIGGRAPH, come say hi!

Tribeca itself was an absolute treat. The animated shorts program is curated by Whoopi Goldberg, who gave a genuine and heartfelt introduction to each screening, highlighting the diversity of voices and storytelling styles that are only possible thanks to the medium of animation. I got to see some wonderful films, catch up with some old friends, and meet a new generation of filmmakers from all over the world. But the best part was seeing our short on the big screen in a room full of animation fans, and hearing their reactions. They laughed at scenes I’d forgotten were funny!

Some of the Dear Upstairs Neighbors crew who converged on New York for the world premiere at Tribeca Festival on June 6th. (For some of us, it was our first time ever meeting in person!) Back row, left to right: Yotam Mann, Sarah Affleck, Anthony Tripaldi, Douglas Eck, Amit Raj, Andreas Veit, Andy Coenen; Middle row: Cassidy Curtis, Erika Lu, Yung Spielburg, Jess Walley, Jess Gallegos, Michael Chang, Ellen Jiang, Sarah Rumbley and her partner; Front row: director Connie He and producer Márcia Mayer.

animation, events, graphics, interactive, machine learning, video

“Believable Acting” video now online

ACM SIGGRAPH has posted the video of my April 12 talk about our team’s work on believable acting for autonomous animated characters. This was a really fun one to do. Most conferences limit you to 25 minutes for technical talks, but we’ve always had a lot more material than that! The San Francisco SIGGRAPH chapter’s talk format is comfortably open-ended, so I was able to spend a full hour and go a lot deeper without rushing through it, and still leave plenty of time for Q&A.

Huge thanks to Henry LaBounta and the SF SIGGRAPH organizers for inviting me, and to the audience for showing up and asking such thoughtful and interesting questions!

animation, npar

Non-Photorealistic Animation (SIGGRAPH 1999 course notes)

Way back in 1999, I had the pleasure of contributing a segment to a SIGGRAPH course on non-photorealistic rendering. By that point I had made a whopping two-and-a-half animated short films with different visual styles (Brick-a-Brac, Fishing, and a never-finished The New Chair) which in those innocent times made me an authority on the subject. So I threw together a loose framework based on what I’d learned from those experiences, and built my piece of the course around that.

I went back and re-read it the other day, and was surprised to find a lot of it still holds true. In particular, one lesson that we carried through in both Pearl and Age of Sail is that if you plan ahead and you’re smart about it, committing to a stylized look can also save you a lot of time and money.

So if you’re interested in making a film with a new visual style, but you just don’t know where to start, have a look!

SIGGRAPH 99 Course 17: Non-Photorealistic Animation

animation, events, npar, VR

“Pearl” at SIGGRAPH 2016

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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!