SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 releases final program schedule, with a focus on business, filmmaking and art.
This year’s inaugural Business Symposium will spark an interactive dialogue between stakeholders in the content creation industries. Spanning one full day, attendees will be able to focus on interesting and topical issues occurring in the industry. The Business Symposium will be split into three segments: Hito, Mono and Kane.
The first of these segments, Hito, recognizes that the most important asset and resource of the industry are its people and looks at how to get the best out of them. Specially selected Symposium speakers and panelists will discuss the needs of the industry and how they can be met through schools, educational programs and enterprises. Mono explores the ways that content creation must adapt to constantly evolving market trends. Finally, Kane will examine how the initiatives looked at in Hito and Mono could be funded by either corporate or government financial schemes.
Each part of the Business Symposium features experts and opinion leaders as speakers, including Shuzo Shiota, the curator of the Symposium and President and CEO of Polygon Pictures Inc., Sen Lai, Principal and CEO of 3dsense Media School, and Richard Chuang, founder and CEO of Cloudpic Global.
The business focus of SIGGRAPH Asia also includes Exhibitor Sessions & Talks which will give attendees the opportunity to experience hands-on presentations and learn all about new developments in product innovation, including a talk from Side Effects Software titled “Houdini and the Houdini Engine” and Stratasys’ “3D Printing: The Future Is Now.”
Also planned for this year is a special presentation from Pixar Animation Studios on the making of this year’s Monsters University, as well as sessions on RenderMan Studio 18′s lighting and shading tools and a special screening of The Blue Umbrella, featuring new techniques for photorealistic lighting, shading and compositing.
Among the many can’t-miss events is the annual Computer Animation Festival, which received a total of 506 submissions from 51 countries. The prestigious Best of Show Award goes to 5 Meters 80, a film by Nicolas Deveaux and produced by French production house Cube Creative Productions. Nadia Micault’s film, Sonata, made in collaboration with another French production company, Autour de Minuit Productions, won over the jury to win the Jury Award. Bringing the awards to a close is Wedding Cake, directed by Viola Baier and produced by Germany’s Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg.
Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., will also host two panel sessions discussing recent films that they have been a part of, one of which is Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s science fiction epic that demanded an incredibly wide-ranging scope of visual effects, from aliens to human-piloted robots.
For more conference information, visit the SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 website at sa2013.siggraph.org.
Source: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
