Most of the big studios were represented with PIXAR getting a lot of attention, with Paul Topolos (Matte Painer), Jessica McMackin (Lighting), Alex Harvill (2D and 3D effects) and Sharon Calahan (DP) all attending. But other studios were well represented with significant presentations by Parag Havaldar, Peter Nofz and Danny Dimian of Imageworks, Glen Entis from Electronic Arts, Grand Major of WETA, and Joseph Olin from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

Sharon Calahan’s, director of photography at Pixar spoke about the research and process of lighting Ratatouille. She really brought the audience into her world to understand how she managed to get things looking so beautiful. Just seeing how she made the fruit and vegetables look so real and so luscious was an adventure. I was blown over by the exclusive presentation of Parag Havaldar, lead software engineer at Sony Imageworks, who gave in in-depth video talk about the technical aspects of creating believable characters for Beowulf. He was authorized to show us stuff not seen before and this was before the release of the film. The job of managing all 14-plus terabytes of mocap data for the film was mind-boggling. He told me: “We used advance techniques to capture eye movement and detailed face movements using our ImageMotion technology.” The eye movement approach was unique in that they used electrodes attached around the eyes to measure electrical impulses moving the eye. He said: “The problem is, when you get a lot of brown muscle movement it can interfere with the proper reading of eye movement.” In any case the eyes in Beowulf are much better than those in Polar Express as is just about everything else.

One talk by Italian animation legend Bruno Bozzetto was accompanied by a wonderful 3D animated homage to PIXAR which was hilarious. Bruno, who is best known in the US for his 1976 animated feature film Allegro non troppo, is 69 years old, and is now making outstanding Flash animations. I recommend visiting www.bozzetto.com and checking out some of his hilarious flash work. I especially like:“Europe and Italy.” It’s Bruno’s view of how Italy and Europe are different.

There were also booths with all sorts of interesting displays. The one I was most taken by was a realtime 3D version of something like Second Life. Wearing polarized eyeglasses you literally climbed into a world where you could fly and build things and interact with other people. It was truly a vision of the future. I was teleported from Turin to Chicago where we grabbed the Sears Tower and transplanted it back to Turin, right in the middle of the Piazza Castello, crushing a few iron horses and other statues in the process.

Looking for things to criticize at VIEW 8, I kept getting side-tracked by all the interesting stuff going on. I don’t like being overly positive about a conference, but lately I’ve been attending some really good ones like VIEW 8. I was surprised to find quite a wide variety of people attending. Besides the many Italian media and game people there were folks from the UK, France, Germany as well as a number of Eastern European countries. Clearly it’s a destination conference for our industry. Some of its appeal may also come from being held in the middle of truffle season in region of Italy famous for its white truffle or “Tartufo Bianco di Alba,” regarded as the finest in Italy. The entire output for Italy is less than 900 pounds a year, which explains the insane price of about 5,000 Euro per pound. If you come early or stay late, you can even go on a truffle hunt using specially trained Tartufo dogs.

All in all I’d have to say that VIEW8 was an awesome experience and that Turin in the fall is definitely worth the visit. If you think you’d be interested, you might want to check out the video re-cap of View 8 on line at www.viewconference.it/OQ_daily_nov9.php where you can see clips of what went on. I found it was a great way to combine a little travel, great food and wine, and to both learn and to network. See you there next year.