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This week, we are attending VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy. The conference is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has a packed program. After a day of workshops, here are our impressions about the second day, with speakers from Disney, ILM, Pixar, and more.
Moana 2 Revealed
A highlight of the day was a conference by Amy Smeed, head of animation at Disney. She took the stage to share clips from the upcoming Moana 2, as well as behind the scene information. After the conference, we had the opportunity to interview her about her work on the movie, and her career. This video interview is coming soon on 3DVF!
Twisters: massive simulations and jaw-dropping sequences
Florian Witzel from ILM shared the secrets behind the effects for Twisters. The goal was to create a new installment inspired by the 1996 film Twister, not as a sequel or a remake, but something fresh.
The original film left a mark with its exceptionally realistic tornadoes for the time, created using Softimage and RenderMan.
For Twisters, shot on film, the team combined various techniques: outdoor shoots (which required a lot of rotoscoping) and shoots on sound stage with blue screens, as well as real elements (fans, water, debris) enhanced in post-production. ILM also undertook a monumental task: over 600 HDRI panoramas were shot to capture the threatening skies associated with tornadoes. This work was done under challenging conditions, sometimes necessitating to flee from lightning.
These elements, combined with tornado simulations, cloud instancing (hundreds of them) and advanced rigs to control the tornadoes, brought the six tornadoes in the movie to life (including a twin tornado). Truly impressive work.
Yuck!
Director Loïc Espuche came to present the behind-the-scenes of Yuck!, his short film about children during the summer vacation. They see adults kissing and mock them with disgust, but Léo, one of the children, realizes he wants to kiss another child in the group, Lucie…
Here is the teaser:
Loïc detailed the graphic process, noting that finding the right style has been quite difficult. However, the most delicate phase was clearly the direction of child actors: coordinating a group of kids proved challenging. Some strategies were employed, like ensuring that retakes were not uneven among the children (so no child felt inferior or less talented), and capturing spontaneous laughter to use these sounds in the short film, as forced laughter felt unnatural.
Josh Cooley: storytelling and inspiration
Next up was Josh Cooley, director of Transformers One and Toy Story 4. He delivered a talk on creativity and storytelling that would be difficult to summarize. One central idea was discovering how to create stories that resonate with the audience through emotion and personal narratives.
Dylan Sisson: RenderMan and the XPU Revolution
Finally, we attended a presentation by Dylan Sisson from Pixar. As an artist and designer on the RenderMan team, he has been showcasing RenderMan’s advancements for years. This renderer is used not only at Pixar but also at many visual effects studios. Dylan Sisson is also the creator of the famous teapots that Pixar fans covet.
His presentation focused on his personal work with stylized rendering in RenderMan. These features were recently used in Ultraman Rising, the first animated feature to rely on them.
Dylan Sisson recapped the roadmap announced at SIGGRAPH this summer, but more importantly, he revealed big news: Pixar believes that XPU, the new internal rendering engine for RenderMan, will soon become mature enough for production use up to the final image. The studio is therefore working on deploying XPU for an upcoming, yet-to-be-announced film. We will keep a close eye on future developments.
Wednesday promises to be rich as well: a look back at The Wild Robot from DreamWorks with its team (including director Chris Sanders), a deep dive into The Phantom Menace for its 25th anniversary with Rob Coleman from ILM… We’ll report back on this soon.