Today I watched some animations from SIGGRAPH. SIGGRAPH is one of those computer industry events where those of us in the entertainment industry go to find our new best artists, so on the whole, the quality of things that one views has already been filtered by industry professionals and selected as being particularly noteworthy.
Tonight's event was hosted by Shrunkenheadman is SJSU's Animation/Illustration club, so we had the luxury of having them pre-screened even further from the 3-DVD "Best of" compilation (which definitely reduced my time sitting in agony viewing bad animations). While there were definitely demo reels from students, there were also rather interesting animations being submitted by researchers. One of the more interesting ones was this one about Flight Patterns. Of course, as long as we are talking about planes, we might as well talk about Snakes, a computer animated version of M.C. Escher's last woodcut.
The classic "Foster's Big Ad" was shown:
Guiness' "noitulove" ad also:
And to round out the beer ad triumverate, we have Johnnie Walker's "Painting":
The biggest difference I find these days between professional portfolios and those from students/amateurs trying to get into doing computer animation is this: pros realize that a reel isn't just a showcase of what you are capable of doing -- the most effective works are also going to be the ones that entertain.
