At the beginning of this month we went to the FMX conference in Germany. FMX is a kind of mini-Sigraph, a conference on computer graphics, visual effects and games, held every year in Stuttgart. It was the first time that I attended and I must say I had a blast.
The conference was four days and packed with interesting talks, generally you could choose from eight different ones held at the same time or maybe I should say ‘had to choose’ cause there were virtually no re-runs and more than one time I had to choose between several talks that I all wanted to see but could only pick one. The location of the conference was in the Haus der Wirtschaf in the center of Stuttgart with enough bars and restaurants close by to get the necessary refreshments. Although the venue was quite big and they even expanded this year with two extra conference rooms across the street, it was still too small. There were four talks that I couldn’t get into cause they were full and a few others that were a close call. Still, I did see lots of great talks and in the end this was just a minor nuisance.
What were those great talks I went to see then? Well, there was one on stereo, explaining all kind of technical and artistic issues which come with this kind of workflow like toe-in trouble, the eye-separation in relation to the screen size, use of depth of field  in stereo, etc. There was the Leslie Iwerks documentary on ILM: Creating The Impossible . I had the good fortune to attend a re-run (one of the few) of the Acting for Animators workshop of Ed Hooks which delivered a few pearls of information and insight. Unexpected, a german vfx company showed us their move to  directing and concepting. And Disney showed Tangled, which I enjoyed a lot to my surprise, seems they are back on track now Lassiter is at the helm.
There were four talks though that defined the FMX experience for me, those were a talk by Supamonks, well known for their Raving Rabbits work, two talks by Cube Creative and a talk by Studio AKA of the Lloyds TSB commercials. What I found so amazing was the enormous creativity of those studios, nothing is too strange or too far out. They are able to create totally believable living and breathing worlds without any photorealism, in fact almost nothing of their work is photo real. They don’t wait till a client comes in with a project, they create their own films and series out of a passion for animation and story telling and that was very refreshing and inspiring to see. It was so inspiring in fact that I whipped myself into action and started on a short animation, I hope I have it finished before the next FMX arrives.