fmx/09 and the Clone Wars

The fmx/09 in Suttgart positioned itself as Europe’s leading conference for Animation, 3D and VFX next to the nice Mundo Digitales in A Coruna, especially since 3D Festival in Copenhagen closed its doors a few years ago. For people primarily interested in the european side to CG, or for people with not enough time or ambition to travel to different continents to visit Siggraph, this is the place to look. And one should not think this is a exclusively european event, many interesting speakers from overseas are here on their tours from one global conference to the next. You would not expect anything less from Swabia – the event is incredibely well organised, the logistics inside the city and the International Film Festival for Animation running in parallel are really well thought of. Staff is helpful and friendly, pricing is fair, and there is a tremendous amount of top of the pops speakers, at least far more than you are able to attend to. And therefore this article is just a personal and subjective impression, and not a valid review. Other colleagues may have experienced everything very differently. Overall you can have a good and inspiring time here, and i can highly recommend to go and see yourself.

What is quite special about CG conferences today in general, is that the business grew the history it did not have years or decades ago. A good example is a story from the Pixar presentation, in a sideline they mentioned this: when Pixar started, John Lassater (remark: next to Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull the master mind behind Pixar) originally used to be the company’s user interface designer, who got to be Pixar’s only animator the years following, as he was the guy who knew how to animate with a computer – cut to 20 years later – today Pixar’s staff inculdes more than 1000 highly skilled specialists, which makes her the top player in the industry. If you, like me, attend conferences just occasionly and not several times a year, changes become quite obvious. Things today in the business seem incredibely professionalized, there are many schools and universities advertising their services, recruiting events, and studios presenting technically cunning and mindblowing superprojects.

And that is the only thing on a great festival which actually gave me ambivalent feelings. Talks are inflationarily referred to ‘any CG terminology’+'art’, even on rather superficial projects, but in fact my personal definition of art in opposition to crafts, includes that art is granted the right to be non-pragmatic, non-functional. Art does not necessarily have to make sense, sell many copies, or tell a clear rational and digestible story. And i did find few explorative, non-streamlined things without pragmatism and a clear goal and market assessment, and i did my best to look hard. Of course something is not automatically art because it does not sell copies, but, hopefully without being biased, having attended i.e. one lecture on getting the world’s biggest sci-fi franchise from movie to tv-series to mobile gaming, did not overlap with my personal definition of art, even if the term was referred to from time to time. Also getting confronted with the words Painterly Style, Vermeer, Client and Deliver in one paragraph gave me a rather odd feeling in the guts. I would have wished for a clearer distiction between more sincere artistic approaches like greyworld.org does, and marketing service facilities, especially in the interest of the projects making efforts to push content boundaries rather than technical boundaries. The term art has the tendency to wear off after a while in a cry-wolf way, which cannot be in the interest of anyone.

A very good step into a different direction though is the phantastic Stuttgart International Festival of Animation running in parallel (hopefully interleaving even further in the future), as well as the integration of the 5D conference on immersive space and media. The latter is an organisation working about opening up the discussion between all fields using CG, be it movies, games, designers or media art. A few panels were unfortunately more about circle ensuring the other panelists and showing portfolios, but others discussed most interestingly the tension between the huge technological and therefore financial resources immersive media requires, sponsors with a obvious or hidden marketing agenda, and the art itself. The hard part to follow for me was, that the 5D panels used their claim ‘immersive design’ rather fuzzy. Let me explain: in the past there was i.e. commercials as printed media or on film media – there was art on printed media or on film media. It was not really clear, or at least it oscillated, if 5D was referring to the commerials vs. art or on the the print vs. film part in this analogy. Just stating it’s all growing together somehow into one with computers is not good enough in my humble opinion. Of course one should always say McLuhan said that media is the message, but i still think it is worth still discussing this and not taking it as an axiom. Maybe it’s not true and yet the message is the message in the end. But i think the field of discussion is very interesting and important, and i just hope and heartly wish it is not eaten up by trade fairs and hipster brand worlds before it matured.

To sum up, my impression is that the business evolved a lot, and is at somewhat of a crossroads at the moment: will Animation and FX in the future develop into the classic and loveable old american studio system of the 20-50ies, where all facilities from story development to special effects is under one roof and stand for a certain style and type of stories, as basically Pixar and Disney already are? Or are computergraphics too complex for that as many say, and the future is rather that houses will continue to work on providing outsourced technical services from story creators (’the director as the client’, a term often used in talks) spiced up with a touch of art, as it is often the standard today? Or will 3D really become democraticized as the software vendors want it to be, and there soon will be something like independent film as well in CG and Animation, like the Blair Witch Project done by a few clever students with borrowed equipment? All this is yet open in my opinion, and hopefully we will see all of it in the future in a good mix. And i would have wished for a panel on this matter, if there was and i just missed it, i’d be glad to hear.

But my personal favorite overall was the talk of Pierre Buffin of the legendary BUF compagnie and the director Marc Caro on a somewhat new-age science-fiction movie called Dante 01, both loveable laid-back guys in their 50ies working with CG since the 80ies, talking rather about their ideas than about tech statistics, and all that with stunning images, a great sense of humour and without taking themselves overly seriously. And – i think they didn’t say ‘art’ too often either.