Vicon announced the first-ever Vicon Film Festival: A Celebration of All Things Motion Capture and Animation, to be launched at SIGGRAPH 2007. Vicon rolls out the red carpet for the festival at booth #902, Aug. 7-9, at the San Diego Convention Center.
"We're thrilled to be launching the first film festival ever to celebrate motion capture in animation," commented Robin Pengelly, vp, entertainment division, Vicon. "With this contest we're making motion capture accessible to many artists who may have never had the opportunity to work with capture data beforeâ¹and we look forward to exposing the next generation of film and games creatives to the flexibility of animating with motion capture."
The Vicon Film Festival is an international competition to find the most Creative and entertaining use of a series of captured movements in a short animated movie. With a grand prize of $10,000, the competition will be open to original short films (between two and five minutes) using motion capture data provided via the Vicon Film Festival website, www.vicon.com/filmfestival.
Selected films will be posted on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 entries will be submitted to an independent judging panel comprised of industry experts, including Mike Sanders of ILM, Eric Furie of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Takashi Fukamoto of Links Digiworks, Gary Roberts of House of Moves, Chris Mais, director and writer of the award-winning SMILE, and Darren Waters of BBC Technology. The winner will be announced in June 2008. Media sponsors for the competition include VFXWorld.com, COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD and DIGITAL ARTS MAGAZINE (UK).
Academy Award-winning Vicon is the largest supplier of precision motion tracking systems, serving customers and CG animation applications in film, visual effects, computer games and broadcast television, as well as engineering and life science industries. Vicon operates in four offices worldwide, including its Los Angeles-based entertainment headquarters, a 26,000 square-foot facility equipped with three performance capture stages for Vicon's service company House of Moves as well as 200 Vicon MX-F40 cameras.
Vicon is the largest holding of OMG (Oxford Metrics Group - LSE: OMG), plc., a group of technology companies that produces image understanding solutions for the entertainment, defense, life science and engineering markets. Other holdings include Emmy Award-winning 2d3 and newly founded Geospatial Vision Ltd. For more information about OMG and its subsidiaries, visit www.omg3d.com, www.vicon.com or www.2d3.com.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
