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SAN DIEGO -- If you can imagine it, you can create it.
Never has that goal seemed more possible than at this year's Electronic Theater at Siggraph, where the world's top computer animators vie for recognition.
Consider scenes from just three of the 21 winning entries: Sculptor Alberto Giacometti, seconds from death, watches his creations come alive and bow their heads to him; a squirrel attempts to gather nuts while tumbling through the air; and a DNA production line replicates nucleic acids in real time.
"This all centers on Moore's Law," said Darin Grant, chair of this year's animation festival and an executive at Hollywood visual-effects powerhouse Digital Domain. "Software and hardware prices are going down, and capabilities are going up. That enables people to drive toward the edges of what we would classically consider CG animation."
In years past, Siggraph's animation festival has been full of technical demonstrations -- a university demonstrating photo-realistic water, for instance, or explosions.
But this year, artists stole the show, most using off-the-shelf software such as Adobe Photoshop and Maya. The big studios had their usual highly polished work: You may recall that tumbling squirrel from 20th Century Fox's Ice Age; and Gollum, Harry Potter, the Hulk and Arnold Schwarzenegger all made their mandatory appearances.
But many of the 28 presentations in this year's Electronic Theater were made by small groups of artists or individuals, some of them still in school.
Florida's Ringling School of Art and Design, which requires its students to submit their work to Siggraph in order to graduate, won four coveted spots in the Electronic Theater.
Award-winner Exigo, a nightmarish battle between armor-clad warriors and goblins, was created by several unknowns from Hungary. "I didn't know they even had CG animators in Hungary," Grant said.
Independent filmmaker Sam Chen, whose Eternal Gaze took the top award at the Electronic Theater, spent three years and lots of his own money to make his black-and-white ode to Alberto Giacometti, whose tortured life and sculptures often are overlooked by art historians.
To make his 15-minute piece, San Diego resident Chen took copious photographs of Giacometti's sculptures at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the sculptor's studio in Paris, integrating the images seamlessly into the film.
Technically, one clear area of progress for the festival was skin, long the bugaboo of animators trying to create photo-realistic humans. Dawn, a nymphet created by Nvidia, had skin matted with imperfections and dimples that notched her up several spots on the believability scale.
But no one would ever take her -- or any of the other humans portrayed in the festival -- for real. The digital humans in The Matrix, Grant noted, all wore sunglasses, saving the animators from attempting the impossible task of creating realistic eyes.
Gollum from The Lord of the Rings -- the single greatest achievement yet in integrating an anthropomorphic character into a film -- was acceptable to audiences because viewers were willing to suspend disbelief about a creature who had stopped being human centuries before.
"Humans are obviously so close to us," Grant said. "The layperson has a very heightened sense of how they should look, and that makes it very difficult for the filmmaker to reproduce."
Hollywood may not have taken the very top awards at the Electronic Theater. But it undoubtedly will end up taking some of the top animators.
The studios use the animation festival as a hunting ground for new talent. Two years ago, in fact, University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television student Van Phan was so inundated by studio interest after he won the top award for his piece Family Values that he had to hire an agent.
