Cg

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Hi could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in CG and are you self taught or taken some training?

Hello everybody, in a special way to the staff of CGArena who permitted me to accomplished this interview. Well, I was born in Milan, Italy 34 years ago. Except to be a (digital) artist I am also a reportage photographer. I am self taught in both disciplines since ten years. I came from scientific studies of Biology. When I was child I was fascinated from organic shapes and certain structures of animals and vegetables. Sure that my university studies influenced my creation of forms that I use in my artistic research. I met the early world of Computer Graphic many years ago with the mythical Amiga 500 and a software called "Sculpt 3D" (that I keep jealously) from Byte by Byte and written by Eric Graham. But later I was dazzled with Lightwave 3D 5 (from Newtek).Then, with the passing of the years, the natural development of software and hardware always more powerful made the rest.


As far as I can see, your every image are of abstract shapes, why is this? Have you ever created something else such as an animal, human or a landscape?

You are right. Until now I always create abstract organic shapes. At the end they are the most important, significant and fulfilling for my personal concept of art. Every day I see the "real" objects and although I am a Nature lover and not tempted to recreate animals, characters or landscape but rather elaborate them with the filter of my soul.


From where you get all the inspiration and which artists work/style you like the most?

I take inspiration from observing some organic structures for examples shells or crust oceans. Also many scanning electron microscope images are extremely enchanting especially because with this instrument of survey is possible to penetrate so closely to the matter and go beyond our limit of vision. When you take a look my artworks you can easily understand that I really amazed from surfaces (especially metals) corroded by the passing of time. I also attracted from diametrically opposite materials:smoothed, reflective, chromed and translucent at the same time. I use both materials often in my composition to reach strong equilibrium and energy. Concerning my favorite artist I can say only a word: H.R.Giger! Often somebody try to related my Art to Moore or Pomodoro brothers and Giger of course. But I don't like that the artist must always link together another one. Giger is Giger, Moore is Moore and Mai is Mai.

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To develop the stylized look of all the characters, Imageworks organized a human look development team. “Their job was to create standards,” says Jerome Chen, visual effects supervisor at Imageworks for the all-CG film. “We needed to bring the characters to a level of realism where they were lifelike enough to make the performance compelling enough to engage you in the story.”

To create the compelling performances, Zemeckis directed all the CG characters by capturing the action of actors on stage. To do this, Imageworks built a 25 x 35-foot stage and surrounded it with 244 Vicon MX40 cameras positioned to capture data from as many as 21 people at a time. “We had a version of Vicon’s Blade software customized for us,” says Demian Gordon, Imageworks’ motion capture supervisor.

Capturing Characters
Actors wore markers on their faces, bodies, and hands, and in addition, a device called an EOG captured eye movement. To help the actors deliver a realistic performance, the crew provided costumes made from transparent material so the cameras could see the markers, and filled the stages with markered props. By the end of production, the motion capture crew had captured data from more than 250 props.

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Three Little Pigs, Close Encounters Enter National Film Registry

Thursday December 27, 2007

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Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today named 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, including CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, BACK TO THE FUTURE and the 1933 Walt Disney animated short THREE LITTLE PIGS.

The selections were made as part of a program aimed at preserving the U.S.'s movie heritage. Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act of 1992, each year the Librarian of Congress, with advice from the National Film Preservation Board, names 25 films to the National Film Registry to be preserved for all time. The films are chosen because they are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant. This year's selections bring to 475 the number of motion pictures in the registry.

Below are the Library's comments on the visual effects and animation related films.

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
Before BEOWULF or THE POLAR EXPRESS, writer/director Robert Zemeckis explored the possibilities of special effects with the 1985 box-office smash BACK TO THE FUTURE. With his writing partner Bob Gale, Zemeckis tells the tale of accidental time-tourist Marty McFly. Stranded in the year 1955, Marty (Michael J. Fox) -- with the help of Dr. Emmett Brown (played masterfully over-the-top by Christopher Lloyd) -- must not only find a way home, but also teach his father how to become a man, repair the space/time continuum and save his family from being erased from existence. All this, while fighting off the advances of his then-teenaged mother. It's THE TWILIGHT ZONE meets Preston Sturges.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
After his 1975 blockbuster JAWS, Steven Spielberg produced this intelligent sci-fi film in which the climactic scene is set far from an ocean: Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Long a sacred place in Native American folklore, the monument served as an iconic image around which to construct this film about the quest for extraterrestrial life and UFOs. Also making the film effective and believable is Richard's Dreyfuss' Everyman character Roy Neary: "I wanna speak to the man in charge." The five-tone musical motif used for communication with the aliens has become as quotable as any line of movie dialogue.

THREE LITTLE PIGS (1933)
Voted the 11th-best cartoon of all time in a 1990s poll of animators, THREE LITTLE PIGS falls midway through a series of classic shorts (SKELETON DANCE, THE BAND CONCERT, THE OLD MILL,) that Walt Disney produced as he learned and refined the art of animation; each film marked another development in his path toward the 1937 feature SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. The wildly popular THREE LITTLE PIGS proved a landmark in "personality animation" -- each of the three pigs had a different personality -- and the title tune WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF became a Depression-era anthem.