Judging
Emotional impact and engagement will be the primary criteria for judging. Technical aspects will be secondary.
In addition to each individual stage the skill in building emotional attachment at the animation and story stage will be judged. The image, animation and story elements should all be viewed as a single progression drawing the player in. They should not be simple repeats and expansions but should work in harmony.
Still images will be used to screen Stage One entries. In Stage Two, the 10 second animations will be judged. All elements will be used to determine the overall winners. More>
Judges decisions will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.
Judges
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Lorne Lanning
Co Founder/President/Creative Director
Oddworld Inhabitants
San Francisco, USA
Lorne has been involved with computer graphics and digital media for nearly 20 years. He is the Co-Founder and President of the video game development company Oddworld Inhabitants and a member of the Advisory Board for the San Francisco Academy of Art University.
A graduate of School of Visual Arts in NYC, Lorne studied photo-realism and commercial illustration before attending the California Institute of the Arts where he studied film, visual effects and storytelling as well as traditional and computer animation.
Enticed by emergent, computer animation work Lorne joined Rhythm & Hues where he contributed to numerous award winning commercials, attractions such as Euro-Disney, MCA/Universal, the Worlds Fair, and worked for clients of the caliber of Universal-Japan, Mazda, and Reebok.
In 1994 Lorne formed the video game development company, Oddworld Inhabitants, with computer graphics veteran Sherry McKenna. After developing a worldwide following with their games, Oddworld is now focused on developing its properties into CG animated motion pictures. |
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Cyrus Lum
Midway Games Austin
Cyrus has been in the video game industry for over 16 years. He started his career at Strategic Simulations Inc., creating many of the monsters and creatures for the Dungeons and Dragons Gold Box line. Cyrus left SSI to found the art department at Crystal Dynamics and become it's art director. Crystal Dynamics became a leader in visual innovations in games for the 3DO game console. Some of these game titles included; Crash 'n Burn, Total Eclipse, and The Horde.
Cyrus later joined Acclaim Entertainment and created the Advanced Technology Group. The group's primary responsibility was to use cutting edge technology to create innovative graphics for Acclaim's video game products. With the success of the department, Cyrus was promoted to Executive Director of Advanced Technologies, then to Vice President of Digital Productions where he coordinated and provided visionary direction to the advanced computer graphic art efforts of Acclaim Studios - Austin, Salt Lake Teeside (UK), London and the Acclaim Studios Cinematic and Motion Capture Group.
In March of 2000, Cyrus co-founded Inevitable Entertainment - a video game development company dedicated to creating innovative product for the next generation game consoles. The company developed The Hobbit, Area51, Tribes2 PC, as well as additional work on Defender and Metal of Honor – Rising Sun.
Inevitable Entertainment was acquired by Midway Games in 2004 and now Cyrus serves as the Studio Art Director at Midway Games Austin. |
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Stephan Martinere
Science Fiction and Fantasy Artist
Midway Games
Chicago, USA
Stephan Martiniere is an internationally renowned Science Fiction and Fantasy Artist. He is also an accomplished concept artist who has worked on movies such as I Robot, Star Wars Episodes 2 & 3, Virus, Red Planet, Sphere, and the Time Machine.
As a visual design director for Cyan, Stephan was also responsible for creating and overseeing the look of the games URU, Ages Beyond: Myst as well as its two expansion packs and upcoming title. Stephan is currently the Visual Design Director for Midway Games in Chicago. |
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Bob Rafei
Art Director
Naughty Dog Inc
www.naughtydog.com
A twelve-year veteran of the gaming industry, Bob Rafei is the art & animation director, and lead concept artist at Naughty Dog, Inc (NDI). He joined NDI in early ’95 as its first employee and went on to manage the visual development of Crash Bandicoot, which paved the way for CB2: Cortex Strikes Back, CB: ‘Warped’ and Crash Team Racing for Playstation, collectively selling 25 million+ units worldwide.
Bob played a key role in establishing the look of the series and touched on all aspects of production from modeling & texturing of any and all geometries, to character rigging and animation. During development of Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, JakII, Jak3 and the recently released JakX: Combat Racing for the PS2, Bob lead visual development that set the look of this award winning franchise as well as contribute to character animations. This award winning series has sold over 8MM units thus far. |
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Steve Theodore
Technical Art Manager
Zipper Interactive
Steve Theodore fell in love with computer animation in the Dark Ages, in more ways than one. He dropped out of a PhD program in Ancient History to start rendering scenes by typing text commands into the Brown University mainframe. He spent the early '90's doing animations for a variety of commercial and television projects. In 1995 he joined FASA Interactive in Chicago, where he created mechs and environments for MechCommander.
Two years later he moved to Valve, where he worked on Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortresss 2 and CounterStrike. For the last couple of years he has worked as the Artist in Residence at middleware provider Rad Game Tools, and now he is art lead on a next gen console project for Zipper Interactive. Steve also writes the "Pixel Pusher" art column for Game Developer Magazine. |
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Mark Snoswell
President
The CGSociety
Adelaide, South Australia
Mark Snoswell is President of the CGSociety - the Society of Digital
Artists. Mark is a co-founder and director of Ballistic Media.Although Mark has
little time to create his own works now - two pieces were featured in
EXPOSE 1.
However as creative director Mark oversees the 10’s of thousands
of entries received each year and the final layout and presentation for all
of Ballistic Media publications.
Recent film production work Mark has supervised includes pre-production work
at Disney Feature Animation for the film Gnomeo and Juliet and lead creature
effects for A Sound of Thunder.
Other relevant work includes development of
muscle and skin software, Absolute Character Tools; the worlds most accurate
musculo-skeletal human model sets - The Ultimate Human; and CGSkin, a
radical new skin simulation system. |
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Paul Steed
Paul is a talented video game modeler and artist, who has worked for Id Software, Origin Systems, Electronic Arts and Wild Tangent. He created artwork or models for several prominent game series including Wing Commander and Quake.
Steed began his career with videogames in 1991 at Origin Software, after answering a newspaper ad that said "Fantasy artist wanted". Starting as a game design sketcher, he moved up to art director. Steed has indicated he "didn't touch a mouse until I was 27". He worked as an art director at Virgin Entertainment and a designer at Iguana entertainment as well.
Besides being a professional game artist, Steed is a published author who has written two books on the subject of modeling characters for 3D games. |
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Doug Cooper
Visual Effects Supervisor
DreamWorks Animation
Doug has 15 years of computer graphics film production experience, with the last 10 of those years spent on multiple film projects at DreamWorks Animation, where he currently serves as visual effects supervisor on the upcoming CG Feature Bee Movie. Prior to joining DreamWorks, Doug worked on two animated feature projects for Amblimation in London.
Throughout his career, he has worked in the capacity of visual effects supervisor, digital supervisor, head of effects, effects animator, technical director, and software developer. During his most recently completed project, Shark Tale, Doug collaborated closely with the game publisher and developer to provide assets and reference material for the game based on the film. |
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