CGSociety :: Special Feature, Paul Hellard 7 July 2008
The winners of the Individual Video, Team Video and many Special Skill categories for CGSociety’s CGChallenge XXII have been announced.
The judging was tight and the quality was high in the Individual Video, the Team Video category section, and in the Special Skill categories, listed below. The theme explores the interactions of aliens and humans, and the competing artists showed their talents for creating some crazy altercations. Judged by industry veterans as well as previous winners of the CGSociety CGChallenges, the winners are below.
The CGSociety teamed up with internationally acclaimed author David Brin for this challenge. To see the winners of the Individual Image entries, Click here.
Teams were invited to enter Videos while individual entrants could enter into either Image or Video categories. Here now are the winners of the Video Individual Master Award, Video Individual Excellence, Video Team Master and Video Team Excellence. Also the nine special skills awards up for grabs: Modeling, Texturing, Animation, Lighting, Visual Effects, Landscape/Matte Painting, Art Direction, Compositing and Editing, and Best Character.
CGSociety would also like to warmly thank the sponsors: BOXX Technologies, SOFTIMAGE, NVIDIA, Wacom, Autodesk, Pixologic, Luxology, e-on Software, REALVIZ, Corel, Stash, Gnomon Workshop, ImagineFX and Ballistic Publishing.
Video Team Master & Art Direction ThE-ShiFT (ThE-ShiFT) - ‘Inspection’
‘Inspection’ is a short movie ThE-ShiFT crew had thought about seven years ago while chatting over pizza. A preliminary storyboard was even drawn up, but Gianfranco and Emiliano were both too busy working, and they admit they didn’t know how to produce something themselves, so the project was frozen.
“In the beginning the story was about a guy with bronchial asthma who gets caught by some mysterious figure that we later discover are aliens that just kidnap him for an inspection of the human species,” says Emiliano.
“When the Challenge popped up with the ‘Alien Relations’ and ‘Uplift’ themes, I thought to just add the part where our character gets uplifted by some alien creatures, to our EON-inspired story. Inspirations for this project have been a lot and are all those things that hit me and leave me breathless. I wanted to follow a quite hard storyline to underline that the evolution process is often a violent and painful path.
Giuliano Panaccio, Emiliano Colantoni, Marco Stellabotte, Gianfranco Sgura, D-image Studio, Daniele Napolitano, Silvia Stellabotte, David Bonelli, Alvise Avati, Maura Casale and Gianluca Palma say they “owe CGSociety challenges a lot because the first one they took part in, EON, had been the spark for us to open our own facility and since then we've faced and surpassed a lot of problems and difficulties, but The ShiFT is working and going always better so we're really happy of our past choices!”
For the Video Team Master Award, ThE-ShiFT wins a BOXX Workstation, SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials, Autodesk Maya or 3ds Max, 4 x NVIDIA Quadro FX3700, Autodesk Mudbox, six annual free subscriptions to ImagineFX Magazine, 12 Ballistic Books and six annual CGSociety memberships or extensions.
For the Art Direction prize they win SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials, Corel Painter X, Stash 6-pack Bundle, an annual subscription to ImagineFX Magazine, Ballistic Publishing Machine Phase and an annual CGSociety Membership.
Video Team Excellence & Animation Three Legged Dog Productions (moljnir) - ‘Coffee Break’
‘Coffee Break’ is this team’s first production as a group. Mike McCain, Zhi Min Chen, Will Nichols, Joon Kim, Matt Titus, Troy Johnsen, Michael Carson, Ryan Sluman, Christine Bian, Danny Dahlquist and Eric Huang all met in the animation program at the University of Washington, and had been talking about making a short together for a while.
“We really liked the human-alien interaction theme,” says Mike McCain, “and wanted to do something fun with it, while still putting a strong focus on story and characters. Since aliens are typically portrayed as having technology vastly superior to our own, we thought it'd be a clever twist to tell a story showing that sometimes, simple human technology is better. Any why not show this in an unexpected environment, like an office? We took care to design our characters and visual style to be relatively simple to render, while still fun and supportive of the story. So we decided to keep a plain white background with simple, brightly colored props and characters. We were later inspired by seeing Speed Racer to play with our background colors in compositing.”
“The forum was always extremely active and supportive, and it was really cool seeing everyone's work progress from concept to completion. This production was a great learning experience for all of us. “While there were certainly plenty of pitfalls, late nights and greasy pizza breaks along the way, we're very happy with the product we ended up with and are excited for future endeavors.”
For the Video Team Excellence Award, Three Legged Productions wins SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials, Autodesk Mudbox, two NVIDIA Quadro FX3700s, two Stash 6-pack Bundles, a Gnomon Digital Bundle, six annual subscriptions to ImagineFX Magazine, six Ballistic Books, and six annual CGSociety Memberships and for the Animation Award, they win SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials, Pixologic ZBrush, a Stash 6-pack Bundle, an annual subscription to ImagineFX Magazine, Ballistic Publishing’s Oddworld Inhabitants and an annual CGSociety Membership.
Judges’ comments:
Taino: Nice story, well polished, with great animation.
