(Chicago, IL) – ACM SIGGRAPH announced today the award nominees for the SIGGRAPH 2008 Computer Animation Festival to be held in Los Angeles this summer. Nominees were chosen from more than 900 submissions from around the globe, presented by both professional studios and students alike. An esteemed panel of jury members reviewed each submission to compile some of the greatest works submitted this year.

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(Chicago, IL) – ACM SIGGRAPH announces Ed Catmull, a pioneer in the entertainment and film industry and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as one of the featured speakers at SIGGRAPH 2008, the 35th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.Catmull, President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, has played a major role throughout the past 30 years in the invention of some of today's most fundamental computer graphics practices used widely across the motion picture industry. He is one of the original architects of the RenderMan rendering software system, which has been used to create blockbuster animated hits such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, as well as 44 of the last 47 Visual Effects nominations to the Academy Awards®.

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(Chicago, IL) – ACM SIGGRAPH officially announced the opening of submissions for FJORG! – the International Animation Contest taking place at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference, 11 through 15 August 2008 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

FJORG! is an "iron animator" event in which competing teams from around the world have 32 hours to create a 15-second, character-driven animation while adhering to at least one of two themes and facing multiple distractions. The online submission system is now open and submission and uploaded materials are due by 7 May 2008. Submissions are open to the public.

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(Chicago, IL) – ACM SIGGRAPH announced a final reminder for the entry deadline of 30 January for jury content to be considered for the 2008 Computer Animation Festival. This deadline represents the date that online entry forms must be submitted. The deadline for material upload is 27 February.

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To fully represent the growing computer graphics and interactive industries, SIGGRAPH's Computer Animation Festival is expanding into a full-scale film festival that will incorporate curated and competition screenings, discussion panels with filmmakers/artists/producers, and an expansive awards program. In addition, the Computer Animation Festival will be more accessible to the general public than ever before.

Updated: deadline was incorrect; updated from january 31st to january 30th.

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I was actually able to pry Bassam away fro the computer at the Blender booth to give an interview about his new Mancandy model and rigging system and his upcoming Blender Foundation training DVD.

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If you enjoyed Roland "Harkyman" Hess' video interview, don't miss this write-up about SIGGRAPH that comes straight from the man himself! Harkyman talks about the city of San Diego, experiences from the Expo floor, and even more.

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This is my interview at SIGGRAPH 2007 with the founders of AnimationMentor.com, Bobby Beck, Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena at their booth. AnimationMentor.com is the online character animation school where all the instructors are working studio animators.

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My interviews with Joe Eagar – Google Summer of Code Deep Shadows, Roland Hess – coauthor of Essential Blender, Ton Mullen – Author of Character Animation with Blender and Bud who is new to Blender.

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I was able to catch Ton between the Blender Birds of Feather conferences, we decided to tape the interview in the hallway to get a bit of the ambiance of the SIGGRAPH conference. We certainly did get some ambiance, Fjorg was being held in the room around the corner.

You can watch the video in either Flash or QuickTime.

Tony Mullen and Roland Hess were invited to the Wiley & Sons Author Dinner at SIGGRAPH.

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With the end of SIGGRAPH 2007, a lot of cool stuff related to the conference and contests are showing up in the web. A video about FJORG! was released last week, showing that some team was using Blender during the competition! Yes, besides all the resources available like Maya, 3ds max and XSI, it`s really good to see a team using Blender.

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Ton asked me to do a quick introduction video like he did of the one at the Blender Institute offices. A quick walk through the exhibit area from the entrance to the Blender exhibit. Also appearing is Roland Hess (Harkyman). I promised Ton that I'd publish this video first.

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Well I'm back from SIGGRAPH 2007 and it was a very exciting and incredible trip. I felt like a sugar starved kid in a candy shop, so many things to see and do, which do I choose to do first. I especially want thank folks at SIGGRAPH for recognizing BlenderNation as a legitimate news source.

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It's that time of year again: we need an excellent Blender Demo Reel to impress participants at this year's SIGGRAPH conference. This is pretty much the world's most important 3D exhibition, and as reported on blender.org, there will be a Blender presence on the exhibition floor. If you're interested in having your work considered for this, keep reading.

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I just received confirmation from Ton that there will be a Blender Birds of a Feather [BOF] meeting at Siggraph 2007 in San Diego. There's not much info to share yet, except that it's on Monday, August 6th in Room 29A.

There's going to be a new twist at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego. In addition to all of the other excellent events going on, there's going to be a intense 32-hour animation competition called FJORG! (pronounced "forge"… and, yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name).

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Here's another demonstration by Bassam Kurdali at the Open Source Pavilion on Siggraph. He talks about the techniques that were used for rigging the character of Proog in Elephants Dream.

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