Join Technicolor as Global Innovators Gather at SIGGRAPH 2019

DIGIPRO 2019
Victor Yudin, Mill Film Lead Developer will present Millefiori – a visual effects application designed to allow users to view and edit a series of large scenes, leveraging Pixar’s USD in its core, and Qt/QML for the UI components. Development of the technology was a successful collaboration of developers led by Mill Film, MPC R&D, and Technicolor Research and Innovation. To register go to: DIGIPRO 2019

Location: Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles

SIGGRAPH Business Symposium Saturday
Fireside Chat: Diversity and Equity as Business Imperatives
This session will provide insight on fostering diversity and equity in the workplace and how the success of underrepresented communities in businesses, both large and small, leads to increased creativity and innovation, better customer understanding and a healthier work environment.

Speakers: Lauren McCallum, Mill Film; Sarah Juma; Natalie Roundtree; Adele Newton

Time: 4:45pm to 5:30pm

* Lauren McCallum will also be a panelist at SIGGRAPH 2019 Women in Animation

The Pipeline Conference
We’re pleased to be participating at The Pipeline Conference, where MPC’s Francesco Giordana, Principle Architect, will be discussing Real-time technologies for film pipelines.

General Assembly Los Angeles

Creating Photoreal Creatures that Audiences Can Connect With

This panel will look at photoreal characters and creatures, and how they allow brands to break through noise and connect with audiences, going into specific examples such as Bam in VW's Born Confident and Patches in Starburst's Two Thing.

Contributors: Michael Gregory and Dan Seddon, Moving Picture Company

Time: 9:00am – 10:30am
Room 150/151

SIGGRAPH Diversity & Inclusion Summit
Panel: Diversity, Collaboration, and Building Toward an Inclusive Organization
Many organizations are well intentioned in working to build an inclusive and collaborative organization that innovates and creates based on its diverse talent. Come listen to some organizations who are striving to create organizational change needed in today’s workplace realities.”

Moderator: Diana Arellano
Panelists: Lauren McCallum, Mill Film; Makaiya Brown; Jeffery Shapiro; Zoe Cranley

Time: 2:45pm to 3:50pm

Meshroom: An Open Source 3D Reconstruction Software
We will invite users to discuss AliceVision, an open source Photogrammetric Computer Vision framework; and Meshroom, that allows artists and scientists to customize 3D reconstruction and camera tracking pipelines.

Organizers: Fabien Castan and Benoit Maujean, Mikros Image
Interest Area: Production & Animation.

Time: 1pm to 2pm
Room 503

Sculpting Color Spaces
Rob Pieke, Principal Architect will explain how MPC R&D embarked on building a user-friendly 3D color space sculpting toolset which allows a user to make complex and elegant color alterations quickly, intuitively and effectively. The tool has been robustly integrated with the color correction pipeline through the ability to import and export industry standard 3D LUT files – and has found success in a number of color-manipulation-related tasks.

Time: 3:45pm –5:15pm

Global VFX Pipelines
An informal gathering for anyone interested in hearing about and discussing the latest trends in production pipelines.

Organizers: Alex Schworer and Ray Forziati, Netflix; Fran Zandonella Benjamin, The Mill; Andry Jong, Weta Digital
Interest Areas: Production & Animation

Time: 5pm -7pm
Plaza 2, JW Marriott

WIA Summit

Mill Film's Global Head, Lauren McCallum will be a member on the panel discussion at the Women in Animation Summit. 

Join representatives from Womeninanimation.org and USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to hear about the first landmark study on women in the industry as well as talks on Supporting Students of Animation and Building WIA Chapters: Vancouver, NYC, Montreal and more. 

Time: 2pm -5pm 
Room 410 

THE FOCUS
LA – Recruitment booth  

Date: July 30-31
Booth 5/6
Los Angeles Convention Center

DMP Without DMP: Full CG Environments for The Lion King
Kai Wolter, Head of Production Technology, London will explain how MPC Film’s existing pipeline was expanded to make space for new dynamic set dressing techniques and for a new procedural approach to the creation of high-resolution natural elements such as rocks and terrains. For The Lion King, the Environments Team built the 150 square kilometers of terrain that extends from Pride Rock – home of the lion Simba – to the massive spaces of the Pride Lands, traversing all the different ecosystems that the story touches.

Time: 9:00am – 10:30am
Room 408AB

Solving Creative Challenges Through Development in Nuke
Join a global panel of Nuke developers as they share their tips for making the most of Nuke’s extensibility, from Python to the NDK to BlinkScript, with examples of how they’ve used these in their pipelines.

Speakers: Mads Hagbarth Damsbo, Business Owner/VFX TD/Compositor at Higx/Nordisk Film Shortcut; Nathan Rusch, Pipeline Technical Director at Luma; Patricia Terol Tolsa, Pipeline Developer at MPC

Time: 12:00pm –1:30pm
Room: Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 502B

Solving Creative Challenges with Nuke Family - The Artists’ Story
This session will feature senior artists and supervisors discussing how they used the Nuke family to efficiently solve creative problems, avoiding costly re-shoots and re-rendering while maintaining artistic intent, as well as a look into what’s coming in Nuke 12.0.

Speakers: Jay Cooper, Compositing Supervisor at ILM; Austin Brown, VFX Supervisor at Psyop; Matt Aitken, VFX Supervisor at Weta Digital; Toya Dreschsler, Compositing Supervisor at MPC

Time: 2:00pm –3:30pm
Room: Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 502B

Building Modern VFX Infrastructure
Natasha Kelkar, Senior Software Developer will talk about how the engineering team at MPC Film drastically reduced the time of deployment from months to a few days by using cloud native solutions. Built on a foundation of microservices, the infrastructure stack provided an asset management system, together with storage, sync and compute capabilities, allowing the studios to scale rapidly.

Time: 9:00am – 10:30am
Room 408AB

Everything the Light Touches – Rendering The Lion King

PathTracing in Production Part 2
MPC R&D Principal Architect Rob Pieke will be just one of the experts sharing their insights and experiences of using path tracing in production in the second part of this popular Siggraph course.

Time: 2:00pm – 5:15pm
Room: 403AB

Unity at MPC Film
Real-Time Set Dressing with Diorama
Learn how to rapidly create environments for film in real-time using Diorama, which is discussed in both technical and artistic terms. Powered by Unity and part of MPC’s Genesis toolkit, Diorama leverages the speed of procedural tools to accelerate workflows and retain artist control.

Time: 11:15am
Unity Session Room 407

Autodesk Vision Series: Interactive and Flexible Rendering Workflows with Arnold Operators. 
Panelists: Suraj "Sid" Harrington-Odedra, VFX Supervisor at The Mill, Adrien Herubel, Principal Software Engineer at Autodesk, Frederic Servant, Senior Software Development Manager at Autodesk.

Time: 2:00pm 
Room: 404A & 404B