Report by Judy Brown and Patrick Saint-Jean

Note: Most images can be clicked on to see a larger version.

IMAGIN@.02, the international Festival for Digital Images was held in Monte Carlo, Monaco, February 12-14, 2002. This was the 20th Imagina Festival, and it was hosted by the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, under the presidency of Prince Alexandre de Merode. The festival was not held last year, after two years shared between Paris and Monaco, and the support has now moved from the French government (INA, National Institute of Audiovisual) to that of Monaco. However, the European Commission (Information Society technologies IST) and the RIAM (Réseau de l'Innovation Audiovisuel et Multimédia) of the French ministry of Research, were in partnership. Although the event was smaller than it had been previously, the enthusiasm of the attendees, and the quality of presentations, exhibitions, and animations was still high.

The Conference Programme included a keynote speaker and two sessions of speakers each day, two master classes on lighting, and a round table discussion on the relationship between schools and international studios. Presentations were given in French or English with simultaneous translation. There was a very interesting exhibition, called the Industry and Innovation Village, with about thirty exhibits, ranging from university and other research groups and university animation productions to small start-up companies and larger established companies.

There were three keynote speakers. Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Vice President of Multimedia telecom Italia Lab (Italy), spoke on integrating the pieces of the multimedia puzzle, the MPEG-21 project. Dr. Marc Pollefeys, Center for Processing Speech and Images, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven (Belgium) presented "From images to virtual models and vice-versa."

Stan Winston, President of Stan Winston Studios (USA) stressed that artistry and performance are key, not the type of technology used. In film-making, you do as much live as possible, and what you can't do live, you do with animation. It used to be stop-action animation, and now it is likely to be computer animation. Robotics and digital tools have grown together. In the movie, "Terminator," animatronics, robotics, make-up, puppetry, and animation were all used. The same methodology is used now as it was for the making of "King Kong," only the tools are different. What is at the core of a good film is a good story, with interesting characters, supported by technology. You choose between live and digital based on cost. However, if a character is going to be used in many ways with live actors, animatronics allows the actors to respond to the character better. With animatronics, the character can't run, leap, or jump up on things, but it can interact better with the actors than a computer generated character can, and 50% of acting is reacting. When asked how he selects people to work with him, he said he selects them on the basis of talent and also on his instinct as to whether these are nice people, rather than egomaniacs. It is important to collaborate, and if you think of yourself too much as an artist and not enough as a person, no one will want to work with you. Stan Winston was asked about the relationship between the actual human process of film creation and those of the artist, and he suggested that an answer given by Christophe Hery (computer graphics supervisor on Jurassic Park III) was actually another question: "How many degrees of freedom exist between the computer graphics artist and the scenario writer?"

Each of the six general sessions had a focus and an international mix of four to seven speakers. According to David Tomatis, Imagina Vice President, they decided to have fewer speakers for this first conference following the reorganization, and to have very high-quality speakers. Figure 3 shows David Tomatis, Imagina Vice President, and Laurent Puons, Financial and Administrative Director.

The first session covered the research and challenges of saving, archiving, and indexing. In speaking about Media commerce space, the real work entails dealing with metadata, semantics about the object and event, texture and geometry, summary and model for annotating information and data, indexing for automatic analysis, physical descriptors, and interpreted index.

The second session was on principles, challenges, and applications of virtual reality and augmented reality. Speakers in this session explained how their work was done. Another way to experience the immersive relationship of virtual reality as introduced in a CAVE® by the University of Illinois, the Cube SAS realization (BARCO, Z-A, Clarté,) is run with a network of PCs. A great project of the French RNTL (Technologies of software national network), PERF-RV, was also presented. This is a French platform for virtual reality, engineering and design for the future. This networked environment is shared between research centers and industry.

Session three was on intelligent autonomous agents. StŽphane Donikian, researcher at IRISA in Rennes, France talked on believable autonomous actors in real-time applications. They are working on a programming environment, called OpenMASK, to model and study human behavior. The example shown was of a person reading, smoking, and drinking, and the demand on resources (such as the eyes, hands and mouth) by each of these activities. There is a subset of the software available in Open Source, and they are looking for users. For more information, see www.irisa.fr/siames/OpenMASK/.

The fourth session was on the interactive fiction horizon. They discussed whether interactive fiction is a meaningful concept and whether a market can develop around this concept. Session five was on a new age of video games. What are the possibilities in design, manufacture, and consumption patterns? What are the technological, artistic, and economic prospects? We have ended the era of video games where the only possibilities were killing and destroying and where the hero was the killer or a soldier in war. Now the user or player becomes the hero, and these players can choose their own personalities and behavior, taking a role in society, such as painter, artist, architect, town planner, or policy maker. They make choices, take on responsibilities, construct, and so on. That's the life: when you start, you can't stop. But is the pleasure just play or life?

The final session was on animation and special effects with a focus on recent productions: "Shrek", "Monster Inc.", "Kaena", "Vidocq", "Jurassic Park 3," and "Walking with Beasts." It showed what we can do now with computers, men and monsters. If some non-completely integrated scenes look like the productions of Fritz Lang or George Méliès, early creators of special effects, they have a realization of technology, color, and living sensibility.

The nomination and awarding of prizes for the best animations occurred throughout the festival. There were 486 entries, with 41 nominees and prizes in nine categories. The categories are: Grand Prix du Jury, Grand Prix Imagina, Prize for Best Direction, Prize for Best Animation, Prize for Best Editing, Prize for Best Rendering Prize for Best Script, prize for Schools and Universities, and Prize for the Best European Production. There were five nominees in each category. The first day there was non-stop screening of the productions entered by European universities, with screening of the nominated productions in the evening. On the second day, there was non-stop screening of the nominated productions, with Sponsors and Special Prizes in the evening. The final event of the Festival was the Prize Giving Ceremony. This is an academy-award-type event, with a showing of a scene from each nominee in a given category, an announcement of the winner, and a full showing of the winning piece. The prize for each winner is a teapot trophy.