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CGTEXPO 09 Mumbai, the largest Expo on Animation, Visual Effects and Gaming started with a bang with the registration desk bombarded with attendees at 09:30am on the first day of the event. Once you are in there was loads in store. With a line up of interesting sessions at the Main Stage, there was the Artist zone, Meet the artist, Master Classes, Education fair, Technology fair, the Art gallery, Job fair etc.

The event saw an intake of 3500 in both the days. The ambience inside was just live energy from the word go. There were as many as 16 stalls at the education fair comprising of different kinds of animation and visual effects institutes and job fair had as good as 9 productions houses and studios with their recruitment desks at the Job fair.

JOB FAIR
Those aspiring to carve a career in the Computer Graphics Industry got a chance to speak to local outfits as well as renowned international studios with those of 'Contact Singapore Lucas films', 'Dreamworks dedicated unit at Paprikaas', 'Big Animation', 'Crest India' , 'Tata Elxsi' and many more acting as a relevant and successful job exchange and recruitment platforms looking out for talent to add to their creative forces.

There was provision of an interview room as well where the studios interviewed the shortlisted candidates. Both the days saw the Job fair full of students and professionals eager to submit their resumes.

MEET THE ARTIST / USER GROUP MEET
Meet the artists was a unique effort at CGTEXPO this year where we had various sessions which were more like an open discussion forum on the particular topic where every one shared their doubts and problems and got to know more about Animation from the artists themselves. Here is an overview of a few sessions.

Photography
Sapan Narula, FX School

He has worked as a VFX artist at Jadoo Works, Big Animation, Pixion & is currently with the FX School as HOD of VFX Department.

"Photography helps develop a sense of Lighting" said Sapan as he showed his work in digital photography. Before clicking one should think of a composition in the image he wants to shoot. He should look for shapes in the compositions. Elaborating on this he explained different types of compositions like L-Shaped composition, S-Shaped composition, Radiating lines composition, Diagonal, Group & Fulcrum composition. He also gave examples of each with the pictures that he had clicked. Going on to the Do's & don'ts of a composition he said "Do not try to fit everything in one frame touching & touch edges, always leave a breathing space. In a good composition the objects are always placed one behind the other diagonally. This gives a sense of depth in the image."
He concluded by giving his website where people can see his work www.sapan.in

Clay Animation
Vaibhav Kumaresh, Director, Vaibhav Studios

A NID graduate & a genius who created Simpoo, Amaron Batteries, Chulbuli, Ooga Booga & many other wonderful claymation works, everyone's favorate Vaibhav Kumaresh started off with him asking the audience to throw questions.
He first explained the process of making a clay model, at first an armature is created with thermocol, aluminum wires & tapes. After that it is covered with a thin layer of clay. Thermocol is used to make the armature lighter in weight & aluminum wires make it strong.

How do you manage the timing in stop motion?
Being a linear (1 time) process you cannot scroll & check back your animation so stop motion is best way to develop the sense of timing. Your pre-production becomes strong as planning is a crucial part in stop motion.

How do you create facial animation in clay?
Replacement technique is used where different lip shapes are created separately & are replaced & shot frame by frame.

How to control movement of joints?
The armature should be made in such a way that there should not be much pressure on the joints. There should be space to move the joint.

What lights are used for clay animation?
White CFL Lights or tungsten yellow lights but should have same intensity.
Currently Vaibhav & his team are working on a brand design campaign of a TV channel & an inhouse short film. He concluded that animation has become a good career option for television branding

Animation
Anand Baid, Animator, Dreamworks Animation Unit @ Paprikaas & Deepak Ganguly, Tata Elxsi

A graduate from animation mentor & a CGTantra Forum Leader Anand earlier worked as Lead Animator with Tata Elxsi, VCL on a Walt Disney - Yash Raj Films collaborated animated film, 'Roadside Romeo'. His ultimate goal as an animator is to be a 'Director's ideal digital actor'. Deepak has worked on the story board for Roadside Romeo.

Anand started by collecting questions on character animation from the audience & then answering it. He said "Before starting with an animation go through the director's notes thoroughly & look for a key word, for example, a wicked smile of the character. Here wicked is the key word that you should keep in mind before animating the character." Deepak went on to explain the basic shapes in character composition: 1) Round shows smoothness, 2) a drop shape shows fluidity, 3) Triangular shape shows force & 4) A rectangle shows that the character is strong & it is difficult to move him. Anand explained the 180 degree rule for camera movement. The composition should be done in such a way that it should lead the eyes to the camera. He explained this by showing various types of compositions. Deepak also explained the difference between a CG expression & a 2d expression.

Regarding timing he said "It depends upon the kind of animation the director is looking at i.e. snappy or realistic. Timing also depends on the weight of the character whether the character is heavy or light." Anand acted on a small example of lifting a heavy object to show how anticipation, squash & stretch is used to show weight. He gave few tips for a animation demo reel:
1. Do not animate the names in the title. Keep it simple.
2. The title should not be more then 4 seconds
3. be different & original. Put your best shot first
4. The reel should not be more than a minute. 30 seconds of your best animation is enough for the company to hire you.
5. Keep the reel clean & short.

To conclude the session Anand thanked CGTantra for organizing such informal session. He loved answering good industry related questions.

Developing an Illustration
Harshvardhan Kadam, Free lance Illustration artist

A Master of Design in Visual Communication from IDC, IIT Mumbai Harshvardhan Kadam a free lance concept artist and illustrator started with a question to the audience, "What is an illustration?" To which a student answered "Illustration is a visual representation of an idea." Harshvardhan took it forward with explaining the difference between a fine arts & illustration. Fine arts is a personal expression of an artist which shows what an artist is, whereas Illustration has a purpose to serve which is planned in advance. It is better for a digital artist to explore various mediums like paint brush, pencil, crayons, etc before going for a digital medium. Showing some of his work for a project where he had to research on god Indra, Harsh said "It is very important for a concept artist to have a sense of aesthetics, anatomy, timing & spacing. Composition plays a vital role in communicating an idea" He also showed the designs he did for a comic book called Buddha. According to him a comic book gives a good idea of timing, spacing & progression of the story.

Rigging
Udai & Anoop from Eyeqube studios

It was an entirely technical session with lot of technical questions from the audience on preparing a bone structure for a CG character. Udai showed in detail about the joints structure, using IK handles, grouping of joints, etc. One of the students showed a character that he had rigged & got feedback from the experts. He asked riggers to refer the book by Eliot Goldfinger on Human & Animal Anatomy. He concluded the session by mentioning some useful websites for riggers like

www.comet-cartoons.com,
www.davidwalden.com,
www.rigging101.com
www.chrisevans3d.com

Lighting
Shweta Gupta, Sequence Lead, TATA Elxsi - VCL

Shweta has in all 7&1/2 years of experience in lighting & has worked as a sequence lead for lighting on Tata Elxsi's Roadside Romeo. She is currently working on the movie "Arjun".

Sharing her experience on Roadside Romeo Shweta said "the most challenging part was to create lighting for Laila as she was colored all white. As Laila's look was very different, she had to be treated separately in all scenes." Majority of the character lighting was done using spot light & they had to be very careful with the fur.

To give a magical feel in the song sequence glow was added to the characters. To the question "What are the different divisions in a lighting department?" She answered "CG, VFX & Product lighting are different departments within lighting where CG lighting can be further categorized into BG lighting & Character lighting."

A lighting artist has only 5 kind of lights to play with out of which spot light is used the maximum & directional & point lights are used for BG. Highlighting on what a lighting demo reel should include Shweta said that it is better to include a concept (scene) that shows both character as well as BG lighting rather then putting random images. A lighting artist should have knowledge of modeling & texturing (UV's) & rendering.

ARTIST ZONE
A platform for artists to showcase various art works from traditional paintings to sculptures, we had the Bombay Art Society displaying a splendid collection of art works, Pallavi Shilpi, a CGTantra volunteer displaying metal sculptures which were made of pure brass & it took her around a month to cast each model. The Artist zone also had digital painting competitions held by Graphiti School of Animation through out the two days.

ART GALLERY
The Art Gallery showcased digital media artwork selected from hundred of art works by CGTantra members from all across the globe utilizing a range of formats. A majority were Digital paintings and Matte paintings which have also won various awards.

ENTERTAINMENT ZONE
Entertainment and Gaming zone by nrg games showcased professional gameplay so as to transform casual gamers to professionals. India has a Gaming mindset which is waiting to explode.

With the fact that 54% of the Indian population is below the age group of 25yrs and having the world's largest youth population - India's only getting younger. Entertainment features as one of the predominant spending area amongst the Indian consumers. The zone comprised of 20 high-end gaming machines. The audience witnessed top class gamers competing against each other. A first hand experience on how professional game play exactly works, the same ambience was created with another section where the audience could sit and enjoy games like COD IV, NFS, Fifa etc

The gaming event was sponsored by Leadtek which is the lead sponsor followed by steelseries as the prize sponsor and Nvidia who is the technology support for the event.
Nrg gaming and playfactory comprises of young gaming enthusiasts. The core team comprises of the gaming star Ben Verghese who was part of the team that won the gaming competition, Nirav and Bhavya, co-founders of nrg gaming.

THE MAIN CGTEXPO STAGE
A different scale of energy made home at the main stage area for the entire two days, and the same could be measured in decibels of cheers for the exciting sessions and product demos were the most awaited. There were sessions by NVIDIA, the first one on Parallel Computing with CUDA by Rupali Deshpande and another talking about NVIDIA products. Rupali answered various hardware related queries and software compatibility doubts that the audience had. Later the Lucky Draw session followed which stole away the show.

Frameboxx had much up their sleeve with sessions like Acting for Animation by Paresh Parekh and Preproduction at the Incubation Centre by Faheem Siddiqui and Japheth Alberto Bautista. Other Institutes like DASA and FX School also made sure that the audience comprising of a lot of students had an entertaining and a learning experience with various sessions on Photgraphy, career counselling. Abhishek Singh spoke about his new graphic novel that he is working on. The product demos included sessions by Suyog from Wacom , Rupali Deshpande and Nitin Khope from NVIDIA, Rajesh Patil from Adobe, Imran Desai for Corel Paint and Peter Mitev from Vray. The lucky draws were a riot with Animation today giving away loads of T-Shirts, magazines and yearly subscriptions, NVIDIA had t-shirts and webcams to give away as well. The main stage also featured short films by Mabel from Siggraph Asia.

CGTANTRA COMMUNITY AWARDS
The new feature & feather in the cap at this year's CGTExpo'09 event was "CGTantra Community Awards" - an initiative towards recognizing and honoring the best of the artists and to give them another reason to stay on their toes to make a mark in the industry. The award for the best of its category was chosen not only by a panel of experts, but the judging power was also given to the community itself by putting up the nominated artworks for online voting.

CGTantra Community Awards Winners

Another main highlight of CGTEXPO 09 was the exclusive India Screening of The Hunt For Gollum - a 40 minute independent film inspired by The Lord of the Rings which was released to the internet for free on May 3 2009 and done entirely by a community of artists from across the world in a huge collaborative effort. We had with us Kaustav Sinha from Kolkata who was part of the team that worked on the film. He later spoke about his experiences working for the film.

Interview with Adam Thomas - VFX - The Hunt for Gollum

The Official site for The Hunt for Gollum