One of the great things about the VIEW Conference – taking place 22-26 October in Turin, Italy – is that you can basically sit down in the morning and stay all day to watch wall-to-wall incredible VFX and animation talks. And you can do that all week. It’s basically one inspiring speaker after another.
This year, VIEW’s programme is pretty much jam-packed with notable speakers, so that’s exactly what I’ll be doing each day: plonking myself down and listening about the latest in feature film, TV show and immersive entertainment until the end of each day.
If you’re still tossing up whether to head over to VIEW, I thought I’d highlight just five of the many talks on offer this year, and why I think they are likely to offer something different than what you might see elsewhere.
1. Magic Leap’s John Gaeta
Everyone seems to know John Gaeta from the Matrix films and ‘bullet-time’ – and why wouldn’t you? That work will be ever-lasting in VFX history. But since then, Gaeta has gone on to do some amazing things, including at ILMxLAB and now at Magic Leap. His talk, ‘What is the Magicverse?’, is sure to give an insight into the, until now, largely secretive company and what it is doing in the AR/MR space.
2. ILM’s Dennis Muren
Dennis Muren could talk about just one of the many, many films he’s worked on, and it would be something I’d definitely see. But it’s his accumulated knowledge about filmmaking, ‘shots’ and the visual effects process that will be part of his talk, ‘Defining that critical, elusive & final 5%’, and that is something rarely discussed in this industry. Muren has been ‘threatening’ to write a book on the subject for years – you can count on him sharing some incredibly rich morsels of information in his talk.
3. Pixar DOP Danielle Feinberg
When you watch a normal live action film, if the cinematography is good, you probably don’t even realise the kinds of additions it is making to the story. That’s now the same way I feel about Pixar films. Director of photography Danielle Feinberg will be, in her talk ‘The Art of Cinematography: Storytelling with Light’, showing how camera and lighting are a huge part of animated storytelling on films like Coco, just as they are in live action.
4. Westworld VFX supervisor Jay Worth
I’m the first to admit that season 2 of Westworld kept bamboozling me, right up until the end (and afterwards). One thing that works so well amongst the chaos, however, is the invisible effects work. Readers will know I am OBSESSED with invisible effects, and Worth’s talk on Westworld will reveal the VFX work in the HBO show that you probably didn’t even know was there.
5. The Breadwinner director Nora Twomey
There’s something about Cartoon Saloon that makes their animated films stand out from the rest. Whether it’s embracing culturally relevant stories, or finding different emotions in their stories, the studio has managed to produce vastly different, and relevant, films. Cartoon Saloon’s Nora Twomey, who directed the Oscar-nominated The Breadwinner, is going to explore that further in her talk ‘Finding the intersection between empathy and entertainment’.
The full program is now online for VIEW – check it out at https://www.viewconference.it/pages/program. Now’s the time to buy tickets for the event, which also happens to be at a new venue, the OGR – Corso Castelfidardo. See you there!
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