Student Film Crafted with Autodesk Softimage Wins VES Award

As part of its ongoing educational commitment and support for future artists, filmmakers, animators and designers, Autodesk, Inc again sponsored the Visual Effects Society‘s (VES) award for "Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project".

This year‘s winning entry is "LOOM" created by Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, Csaba Letay, Fabian Pross and Regina Welker of Film Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, using Autodesk Softimage software, their self-proclaimed "weapon of choice." With breathtaking photo-real computer graphics (CG), the filmmakers weave a tale of a moth stuck in a tangled web facing an impending spider attack.

"For LOOM, we made heavy use of ICE [the Softimage Interactive Creative Environment] to create spider webs, hair systems and deformers. We‘re honored that the VES picked our film," said co-director Ilija Brunck. "It‘s simply awesome," added co-director Jan Bitzer.

"Each year the quality and creativity of the work we see in the student category is amazing. The nominees this year displayed incredible talent for creating cartoon character-style CG, beautiful life-like photo-real renderings and seamless meshes of live-action with CG environments," said Jeffrey A Okun, chair, VES. "‘LOOM‘ is a beautiful work of art that truly impressed our hundreds of judges from around the world."

"The student entries in the VES awards continue to raise the bar every year. The astounding level of sophistication of the entries continues to make Autodesk proud to support this award, recognizing the filmmakers, visual effects artists and animators of tomorrow. We will definitely be following the careers of these very talented young filmmakers in the years to come," said Stig Gruman, vice president, Autodesk Digital Entertainment.

This year, the VES received entries from around the world with the final selected nominees coming from accredited schools in New Zealand, Germany and France. While not a requirement for submission, all of the four nominees used Autodesk 3D animation software to create their short films.

Nominees included "Time for Change," a short film featuring whimsical characters living behind the doors of a town square cuckoo clock and "Das Tub," a farcical submarine encounter that takes place in a bath; both entries were created by Rupert Ashton, Priyan Jayamaha, Junying Xu and Kristen Dale Pretorious, students from the Media Design School in Auckland, New Zealand using Autodesk Maya software. "Nuisible(s)" by Erick Hupin, Baptiste Ode, Phillippe Puech and Pierre Nahoum of the Artfx School in France also used Maya to combine live action and CG to create a story about a bug-sized civilization meeting its match in a shiny black vacuum cleaner.