I have spent 3 pretty solid days working on the submission to Siggraph. They have a venue called the Electronic Theatre that plays films in high definition. The acceptance email had a clause saying that standard definition content that was not considered acceptable quality would not be shown.
Since Flip is standard definition I wanted to avoid any problems, I was also disappointed with the image quality in the Palm Springs screening, so it was an opportunity to try and improve things.
So I recreated the opening text crawl and the end credits in full high definition. My theory is that picture quality differences are actually fairly hard to pick, but text legibility is a dead give away.
I also made a new full high definition background, I used the high resolution paper texture from the postcard I made.
There’s a lot of detail in the paper texture and the colours are richer than in the original version.
Then I experimented with various methods of scaling and compositing the animation on the new high resolution background. In the end I also redid a couple of zoom effects to clean up the interlacing problems. The animation itself looks ok at the bigger size, I had to blur it a little to try and hide the worst of the square pixellated edges. However the style of the drawings is simple and lends itself to the softness, kind of like a felt marker that bleeds around the edges a little.
Anyway, I am pretty happy with the end result and can’t see any reason why Siggraph would want to drop it from the screening, which is the main point.
Of course the new file was too big to fit on a disc, so I had to buy an external hard drive to mail the file to the office in Tokyo. Fortunately I had a bunch of points on a loyalty card from Yamada Denki, which is kind of like the JB Hi-Fi of Japan. They had 160 GB hard drives on sale for 4990 yen, which is very roughly about $65 Australian. I only had to pay around 2300 yen, so I guess that’s about $30, which is a bargain. Siggraph won’t post drives back, but I can pick it up at the festival.
Speaking of festivals, I got the rejection email from Ottawa today. I’m glad I got Siggraph a few days before, I was really hoping for Ottawa but when Siggraph came through unexpectedly it more than made up for missing out on Ottawa. There are still some European festivals that I’m waiting to hear from. I’d like to go to London in late August for the London International Aniamtion Festival, but I just don’t think I can justify the expense. If something comes through in late October or November I might be able to manage one big trip instead.
So Siggraph Asia will be happening in Japan in December, I plan to come back for the festival and since it’s a long trip to make I’ll stay for a few weeks, maybe a full month. So probably from late November through to late December. The festival is actually in Yokohama in mid December, around the 14th, so I’m looking forward to being back during the cooler weather.
Last weekend was the Takasaki matsuri. Every town has one of these summer festivals, Takasaki is a fairly big city so the festival was huge. Lots of people everywhere. There are some photos (and also some video of fireworks if I can manage to upload it), Kiryu matsuri is this weekend, I’ll be busy Friday and Saturday, so I’ll go in on Sunday and hopefully see some of my students there.
