Hasta La Motion!

IESF is very pleased to announce that eFootball PES series, Tekken 7 and DOTA 2 are the first titles announced for the 12th Esports World Championship in Eilat, Israel.

KONAMI’s eFootball PES series will return for its second year as an official game title at the Esports World Championship. With its long history of international appeal, eFootball PES series is a natural choice for international Esports competitions.

Bandai Namco Entertainment’s Tekken 7 will also return to the IESF Esports World Championship. The popular 1:1 fighting game was first released in 1994. At the 11th Esports World Championship in Seoul, world-famous Korean Tekken athlete “Knee” won the gold medal for South Korea.

DOTA 2, developed and published by Valve Corporation, is one of the most popular Esports titles in recent years. Played in matches by two teams of five players, the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game enjoys enormous global Esports following. Sweden was the gold medal champion at the 11th Esports World Championship in Seoul with a team that included gamers “Chessie”, “Xibbe”, “Charlie”, “EGM”, and “s4”.

IESF President, Colin Webster, stated, “It would be an honour to have the defending world champions for eFootball PES series, Tekken 7 and DOTA 2 attend IESF’s 12th World Championships. IESF’s 12th World Championships to be held in Eilat in November 2020 promises to be the most well-produced world championships ever. Without doubt, such World Championships is the jewel in the crown.”

Colin then added, “Special thanks must be extended to the publishers of the titles for the use of such titles. Without the continued support of the publishers, Esports would not be the most vibrant sport in the world.”

IESF is looking forward to seeing all the world’s best national teams represent their countries in these titles and more at IESF’s 12th Esports World Championship in Eilat, Israel.

The post IESF reveals first titles for 12th Esports World Championship, Israel appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Xilam Animation’s multi-award winning feature I Lost My Body scooped a pair of gongs at the 45^th César Awards for best animated film and best original score.These latest wins follow I Lost My Body’s outstanding awards and festivals success, which has seen the critically acclaimed feature take home 30 awards to date including three Annie Awards, a double win at Annecy International Animated Film Festival and the prestigious Critics’ Week prize at Cannes Film Festival, in addition to a further 37 nominations including at the Academy Awards for Best Animated Film.

A self-funded Xilam Animation production, I Lost My Body is an adaptation of Guillaume Laurant’s novel Happy Hand. Directed by Jérémy Clapin who also co-wrote the feature with Laurant (Amélie) and produced by Xilam’s Marc du Pontavice, I Lost My Body premiered to critical acclaim during Cannes Film Festival 2019 and launched on 29 November 2019 on Netflix. Pontavice was also honoured at Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2019 as he received the MIFA Animation Industry Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the animation industry.

Xilam Animation CEO Pontavice said: “We are thrilled and deeply humbled by these wins, which is the perfect way to finish what has been an amazing ride over the awards season. To see a small, independent film win at France’s most prestigious awards ceremony against such brilliant contenders, is not only an immense privilege but also demonstrates an extraordinary inclination from the César Academy for innovation in animation. These awards are also testament to Xilam’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of animation and nurturing game-changing talent who we know will forge new and ground-breaking paths in the genre.”

Set in Paris, I Lost My Body sees Naoufel fall in love with Gabrielle. In another part of town, a severed hand escapes from a dissection lab, determined to find its body again.During a dangerous expedition across the city, it remembers its life together with Naoufel, up until the accident. After an eventful journey, they reconnect in the most unexpected and poetic way.

The full list of awards and nominations to date is as follows:

Wins

Cesar Awards (2020)

Best Animated Film

Best Original Score

Best Writing: Adapted Screenplay (nomination)

Prix Lumieres (2020)

– Best Animated Film

– Best Direction ‐ Feature ‐ Jérémy Clapin (nomination)

– Best Music – Dan Lévy (nomination)

Annie Awards (2020)

– Best Indie Feature

– Best Music ‐ Feature ‐ Dan Levy

– Best Writing ‐ Feature ‐ Jérémy Clapin, Guillaume Laurant

– Best Direction ‐ Feature ‐ Jérémy Clapin (nomination)

– Best Storyboarding ‐ Feature ‐ Julien Bisaro (nomination)

– Best Storyboarding ‐ Feature ‐ JérémyClapin (nomination)

Los Angeles Film Critics Awards (2020)

– Best Music Score

– Best Animation

Chicago Independent Film Critics Association (2019)

– Best Animated Film

Black Film Critics Circle (2019)

– Best Animated Film

San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (2019)

– Best Animated Feature

Boston Society Of Films Critics (2019)

– Best Animated Film

Palm Springs International Animation Festival (2019)

– Best Film

San Diego Film Critics Society (2019)

– Best Animated Feature

New York Critics Circle Awards (2019)

– Best Animated Film

New York Critics Online (2019)

– Best Animated Film

Florida Film Critics Circle (2019)

– Best Animated Film

Utah Film Critics Association (2019)

– Best Animated Feature

New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival (2019)

– Grand Prize

Festival International Des Voix Du Cinema D’animation Voix D’etoiles (2019)

– Coup de coeur du jury

– Meilleure voix feminine

Animation Is Film Festival (2019)

– Grand Jury Prize

Sitges Fantastic Film Festival (2019)

– Best Music

– Best Motion Picture (nominated)

Colcoa French Film Festival (2019)

– Audience Award

– CriticsAward

Festival Européen Du Film Fantastique De Strasbourg (2019)

– Best Animated Film

– Best European Fantastic Feature Film (nominated)

Annecy International Animated Film Festival (2019)

– Feature Cristal

– Audience Award

– MIFA Animation Industry Award: Marc du Pontavice

Cannes Film Festival (2019)

– Grand Prize at the Semaine de la Critique

NOMINATIONS

Prix Jean Renoir Des Lycéens (2020) – TBA

– Feature Film

Academy Awards (2020)

– Best Animated Film

Prix Louis Delluc Junior (2019)

– Best Animated Film

Ace Eddie Award (2020)

– Best Edited Animated Feature Film

Critics’ Choice Awards (2020)

– Best Animated Feature

Georgia Film Critics Association (2019)

– Best Animated Feature

Nbr Awards (2020) 

– Best Animated Feature

Columbus Film Critics Association (2020)

– Best Animated Feature

Music City Film Critics Association (2020)

– Best Animated Feature

Houston Film Critics Society (2020)

– Best Animated Feature

Chicago Film Critics Association (2019)

– Best Animated Film

Greater Western New York Film Critics Association (2019)

–  Best Animated Film

Oklahoma Film Critics Circle (2019)

– Best Animated Feature (Runner Up)

Indiana Film Journalists Association (2019)

– Best Animated Feature (Runner Up)

–  Original Vision Award

Seattle Film Critics Society (2019)

–  Best Animated Feature

Prix Louis Delluc (2019)

– Best First Film

Southeastern Film Critics (2019)

– Best Animated Feature (Runner up)

Detroit Film Critics Society (2019)

–  Best Animated Feature

European Film Awards (2019)

– European Animated Feature Film

Hollywood Music In Media Awards (2019)

– Original score: Animated Film

Stockholm International Film Festival (2019)

– Best Film

Philadelphia Film Festival (2019)

-People’s Choice Award ‐ Best Film

Warsaw Film Festival (2019)

– Free Spirit Award

Pingyao International Film Festival (2019)

– People’s Choice Award ‐ Best Film

Montreal Festival Du Cinéma Nouveau (2019)

– Best Film (Louve d’or)

Gent Festival (2019)

– Best Film

Hamburg Film Festival (2019)

–  Young Talent Award ‐ Best Feature Film

Zurich Film Festival (2019)

– Best International Feature Film

 

 

The post Xilam Animation’s ‘I Lost My Body’ triumphs at the César Awards 2020 appeared first on AnimationXpress.

The famous Eurovision 1994 interval act, Riverdance, is soon to be in cinemas as an animated musical comedy. Production companies, Aniventure and Cinesite Animations, along with River Productions are currently in post-production stages of a new movie called Riverdance. The movie will be released in cinemas later this year.

The animated movie has been inspired by the Grammy Award-winning Eurovision interval act, Riverdance, which debuted 25 years ago at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, and will be directed by Eamonn Butler and Dave Rosenbaum. This is Butler’s debut film as director, but he is not stranger to the industry working on the visual effects for movies like The Addams Family and Avengers: Endgame.

Rosenbaum directed The Picture of Dorian Gray and this will be his second outing as a director. He has worked as production manager on movies like The Lorax and Despicable Me 3.

Aniventure was part of the team that worked on the Oscar-nominated Netflix animation Klaus. The script has been written by Tyler Werrin who has previously worked with Illumination in the production of some of the biggest movies such as Despicable Me, Minions and The Secret Life of Pets.

Cinesite Studios has revealed that the movie will be released in 2020. The cast and release date remain unconfirmed.

The post Animated Riverdance movie coming soon appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Name: Xigma Games
About : Founded in 2015, Xigma Games is an indie studio specializing in developing games on creative, original and innovative ideas for the global market. Based in Bangalore, a team of passionate gamers with a mission to put India on the global map of game development.
Location: Bangalore
Projects: The Bonfire 2: Uncharted Shores

What are the current trends you’re seeing in the Indian gaming space?
Currently, online games with social features and multiplayer are hugely popular. The mobile gaming market will continue to grow and social features with multiplayer games will play a pivotal role to drive the growth of the mobile market in India. Free to play with ads monetisation is still the major share of the revenue for most of the developers in India though we are seeing an increase in conversion to in-app purchases. Fantasy sports and card games are as popular as ever and Real money gaming is gaining a lot of traction and bringing in a new set of players. On the other side, there are small indie studios who are focusing on the global audience on different platforms such as PC and consoles and trying to push the creative boundaries and trying to make a mark globally.

What are the challenges in this ecosystem?
The gaming ecosystem is ever-changing and always evolving and the biggest challenge is to keep up with the pace of the industry. Also, it’s difficult to find experienced and skilled candidates for the job as the industry is relatively new in India. Though in recent times we have seen many colleges have started providing courses for game development in India. We need more creative and experienced people in the industry and people who are willing to take risks and think differently.

What’s one message you’d like to share with the aspiring enthusiasts?
The gaming industry is as lucrative as ever and it’s only going to grow from here. There are a lot more opportunities now presently available in all the various aspects of game development. If you are an aspiring enthusiast who wants to get into game development then pick your area of interest such as game programming, art or game design and work on your skills and build a great portfolio.

The post Studio of the Week| Xigma Games appeared first on AnimationXpress.

ACES is a color work space that helps you get a realistic film look when you render. Learn how dial in your color using this revolutionary workflow.

Chad Ashley from Greyscalegorilla gives you an intro to ACES and shows you how it makes color so much easier to manage at every level of production.

This snippet preview lesson is an inside look to the Getting to Know ACES training series, streaming now only in Greyscalegorilla Plus.

Getting to Know ACES and ACEScg

Hey, what’s up everybody? In this video, we’re going to talk all about ACES. So what the heck is ACES? Well, ACES stands for Academy Color Encoding System.

Now it really is a system, but it’s also a lot more than that. And we’re going to talk all about what that stuff is here in a minute. Let’s start a little bit further back.

So ACES began by the same group, the Academy that brought you the Oscars as a way to create a consistent way for companies across the motion picture industry to deal with color.

The residual sort of benefit for us is ACES CG, which we’re gonna talk about in a minute. The easiest way to think about ACES is to sort of break it down into two different categories. There’s ACES, the system, and then ACES, the color space.

ACES – The System

So let’s talk about ACES the system first, it was designed as a way to consolidate and simplify the color management process for feature film.But it also has benefits that reach far beyond that. So think of ACES as just a way of working with different formats and you would bring in all these different multiple capture formats, work in ACES, and then be able to put them out again into the world in different various formats.

I like to think of this as sort of like an air lock. You have an air lock and in that air lock is ACES. Anything that’s coming into that air lock then becomes basically a, it gets normalized to that, let’s say air pressure or something. And then everything that comes out could go anywhere, right?

So it’s really this like in between color space management system, right? And what they use is they use these things to come in and out. They call them input device transforms and output device transforms. So you can transform any capture device into ACES using an IDT input device transform.

And then you could go back out again to any format that you want, whether it’s REC709 or maybe you’re going back out to film. And those are output device transforms ODTs. So everything in the middle, you’re working in ACES. Okay. So that’s ACES, the system.

ACES – Color Space

So let’s talk about ACES, the color space. Believe me, I’m going to preface this by saying there are a lot of people way smarter about the color science stuff than I am now. ACES CG is a wide gamut color space that was designed specifically for doing 3D rendering, right? It is a broader color range, wider gamut than SRGB.

That means that there’s many more colors available to you than you do. Then you typically get an SRGB. now what that means is that you’re going to be able to push that duration much, much further. You’re gonna be able to push light intensity much, much further. And when you have a color space that reacts more like film, you’re able to really push your lighting a lot further. Intensities can get brighter, therefore giving you a little bit more energy in your indirect bounce lights in GI, right? Also, it has a really filmic response curve.

It sort of reacts very like film. If you start to blow out the image, it’s not like a linear brightness like the entire image is getting brighter. You can really see it. It looks like you’re exposing film when you bring the intensity up of a light or maybe your camera exposure in ACES CG. Uh, you can also like push saturation really, really far.

There’s a great article that Chris Brejon wrote about how when they made the Lego Batman movie, he walked into the studio that was making that film and saw some really bright saturated Lego image. And he thought to himself like, how the heck are they getting these colors to blend like this without it haloing without it fringing and that’s because they were working in ACES.

So for instance, let’s say you have a background plate that was shot in log and you need to put a 3D render on top of that background please and then spit it back out for comp. Right? So normally in a normal workflow you might have to pre-convert that log footage into a color space that you’d be working with in comp. So you’d have to pre-convert that footage, bring it into CG, try to match it as best you can, then spit out a linear EXR for the comper to try to like fudge and make it look like it’s sitting in the plate. Right.

Well the beauty of what ACES does is it sort of like it levels the playing field for all capture devices. So if you have a log C footage and you bring it into, let’s say Cinema 4D with Arnold, you can use an input device transform and say, well, I know this footage was log and I’m going to bring it into ACES CG. And you literally can set this little converter. It’s color space, but you’re, you’re almost doing a little conversion on it before it goes into your scene.

So once you’ve put your IDT or input device transform on it, now you’re working in ACES CG. You can put your 3D on there, your renderings and all that stuff is in ACES CG so that when you go back out to comp, the comper knows, Oh, this came from ACES CG. Cool. Oh and I have that log footage too that I’m going to use.

So that came in as log. I’m also going to bring that into ACES and now I’m going to comp everything and then I can go back out to anything. I can go to REC709, I can go to SRGB, I can go to REC2020, I can go out to film. So ACES, the system allows you a unified place, a simplified place to deal with color and formats. Now, one drawback is currently the renders that that support ACES are pretty limited when it comes to Cinema 4D.

Cinema 4D doesn’t support Open Color IO, which you definitely need to be able to load the proper ACES configuration file. But luckily Arnold actually does. So a lot of our ACES training, we’re going to be showing you how to work with it in Arnold because that’s the one render that sort of supports the workflow from beginning to end.

Over in Greyscalegorilla Plus, we’re going to show you how to set up a scene in ACES. We’re going to show you the benefits of ACES compared to let’s say, a tone mapper or a LUT. And then we’re going to show you how to comp in ACES really briefly in fusion show you how to bring in a 3D render with footage and have it all married in ACES and then out out to whatever you want really.

So it’s sort of like this mini series, a set of videos to try to get you up and running, or at least understanding the benefits and what ACES really is. So I hope you enjoy the Greyscalegorilla Plus videos and I encourage everybody to go and learn more, learn as much about ACES as you want. We’re going to drop lots of interesting links below, so happy learning and I’ll see you in the next one.

More ACES Resources to Study

• CG Cinematography ACES – Chris Brejon
• Color Grading: What is ACES? – Michael Maher
• ACES Central
• Getting to Know ACES Training Series – Greyscalegorilla Plus
• Why Every Editor, Colorist, and VFX Artist Needs to Understand ACES – Frame.io
• ACES – Oscars

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