Digital Storytelling, the Oslo seminar that first brought Norway’s film, VFX, and games communities together in 2006, returns to Cinemateket on October 9 for its 20th anniversary with a program headlined by three-time Academy Award winner Paul Debevec.
Debevec, who joined Netflix in 2021 and is now the company’s Fellow, Content Production Research, pioneered image-based lighting — capturing real-world light to illuminate digital characters and worlds — a technique that has underpinned two decades of Hollywood filmmaking, from The Matrix to Spider-Man. His keynote, “Image-Based Lighting: Past, Present and Future,” traces the technology from its first SIGGRAPH presentation in the late 1990s through The Mandalorian to where it is heading next: LED volumes combined with machine learning now make it possible to change a scene’s lighting after it has been filmed, and soon the camera angle too. Debevec was also the seminar’s keynote back in 2011.
Stuart Penn, visual effects supervisor at Framestore in London, presents “Practical First: The VFX Behind Rocky & Grace,” on how the studio brought the alien Rocky to life alongside a physical puppet in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary, and how the film’s zero-gravity sequences were rebuilt shot by shot to remove rigs while keeping every trace of the actors’ performances.
Espen Nordahl, Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning VFX supervisor and head of VFX at Storm Studios, presents “On The Shoulders Of Giants — Combining Practical and Digital Effects,” on the renaissance of practical effects and how prosthetics, special effects, and visual effects work together on productions including Sinners, The Last of Us, and Percy Jackson.
Tahir Tanis, creative director on the game ARC Raiders at Embark Studios in Stockholm, joins Digital Storytelling co-founder Eric Hanson for a fireside conversation on building digital worlds from real places. Morten Moen, associate professor at Kristiania University College, traces two decades of Norwegian VFX in “The History of Norwegian VFX — from Rookies to Oscar Nomination,” and Stephanie Erso, chair of the Norwegian VFX Association, presents two showreels spanning that history.
VES Award winner Theodor Groeneboom of Rebel Unit joins Nordahl and Penn on the closing panel, moderated by CG Channel editor Jim Thacker. The day ends with “The Artist and the New Machine,” a moderated conversation and open Q&A with the panelists on craft, tools, and what stays constant when everything around it keeps changing.
“Twenty years ago, the Norwegian VFX industry was just getting started. So were we,” said co-founder Kim Baumann Larsen. “Returning to Cinemateket with a programme like this — and with Paul Debevec on stage — feels like both a homecoming and a genuinely open question about where we go next.”
The seminar runs Friday, October 9, from 12:30 to 5:00 p.m. (registration from 11:30 a.m.) at Tancred kino, Cinemateket, Dronningens gate 16, Oslo, followed by an anniversary reception. Across 11 editions since 2006 the event has featured more than 90 speakers, including Oscar winners Robert Legato, Robert Stromberg, Michael Fink, and Jan Pinkava, and welcomed more than a thousand attendees. It is co-founded and co-directed by Larsen of Dimension Design, Oslo; Angela Amoroso of Seaside Scripts, Oslo; and Hanson of xRez Studio, Los Angeles. Tickets are available at digistorytelling.com.
Source: Digital Storytelling
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
