You're invited to the Autodesk 2010 Blockbuster Tour
Auckland Wednesday 23rd June

Hear how Autodesk helps the world's best create
brilliant work with greater efficiency

Tough times call for tough action - you could either scale back or push ahead by optimising your production pipeline. This year's Autodesk Blockbuster Tour brings you 2 world leaders in the industry to tell their incredible story of staying ahead of the curve by constantly tuning their pipeline to improve their productivity without compromising their creative vision and output.

Don't miss this unique opportunity to meet Mohen Leo and Nolan Murtha, senior professionals from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Lightstorm Entertainment and share their experiences of working on Ironman 2 and Avatar. They'll take you behind the scenes to show us how all those amazing shots were assembled and the creative journeys that brought audiences flocking through the doors - and tell us how the latest Autodesk products are used every day in these world leading studios.

Iron Man 2 - Power from within Asia

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is a Lucasfilm Ltd Company with studios in San Francisco and Singapore that provide advanced digital effects for the entertainment industry. The Academy-award winning studio was the principle visual effects studio for Marvel Studio's Iron man 2. ILM produced over 530 visual effects shots for the movie, including the Stark Expo and the amazing battle scenes. - 190 of these shots were created in the Singapore studio.

Mohan Leo started his career with ILM in 1996 as Lighting Technical Director and Effects Animator on films such as Star Wars Episode 1, The Phantom Menace; Star Wars Episode 2, Attack of the Clones; The Perfect Storm and Pearl Harbor. He then spent two years working on the blockbusters The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions before returning to ILM as Associate Visual Effects Supervisor on Poseidon. He is now the Studio Supervisor for Lucasfilm's Singapore studio.

Avatar - Journey of an Incredible Movie

Lightstorm Entertainment is an American film production company founded by mega filmmaker James Cameron and producer Larry Kasanoff in 1990. Their amazing line-up of films include Terminator 2: Judgement Day; Titantic and the recent record breaker Avatar.

Nolan Murtha worked with James Cameron on Avatar for 4 years, playing a significant role in the motion capture and virtual reality based digital filmmaking technique now known as "Virtual Cinematography". This process combines video game technology, effects post-production and live action to make possible the accurate, real time vizualisation of 3D scenes with compositions of the live actors and their digital backgrounds.

This technology is set to expand rapidly into digital film, video game cinematics, television series and architectural markets.

Avatar - Creating Pandora

Avatar follows the journey of Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, recruited to help a strip-mining operation on an extraterrestrial moon. Through his eyes we witness the world of Pandora, harsh and beautiful rainforest densely filled with exotic vegetation and wildlife, glowing at night with bioluminescence.

To deliver Avatar Weta Digital created over 1800 stereoscopic, visual effects shots. They created an extremely complex photo-realistic world and digital characters that would convey all the subtleties of the performance of the actors, while being believable. While photo-real CG environments and animated characters are not necessarily novel, the scale, detail and complexity of Avatar proves that CG is at a point where we can create engaging characters to support the story and maintain the suspension of disbelief through an entire movie. Weta Digital's Head of Layout and Animation Technologies Shawn Dunn was instrumental in developing the tools and methodologies used to bring Avatar into the Weta pipeline. Shawn worked closely with Lightstorm and other vendors to build a stream lined process for ingesting the massive amounts of data that were generated in the visualization phase of the project. Shawn then worked with the internal teams at Weta to break down the data and farm it out to the appropriate departments to start the shot making process. Once the data was inside Weta, Shawn supervised the layout department which worked worked closely with teams such as models, animation and shots to help build the elements that were used in rendering out the final shot.

This talk explores the process and tools used in the modelling and layout of these very complex environments.

Shawn Dunn has over 18 years of CG experience. He has most recently worked for almost four years on James Cameron's Avatar. Shawn joined Weta Digital in 2003 to work on "Return of the King" followed by "King Kong" as the Animation Technical Supervisor. Shawn has also worked on I Robot, X-Men 3, Eragon, Bridge to Terabithia, Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Water Horse, and District 9. Prior to Weta Digital he worked for Alias|Wavefront, responsible for the development and delivery of educational material forw Maya users.

Where and When

Hoyts Cinema Sylvia Park 286 Mt Wellington Highway Mt Wellington, Auckland Wednesday June 23rd 5:00pm - 8:15pm

4:30pm - 5pm	Registration: Directors Lounge
5:00pm - 5:10pm	Paul Hellyer, Master of Ceremonies
5:10pm - 5:40pm	Rob Hoffman, Senior Product Manager
5:40pm - 6:20pm	Keynote Customer Presentation Mohen Leo, Studio Supervisor - ILM
6:20pm - 7pm	Break (Burgers & Beers will be served in the break)
7pm - 7:30pm	Keynote Customer Presentation Shawn Dunn - Weta Digital
7:30pm - 8:15pm	Keynote Customer Presentation Nolan Murtha, Digital Effects Supervisor Lightstorm Entertainment