The official ILM site has posted the schedule of the booth presentations during SIGGRAPH 2006. ILM members will discuss such projects as Mission: Impossible III, Poseidon, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and R&D.

VFXWorld.com has an interview with Terrence Masson, former ILM digital artists, who is the SIGGRAPH 2006 Computer Animation Festival Chair where he discusses how the program is selected.

Creature TDs Andrea Maiolo and Tim Naylor will teach a couple of Maya MasterClasses during SIGGRAPH 2006 on Thursday, August 3, 2006. The title of their class is "Bi-Directional Constraining: Breaking the Cyclic Dependency".

ILM has recently posted information regarding their recruiting efforts during SIGGRAPH 2006, both full time and project based positions.

ILM will have a presence at the SIGGRAPH 2006 Exhibition Floor in the Lucasfilm booth, number 1717, which will also include LucasArts and Lucasfilm Animation.

The Autodesk SIGGRAPH 2006 User Group Event will feature customer presentations from ILM, Frantic Films, The Orphanage and GMJ. The event will take place Monday July 31, 2006 4-7pm at The Westin Boston Waterfront hotel.

ILM members will be presenting 4 sketches at SIGGRAPH 2006 covering such projects as Poseidon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Other studios presenting sketches include Pixar, Digital Domain, MPC, Blue Sky Studios, PDI/DreamWorks Animation, Weta Digital and Rhythm and Hues.

Frank Losasso and Ronald Fedkiw of Stanford University and consultants at ILM have two accepted papers at SIGGRAPH 2006 dealing with fluids simulations.

The SIGGRAPH 2006 website has put a small feature highlighting some of the luminaries that attend the SIGGRAPH annual conference. VFX Supervisor John Knoll is featured, a 20 year SIGGRAPH attendee.

Compositing Supervisor Greg Maloney will be one of the panelists in the "Is a Career in Computer Graphics Possible? Part 1: Skills and Training" session at SIGGRAPH 2006.

ILM has one piece that has been accepted to the SIGGRAPH 2006 Electronic Theatre. Other studios with pieces in the Computer Animation Festival include Weta Digital, Digital Domain, Framestore CFC, Imageworks, Pixar, Cinesite, The Moving Picture Company and Scanline.

Members of ILM will participate in four SIGGRAPH 2006 courses covering HDRI, fluid simulations, digital creatures and performance-driven facial animation. Other VFX related courses will cover Imageworks work in Open Season, Rhythm and Hues work in The Chronicles of Narnia and the return of the RenderMan course. SIGGRAPH 2006 will take place July 30-August 3, 2006 in Boston.

The SIGGRAPH 2005 student reports website has posted an interview with digital artist Tim Fortenberry. In it he discusses his career, his work with Python and Open Source tools and SIGGRAPH.

VFXWorld.com has a report of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Animation Festival which includes comments on the two ILM pieces shown in the Electronic Theatre, the clips from Digital Domain's Stealth and DreamWorks' Madagascar, and such acclaimed pieces as Shane Acker's 9, Blur's Gopher Broke and Platige Image's Fallen Art.

The official Star Wars online store will be selling the ILM SIGGRAPH 2005 t-shirts. The t-shirts come in two versions: Rebel or Light Side and Imperial or Dark Side.

ILM OpenEXR maintainer Drew Hess, researcher Florian Kainz and developer Wojciech Jarosz have officially announced the OpenEXR Birds of a Feather meeting during SIGGRAPH 2005. It will take place in room 516 on Wednesday, August 3rd from 4 - 5 pm. Some topics covered will include workflow issues and a Stupid OpenEXR Tricks section.

The official ILM site has posted a complete schedule of their SIGGRAPH 2005 activities, including several customer presentations. ILM members will participate at user group meetings and booths of Alias, Apple's Shake and AMD discussing Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith, War of the Worlds and the Letterman Digital Arts Center infrastructure.

Animation Mentor co-founders Shawn Kelly, an ILM Animator, Bobby Beck and Carlos Baena, the latter two Animators at Pixar, will be at the CGW booth during SIGGRAPH 2005 on Tuesday August 2, 2005 at 2:30pm to answer questions about the animation and their online school. Additionally Carlos Baena, who was at ILM before joining Pixar, will be a speaker at the CGChar @ SIGGRAPH event. Also former ILM Animator Bradley Gabe who is co-founder of CG Soup will teach at the Softimage Training Center during the conference.

The ILM website has just posted that they're accepting resumes and cover letters for interview consideration at SIGGRAPH 2005.

Ron Fedkiw, Assistant Professor at Stanford's Computer Science Dept. and consultant for ILM, will receive the Significant New Researcher Award at SIGGRAPH 2005 for his contributions to the field of computational fluid dynamics. Jos Stam, Senior Research Scientist at Alias, will receive the Computer Graphics Achievement Award while Professor Tomoyuki Nishita of the University of Tokyo will receive the Steven A. Coons Award. Also the SIGGRAPH 2005 website now lists the Courses detailed schedules.