The Prix Ars Electronica Forums are taking place every year during the Ars Electronica Festival. They are a wonderful opportunity to get in contact with the artists who are talking about their works, ideas and technical challenges. The “Prix Forum I” on September 4, 2015, at the 2015 Ars Electronica Festival was all about “Computer Animation / Film / VFX” and took place at the CENTRAL, a former art house cinema in Linz.
About medieval art and bear videos
“The final selection we came up with really describes and shows where contemporary art and film is supposed to be.” After the introduction by Erick Oh, animator at Pixar Animation Studios and jury member of the 2015 Prix Ars Electronica, Golden Nica winner Alex Verhaest introduced her interactive animation work “Temps Mort/Idle Times” where viewers are able to call the phone within the animation. At the Prix Forum she talked about how she came up with the idea and the story line of interacting with the viewers. She combined her “complete obsession with medieval art” with a lot of hours of recording, composing, motion tracking and the animation of small living creatures.
Pascal Floerks has received the Award of Distinction for “Bär“, a personal story about the relationship with his grandfather and his past in Word War II. Floerks turned his grandfather into a bear and created an emotional film. The story is kept more open and simple by telling with an animal character, he was convinced and referred to the Blacksad comic series. While looking for the best way of animating a bear he stumbled upon the google image search and some bear videos and decided to create the animal as a 3-D character: “So I went the boring way and animated it in 3-D.”
Watch the 1,5 hours of the prix forum I: