BATON ROUGE – While animation is a fun part of Saturday morning cartoons and blockbuster films, it’s also a useful tool in advancing research. Scientific animation builds on researcher data to render still images or short films that literally present a picture of phenomena such as cell transport within the body, black hole collisions in outer space, or sediment deposit and water salinity changes during a hurricane. This process allows researchers greater observation and understanding than they could gain just analyzing data alone.
The Red Stick International Animation Festival will include a special track on scientific animation during the sixth annual festival, which will take place Nov. 10-13, 2010 in downtown Baton Rouge, La. Red Stick will partner with the 2010 Sci-An Awards for Excellence in Scientific Animation to offer panel discussions of current projects, recent advances in this field, and the latest applications during the festival’s annual lineup of guest lectures.
Red Stick and the 2010 Sci-An Awards also will jointly present awards to international contributors in this field during the festival, and will honor one contributor with a special leadership award for demonstrating innovation in applying scientific animation to research or communication.
“We always use the festival as a platform to highlight the connections among art, science and technology, and scientific animation is a true cohesion of these seemingly unrelated areas,” said Stacey Simmons, Ph.D., Red Stick International Animation Festival Director. “While we have previously featured scientific animation as a topic for Red Stick lectures and we accept scientific animation entries through our Best of the Fest film competition, this will be the most extensive program we’ve offered, and we’re excited to partner with the Sci-An Awards to recognize work taking place around the world in this exciting, emerging area.”
The Sci-An Awards first took place in 2009, co-founded by David Bolinsky, renowned medical illustrator and founder of XVIVO, a company that focuses on using computational technology to animate medical images, and Sander Johnson, educational multimedia specialist and president of International Television for Asia and American Television in China.
The first Sci-An Awards for Excellence in Scientific Animation winners were National Geographic for natural science, Nucleus Medical Art for physical science, Jester International for children’s education, and an honorable mention for Jannis Productions.
“As scientific animation is becoming more widely used, the techniques are constantly evolving, and the visual vocabulary is becoming more sophisticated,” Bolinsky said. “We wanted to create a special award series that would honor these accomplishments and draw attention to animation’s use in helping us understand scientific processes that cannot be seen with the naked eye.”
The first awards ceremony occurred in August 2009, during the First International Science Animation Forum in Guiyang, China, which took place as part of the Asian-Pacific Animation & Cartoon Association.
Bolinsky and Johnson, who both are previous guest speakers at Red Stick International Animation Festival, are transitioning the Sci-An Awards to become an annual, independent event. They wanted to partner with Red Stick to showcase the second offering of these awards. They will accept submissions for this year’s Sci-An Awards from Sept. 1 through Oct. 15, 2010.
“The first year of our awards was a historic landmark in the future of animation and industry, and we hope these awards will expand this maturing international field,” Johnson said. “For the first year, we unveiled the awards in conjunction with an Asian animation festival and this year, we have the opportunity through Red Stick to showcase them at an American animation festival, representing the cross-cutting work taking place in this area, with universities, industries and researchers on both sides of the globe advancing the field.”
For more information on the Red Stick International Animation Festival, please visit www.redstickfestival.org.
Related Links:
XVIVO
http://www.xvivo.net
Sci-An Photos in Red Stick Festival Flickr Gallery
http://www.flickr.com/photos/redstickfestival
Publish Date:
08-25-2010
