Another part of SIGGRAPH I like are the big film production sessions – they are like a DVD “behind the scenes” on steroids.  They do tend to have long lines, though.  This year, the SIGGRAPH production sessions have been brought under the wing of the Computer Animation Festival.  A full list of production sessions can be found here.  They all look pretty interesting, actually, but I think the following ones are most noteworthy:

Big, Fast and Cool: Making the Art for Fight Night 4 & Gears of War 2: This is the first SIGGRAPH production session discussing game production rather than film production, and I hope to see many more like it in future years.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button marked a watershed in digital character technology – the first time anyone had successfully rendered a photorealistic human character with significant onscreen presence.  The production session for this film spends a fair amount of time discussing the character, and also touches upon some other interesting bits of tech used in the film.

ILM was heavily involved with three big, flashy effects shows this year: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation, and Star Trek.  The production session discussing all three is sure to be a lot of fun (unfortunately, there are also sure to be long lines).

Sony Pictures Imageworks‘ Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has some very unusual scenes (including spaghetti twisters and Jell-O mountains); it is also unusual in being fully ray-traced.  The production session discusses both of these aspects.

Although not directly relevant to real-time rendering, I am fascinated by the way in which 3D modeling and rapid prototyping were used for facial expressions in the stop-motion film Coraline (and I wrote about it in a previous blog post).  There is a production session about this very topic – anyone else who thinks this is an interesting use of technology might want to attend this one.