‘Borrowed Time’ Wins Best in Show At SIGGRAPH 2016

SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest annual event in computer graphics and interactive techniques, announced the winners today for its 43rd annual Computer Animation Festival.

The best in show award is being presented to Borrowed Time, a short film produced after-hours by Pixar artists Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj. The SIGGRAPH win qualifies the film for Oscar consideration, but the film was already in contention thanks to earlier Oscar-qualifying wins at the St. Louis and Nashville film festivals.

Made over the course of five years, Borrowed Time tells the tale of a weathered sheriff grappling with past mistakes. Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain, Babel) wrote and performed the film’s music.

SIGGRAPH honored two other films. The jury’s choice was awarded to Mathieu Auvray’s Cosmos Laundromat made at the Blender Institute:

The prize for student project went to the French film Crabe-Phare made by Mengjung Yang, Gaetan, Benjamin Lebourgeois, Clarie Vandermeersch, and Alendandre Veaux at Supinfocom:

The 2016 Computer Animation Festival is presented in two parts: the Electronic Theater and Daytime Selects. The Electronic Theater, which takes place in the evening, contain primarily narrative-driven short films from around the globe, while the Daytime Selects has been curated into four parts this year:

• BREAK IT DOWN – A chance for attendees to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how movie magic is created, featuring demonstrations of today’s most stunning visual effects from major studios and a glimpse at how standard techniques can be used in new ways. Celebrate the art of the breakdown with participating studios ILM, MPC, Framestore, Weta, Digital Domain, Pixar, Spin VFX, OLM, Mr. X, and many more.
• THE ARCADE – An audience experience that focuses on games from concept art through technology to implementation in cinematic and real time. The show touches on everything from look development through to the amazing accomplishments being made today with modern real-time engines.
• DEMOSCENE – A representation of an international computer art subculture that specializes in creating self-contained programs that produce audio-visual presentations. It is designed for computer scientists, GPU lovers, shader architects, and extreme real-time graphics artists to exhibit programming, artistic, and musical skills within highly constrained limitations.
• WINNERS’ CIRCLE – A celebration of Computer Animation Festival award winners from the past seven years for attendees who wish to revisit some of their favorite winning content from Electronic Theaters of the past.

SIGGRAPH 2016 will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in California between July 24–28.