Confessions of a researchaholic

While at SIGGRAPH conferences I usually spent the majority of my “attendance time” in the animation festivals and production talks primarily because (1) the contents are usually not recorded for later consumption, (2) the effects look nice, and (3) the topics tend to be something I am less familiar with, even after 20+ years in the field.

The animation creations and effects productions are hybrids of art and science/engineering.
Each effect is tailored for the specific style and story and created by a combination of artistic practices and off-the-shelf/bespoke tools.
The presentations tend to focus on the design process and tools deployment, instead of technical methods and implementations.

I just looked at a single-authored SIGGRAPH submission from a recent collaborator (with a first-authored SIGGRAPH paper before even getting into a graduate degree program), intentionally after the deadline to ensure that I wouldn’t be tempted to contribute anything to his solo effort (as I just did) before the review process.
I like the work and hope it will get accepted so that we could finally meet in person at the conference.
(Hopefully the Canadian visa would be easier to obtain than the US equivalence, as otherwise he would not have any co-author to present the paper.)

I used to concentrate my paper submissions to a venue that gained prestige by accepting only the most novel ideas, but its prestige has been diluted with more incremental works over the years to the point that it has higher acceptance rate than alternatives (in an overlapping but different field) that I now submit to more.