History

We shall release information regarding the seminar statement by updating this page on a regular basis.

This seminar series has closed.
For more information, please refer to "Looking back on FPTS".

■The beginnings of this seminar

The genesis of this convention was a convention titled "Art-directable Discrete Models for physically-based method in CG" which was held at Kyushu University IMI. For more information, (*1) contains a detailed written description of what the day was like, but we were inspired by that convention to start this one, realizing the importance of an awareness of the public nature of our activities, and in recognition of the significance of making things like each studio's technical strategies available to the broader public, as well as the growth that can be achieved while sharing how each studio has improved, as well as methods for inter-studio improvement, the improvement of internal compliance for purposes of appropriate application of academic knowledge, and the the release of company publicity and of isolated technical information.
Ever since that convention, having participated in various discussions and experimental efforts with other participants in the convention, we ventured to begin our own convention starting in 2016. Nevertheless, for us as a studio to deal with academic knowledge, the fact is that even the release of simple information that is not the result of research is not a simple matter, but rather weighs heavily on us as a responsibility.
Also, it is difficult for us to urge the same sort of burden upon all of the studios who participate in the seminar, and as we have strayed from the initial project of reaching out from within our studio, we have found the deployment of information based on research to be difficult to operate. At that point, we decided to devote ourselves to a plan which constrains the focus of this seminar to the operation of a studio.

(*1)IMI seminar page
http://www.imi.kyushu-u.ac.jp/eng/events/view/1078


■2016-2017

As Polygon Pictures and Studio Phones planned and undertook this convention, we explored ways in which its format and contents could be improved. At the same time, we made improvements based on the opinions of several studios who participated, and set the agenda on the basis of the balance with the promotional aspect, the internal control and compliance situation at each studio, and such differences between the participant studios as their business models, thus establishing a fundamental stance in accordance with the operation of the seminar. It can be difficult to prevent it from turning into a sort of technical public relations, but with cooperation between each studio, we have conscientiously conducted each seminar with a view toward overall developments within the industry, while providing support for engineers who only temporarily interact with the industry.


■2018-

At the seminar conducted in February, 2018, for which planning was begun in 2017, we began to anticipate that, in addition to attendees from image production studios, we would get attendees and cooperating companies from the game production field, and that the number of attendees would increase as well. However, at the planning stage of the seminar, we felt that it was important to keep the number of participants low, and to hold more concentrated discussions of technical matters, as well as to aim to find things that would spur innovation, and so we held the February seminar accordingly.

In March, 2018, the site was moved from a subdomain of the Polygon Pictures corporate site to this domain (a-film-production-technique-seminar.com), and we changed the way the seminar is conducted to be a smaller image production seminar that takes up topics each time which the two studios who moderate the seminar think are important.

At this point in time, when the seminar is held, we aim to keep the number of participants low, to conduct concentrated discussions, and to shift our way of doing things so that we shall continually release industrial or technical issues discovered within the knowledge obtained in the seminar on the related materials page. We shall change our stance in order to devote proper care to the running of the seminar itself, inviting attendees with a focus on a fitting corporate structure based on discussion and persistently maintaining low attendance numbers in order to be able to hold discussions pertinent to the important topics that the two companies have selected each time.


■End of 2018

After the seventh seminar, which was fortunate to have participants from video, games and animation, in the same way as matters discussed in society generally, the issue of the need for information literacy among all staff members who are involved in production which includes artists continues to be raised as an issue common to all disciplines. There is a greater awareness among many domestic studios of future overseas development; an increasing number of studios have already begun to keenly feel the difficulties of globalization as a result of assessments made by overseas clients on large-scale projects; and it seems evident that large-scale trends are afoot in order to do things like securing coordination (awareness of standardization in the wider world) with outside studios centering on private clouds or public clouds, which demand high information literacy, and development system architecture for the pursuit of individualization (awareness of destandardization promoted internally).

Details of this have been summarized in the related document called "Potential and Problems in Cel Look Pipelines that Actualize Hand-Drawn Anime". Because we recognized that we have begun to reach the limits of the sphere of what can be moderated by two companies as we drew up the section "One Pipeline and Infrastructure Conceivable from the Seminar" within this document, and also because we believe we have achieved the initial motivation for instituting this series, we have decided to conclude this series of seminars at the end of 2018.

The possibility of cel-look pipeline and challenges to take advantage of the hand-drawn animation
https://a-film-production-technique-seminar.com/fppat/materials/ppi_phones_possibility_celook_pipeline_challenges/index.html


■End of 2018-

Resulting from the understanding achieved during "Craftsmanship and Artist Technique" in August, 2018, we plan to interweave topics pertaining to video production pipelines into craftsmanship and artist technique as we continue such discussions, as a result of our understanding that it is not possible, in the course of business, to develop craftsmanship and artist technique without a similar perspective to issues addressed in "Film Production Pipelines and Artist Technique".

"Craftsmanship and Artist Technique" History Page
https://a-film-production-technique-seminar.com/crafts/crafts_history.html