Until I get off (on?) my ass and see some movies, I really should get myself removed from the Film Friday rotation.

For popcorny movies I have a big backlog of last-in-a-series movies to see. Like the most recent Bourne Identity and the most recent Bond. Then there’s the new stuff that I’ve been waiting for, like Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E (hello? Short Circuit? Anyone?).

When I do want to curl up (who am I kidding) lie flat and drooling on the couch at the end of a long day, I put in something short and/or episodic from the private stash.

Recently, that has meant watching my mini-library of Siggraph Animation Theater Program DVDs.

SIGGRAPH is the short form of Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques, and it’s the name of an annual conference on computer graphics put on by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

That is to say, this is where all the hella awesome new CG stuff gets showcased. Two words: Eye. Candy.

Submissions come from all over. You’ll get the big studios showing how they gave Harry Potter gills, but you’ll also get submissions on medical imaging and architectural modeling techniques, or a new approach in lighting mocap.

And then you get my favourites — the small team productions, sometimes through a university’s graphics program. These are the pieces that highlight what we’re not seeing in mainstream CG. The creativity shown blows me away. The subject matter runs the gamut from fluffy to quite dark, and is often a bit existential. Not coming soon to an AMC near you.

Here are links to a selection of (very) tiny teasers clips of what I’m going on about. The full library is browsable here.

Let’s see. From past years there’s The Fog, and Memorial. And (warning that the subject matter is dark) Fallen Art, & Jona/Tomberry.

Here’s Fallen Art in its entirety (skip down one for some lighter fare):

And, for the 3D artists out there (plus, y’know, women), there’s Cubic Tragedy:

Happy Long Weekend!