ACM SIGGRAPH Montréal:  Vive la Différence!

Chris Isaac Larnder
Founder and First Chair

 Reprint from the Fall 2004 edition
of the Computer Graphics Quarterly 

Montreal is definitely a unique cultural experience, for those of you who have had the chance to spend any time here. This difference is reflected in our local ACM SIGGRAPH chapter, which maintains a fully bilingual website and presents public events in a colorful mixture of French and English.

Montreal is the home of many internationally renowned computer graphics companies (e.g., Discreet, SoftImage, Kaydara), while generous government incentives have convinced many other prominent companies (e.g., Ubisoft, EA) to set up their development offices here. Having the Canadian Space Agency nearby and CAE’s flight simulator development in town ensures us a strong hand in the high-end markets as well.

With four universities, numerous computer graphics research labs and numerous new media research centers and training centers, the city abounds in technical and artistic talent. With such a high concentration of computer graphics activity in Montreal, it is surprising to find that it is only very recently that an ACM SIGGRAPH chapter has been established here. Apparently, the only thing that was missing was a spark, for the response from the community has been tremendous.

Sitting on the board of ACM Québec, the Quebec chapter of SIGGRAPH’s parent organization, the chapter’s founder got early support for the project in the spring of 2001, and valuable mentoring throughout the chapter’s founding year. By the end of the summer, a dedicated core group had formed, a bilingual website and mailing lists were in place and presenters for the first few monthly events had been confirmed.

Word of mouth quickly reached the SAT (Society for Arts and Technology), which offered to host our monthly events in their superb locale. The SAT was created in 1996 by a group of artists and researchers interested in placing new digital production tools at the service of artistic expression. They continue to play an active role in our chapter, and represent an important link to the Montreal artistic community.

The screening of the latest Electronic Theatre every September as our season opener has quickly become a widely anticipated tradition in the Montreal community. Our events during the rest of the season range from highly technical presentations (realistic rendering of fur and hair) to contentrich artistic presentations (Eric Goulet’s stop motion animation, René Morel’s hyper-realistic animated characters) to presentations of more practical applications (architectural lighting simulation, medical visualization). Many events are thematic, and have included such topics as artificial vision in humans and robots and 3D graphics on the Web. We have also had the privilege of early presentations on major products in development here in Montreal, including Softimage’s XSI, Kaydara’s Motion Builder, Discreet’s Flame and 3DS Max and MindAvenue’s AXEL.

Speakers present their material either in French or English, and many are capable of switching from one to the other depending on the composition of the audience.An interesting compromise has sometimes been to have visual material in English with the narrative in French!

Our average attendance is well over 100 people, with more than 300 people attending our biggest events. Out-of-town speakers have expressed great satisfaction with their Montreal experience. We are always happy to hear from potential new speakers the world over, especially among the select readership of ACM SIGGRAPH’s Computer Graphics quarterly! Consider contacting us should you be interested; we can surely put you in contact with other organizations in Montreal that you may want to visit at the same time.

The Montreal chapter has also become strongly involved with the organization of ACM SIGGRAPH as a whole, as evidenced by the visit of SIGGRAPH’s Executive Committee to Montreal in 2003. During SIGGRAPH’s chapters workshop in 2002, Juan Pablo Di Lelle, our co-founder and Webmaster, had proposed a content management system as a foundation for all the chapter websites. This same system now appears to be heading for adoption as the backbone for the entire Web-based content of the SIGGRAPH organization itself.

This is not the only project “in the works” within our chapter. Now that we have established a reputation in Montreal and enhanced the identity of Montreal within the worldwide computer graphics community, we are working toward longer-term partnerships with various organizations in the Montreal area.This will help us to broaden the scope of our activities to include educational projects in schools and new media training centers, workshops, the development of a local animation festival and opportunities to increase Montreal’s presence in international settings.

With three years of establishment and consolidation behind us, we now move forward into our new season under the energetic leadership of Myriam Côté, our new chair. This represents the final, crucial step in founding a new organization – ensuring its continuity. It is delegation taken to its logical and most important conclusion.

Although our initial spark has become a strong flame, it is the gesture of passing it on to a new firekeeper that announces to the community that the value we have created is truly owned by the community as a whole. Each of us has benefited from our involvement in this chapter, on both professional and personal levels. It is good to see the fire growing and the circle of benefit widening.

Physicist and software engineer, Chris Isaac is the founder and first Chair of Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH. After two years of teaching physics at Bishop’s University, fellow McGill University graduates convinced him to join them in creating high-end, physically-based 3D training simulators. He went on to become system architect at MathEngine, Inc. creator of physics simulation middleware for the film industry, virtual reality, and the interactive entertainment industry. He has also developed “entertainment physics” for video game characters on multiple game consoles, and done consulting work on various projects, including virtual humans authoring and networked 3D environments. He spends most of his spare time creating music and canoe-camping with his wife and three kids. He continues to support the Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH chapter as Treasurer and through the development of projects focused on youth and technology.