Art studio. (imagina).(Imagina Awards)

The creme de la creme of computer graphics were honored at this year's Imagina Awards, the traditional high point of the Imagina international festival for digital images, held annually in Monaco. This year, more than 380 works were submitted for the competition, including feature films, short animations, music videos, and commercials, illustrating the wide variety of computer graphics being used today.

Students from Supinfocom, a computer graphics school in Valenciennes, France, dominated the competition, winning three of the 10 prizes, including the Grand Prize for "Tim Tom," a short film that pays homage to stop motion and digital techniques introduced by animation pioneer Tex Avery.

More than 1800 professionals and students attended the conferences, exhibition, and awards ceremony at Imagina, often referred to the SIGGRAPH of Europe. This year, a new emphasis was given to video games, with session topics covering research in artificial intelligence, the sociology of massively multiplayer games, and future directions for game content and interactivity. Interactive television and applications for broadband Web and mobile devices were also widely emphasized.--Katherine Tyrka, European correspondent for Computer Graphics World.

Clockwise from top left [this page]:

(Grand Prix Imagina) Tim Tom by Cristel Pougeoise and Romain Segaud of Supinfocom. This short film, a salute to computer graphics animator Tex Avery and the group at Aardman Animations, integrates a variety of techniques made famous by these pioneers to tell the story of Tim and Tom, who would like to meet. The production was created with Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, and ...