Larger than life: a gothic cathedral stars in Siggraph's award-winning animated short. (Cover Story).

Although any studio can enter the competition, and this year there were 640 entries, Siggraph has given its Best Animated Short award in 2002 to "The Cathedral," created by an individual artist from a small studio. Tomek Baginski of Platige Image (Warsaw, Poland) used commercial software to craft a beautiful and haunting animation that garnered the jury's unanimous praise. That film, a 6-minute animation based on the book, "The Cathedral" by Polish science fiction writer Jacek Dukaj, tells the story of a pilgrim who arrives, after a long journey, at a cathedral on the border of the known world. Baginski doesn't like to divulge the ending--the film's notes reveal only that, "The cathedral is not only a building and the pilgrim is not only a man." One concept can be passed on, though: Nothing in this film is what it seems.

Like last year's Best Animated Short winner, Jason Wen's "F8" (see January 2002, pg. 32). "The Cathedral" was created with off-the shelf software. Baginski used 3ds max, Character Studio, Stitch, Brazil, Photoshop, After Effects, and Softimage DS. Also like "F8," it is neither cartoon nor photorealistic. "F8" is distinguished by its lighting and rendering effects; "The Cathedral" is unique in its painterly style. In a written statement, the jury said of the film, "It was viewed repeatedly and each time the jury became more entranced by this production. It is a beautiful animation--very representative of the outstanding work we received from small, highly creative production companies in this country and internationally."

Indeed, although Warsaw's Platige Image is but five years old, artist in this small animation and effects studio are already taking home major international awards. Baginski's win follows on the heels of colleague Grzegorz Jonkajtys' first place award in the digital category at the Bradford Animation Festival for his short animated film "Mantis," created with Cinema 4D.

"This company is like a bunch of friends," says co-founder Jarek Sawko. "We are not very restricted to particular forms of making things. If somebody has an idea and shows it to everyone and says that it's going to be a nice piece of work and he's going to work on it in here, we all say `no problem.'"

Founded in 1997, by Piotr Skiora and Sawko, Platige's 15 artists and animators work primarily on commercials for Polish clients although they recently helped create digital visual effects for the Polish film Quo Vadis. All the artists are self-taught. "At the time we started, there were no schools in Poland that people could go to for animation, so we learned by ourselves." Sawko says. "Some of the people here studied art, some physics or something else not related to art. Tomek studied architecture."

Baginski's architectural roots show in his award-winning film, but it's the painterly quality of the film that sets it apart from other work. Although people in the studio helped with motion capture and with the music, Baginski did all the visual work. He began ...