Lev Manovich is MEGAPIXEL Keynote Speaker
Lev Manovich, new media theorist and author, has agreed to be the Keynote Speaker for “MEGAPIXEL: the impact of HD technologies on the Screen Arts and edu
cation” conference, to be held on 10 and 11 October in Cambridge.
Lev Manovich is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which has been hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Manovich is a Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego and a Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Lev will be talking on the topic of visual resolution and about his work with 4k Cinema. 4K offers approximately 4,000 horizontal and over 2,000 vertical pixels – or roughly four times the total number of pixels than the widely used 1080i HDTV format (and 24 times that of a standard broadcast TV signal).
Lev is now starting to work on a series of projects with visualisation and computer graphics researchers to develop cultural applications for these displays. 
Lev Manovich’s website is www.manovich.net.
Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001)
Paul J Franklin, Visual Effects Supervisor
Paul J Franklin is Visual Effects Supervisor for Double Negative, one of London’s leading Post Houses. As VFX Supervisor he has worked on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Batman Begins, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Enemy at the Gates, and Pitch Black.
After leaving high school he attended the Cheshire School of Art and Design for a year and then went up to St John's College, Oxford University to read Fine Art specializing in sculpture at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (the university art department). Whilst studying he worked extensively in student theater design, film making and magazine design and became involved with a group of film makers which allowed him to combine his love of graphics through animation with the moving image.
After graduation in 1989 he worked variously in videotape editing and video graphic design. In 1992 Paul joined the pioneering UK video games company Psygnosis as a computer artist, designing and creating 3D animations for a variety of gaming platforms including the nascent Playstation. Throughout this period he was working with a group of independent film makers, creating the graphics and effects for a series of short films.
In 1994 Paul joined the Moving Picture Company (MPC) in London as a senior 3D animator where he worked on a number of award-winning commercials and television identities and was involved in the setup of MPC’s digital film division.
In 1998 Paul became one of the co-founders of Double Negative, setting up the 3D department and supervising the computer animation for the company’s first feature film project, Pitch Black.
Paul has driven the development of 3D animation at Double Negative, building the department from an initial handful of people to a team of over 200 artists and software developers. As one of Double Negative’s Senior VFX Supervisors Paul recently oversaw Double Negative’s work on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which marked the facility’s largest and most complex project to date.
Paul also worked as a Pre-Viz artist on DaVinci Code and a Visual Effects artist on Die Another Day. As such, his knowledge and experience of how the Real and the Spectacular can be evoked by digital techniques is unparalleled. Paul will show examples of ‘invisible effects’ and talk about the arsenal of tools and techniques that the modern film director can call upon.
Mike Milne has worked for 25 years in computer animation, starting in the early 1980s as Head of Graphics at Research Recordings, followed by seven years as Director of Production at Electric Image in Soho. In 1992 he started the computer animation department at Framestore CFC, which has grown to become Europe's largest digital effects & animation studio.
In 1997 Mike was CGI supervisor on the title sequence of “Tomorrow Never Dies”, then formed a new team at Framestore to make the landmark BBC television series 'Walking with Dinosaurs', followed by many subsequent series which have won an unprecedented three BAFTAs, seven Emmys and six Visual Effects Society awards.
Mike is a regular speaker at computer animation conferences worldwide, and has lectured at colleges in the UK, the US and Europe. In 2002 Mike was elected to the Council of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and is a visiting professor at Bournemouth University.
Mike is currently director of Computer Animation at Framestore CFC and has
worked on the TV series "Primeval". Framestore_CFC is also renowned for such films as 'Superman Returns', 'X-Men: The Last Stand', 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', and 'Charlie and The Chocolate Factory', and the classic Guinness surfing advert with the horses in the waves.
Born in May 1940, Malcolm Le Grice started as a painter but began to make film and computer works in the mid 1960's. Since then he has shown regularly in Europe and the USA and his work has been screened in many international film festivals. He has also shown in major art exhibitions like the Paris Biennale No.8, Arte Inglese Oggi, Milan, Une Histoire du Cinema, Paris, Documenta 6, Kassel, X-Screen at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, and Behind the Facts at the Fondacion Joan Miro, Barcelona. His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London and is in permanent collections including: the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Royal Belgian Film Archive, Brussels; the National Film Library of Australia, Canberra; German Cinamatheque Archive, Berlin; Canadian Distribution Centre, Montreal and Archives du Film Experimental D'Avignon. A number of longer films have been transmitted on British TV, including 'Finnegans Chin', 'Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy' and 'Chronos Fragmented'. His main work since the mid 1980’s is in video and digital media and includes the multi-projection video installation works 'The Cyclops Cycle' and ‘Treatise’.
Le Grice has written critical and theoretical work including a history of experimental cinema 'Abstract Film and Beyond' (1977, Studio Vista and MIT). For three years in the 1970's he wrote a regular column for the art monthly Studio International and has published numerous other articles on film, video and digital media. Many of these have been collected and recently published under the title 'Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age' by the British Film Institute (2001).
Le Grice is a Professor Emeritus of the University of the Arts London where he is a collaborating director with David Curtis of the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection.
Ryan Stevenson, Senior Concept Artist, Rare
Since childhood Ryan showed a love of art and creating, it quickly became apparent that it was going to be his calling. Fast forward a few years and the pursuit of his artistic dreams took him to the valleys of Wales and Glamorgan University to study Animation, exhibiting work in galleries and film festivals, the world of post-production, and then into the game industry with Take Two/Rockstar. In 2001 Ryan arrived at Rare, where his bizarre view of the world found a new home. With his passion for art and the act of creating Ryan can always be found with either charcoal covered hands, working in his sketchbooks or glued to the screen of a well travelled laptop with Wacom pen in hand. Over the last few years Ryan has been busy immersing himself in the world of Viva Piñata creating the award wining art style for the 360 game which has gone on to become a global cartoon series and created several spin off products. Recently his work has been select to feature in the INTO THE PIXEL exhibition which celebrates the artists behind the rich visual worlds that feature in modern games. As a fine artist that has embraced the digital world he is fully aware of the continual drive of technology and the new tools and opportunities it brings.
Following the success of Viva Piñata (one of the few recent games to spawn a TV series and toys) Ryan is now working on a Next Generation incarnation of an old cult 8-bit game, Banjo Kazooie.
Rare Ltd, the UK Developersare now part of Microsoft Game Studios, but have a startlingly long history, starting with the launch of Jetpac on its platform of choice, the Sinclair Spectrum, in the summer of 1983. But it was Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, released in late 1994, which was to suddenly hurl Rare into the limelight. One of the biggest-selling games of all time, DKC began a franchise which has seen sales of well over 30 million copies to date.
Grahame Weinbren is a media artist and filmmaker. He completed six full-scale interactive cinema installation projects between 1983 and 2006, which are exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. The Erl King (collaboration with Roberta Friedman, 1983-5), one of the first works to combine interactivity with cinema, was recently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum.
Weinbren is credited as filmmaker on a number of widely screened and broadcast documentaries, including George (2000) a documentary about an autistic 12 year old, made in collaboration with Henry Corra. The film is partly a self-documentation of the world of a boy who is neurologically impaired, recreating daily experience through his eyes and brain, and partly an attempt to develop a sympathetic understanding of an autistic's world from a"normal" point of view.
Weinbren is currently collaborating with software engineer Isaac Dimitrovsky on the development of LimoHD, a low-cost full-quality high definition cinema technology, designed primarily for his own projects. The first set of his LimoHD works, 25 Letters, was screened at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. Recently he has received commissions from the National Gallery of Art (USA) and the Guggenheim Museum to create short works in LimoHD about specific paintings in their collections.
Weinbren has published articles about Media Art, Cinema, and Technology which are widely reprinted. He teaches in the graduate division of the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is an editor of the Millennium Film Journal.
Weinbren has published and lectured for three decades on cinema, interactivity, and new technology, and is on the editorial board of the Millennium Film Journal. He is on the graduate faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Martin Binfield and John Clark (SCEE)
The arrival of HD has encouraged an appetite for detail that creates serious logistical demands for game developers. The question is whether this change merely presents an administrative challenge or if it actually requires a new developmental approach altogether.
Sony Cambridge artists John Clark and Martin Binfield will present an anecdotal account on the effect of HD on Next Gen game production at SCEE and in the process touch on a number of creative issues stemming from these new technologies. Not the least of these is the effect resolution has on representation; it clearly effects the methods we use in production but how much will it affect our subject matter?
Martin Binfield is a Senior Artist at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE). Graduating from Bournemouth University, he received a first class Bachelor of Arts in Computer Animation and Visualisation. His life-long love of video games led him to work for SCEE Cambridge Studio, where he has been involved with games on PS2, PSP and PS3, producing character art and animation for titles such as GhostHunter, Medievil PSP, Getaway 3, Heavenly Sword and Home. Martin maintains strong links with Bournemouth University through tutoring and appraising student work in the Masterclass subject of Character Design and Creation.
John Clark is an Art Director at Sony. Having graduated from Oxford University he went on to work as a painter and sculptor, exhibiting across Europe, and initiating a number of significant art projects. Always committed to improving the lot and influence of artists, John was instrumental in the establishment of Glasgow Sculpture Studios , and chaired the Scottish Union of artists. He taught at Glasgow School of Art and at Greys School of Art in Aberdeen before an interest in new technologies and the convergence of art and science provoked a jump into the world of games. Since then he has worked on their development at Infogrames and Sony and has continued to search for ways in which artists involved in games development can realise their creative as well as commercial potential.
Dan Rubenfield, Game Designer (SCEE)
New Technology always begets new opportunity. From the early personal computing days through to modern consoles, this technology has always been at the forefront of next-generation hardware and software. But this isn't always a blessing...
Dan’s talk will focus on the criss-cross between technological improvements and the development of interactive entertainment. Because games are an interactive medium, the adoption of new technology requires not just an analysis of the direct results, but the impact on development, player experience, market adoption and much more. Focusing on the history of visual developments and design methodologies, this talk will cover the production changes and new design focus required as display technologies push from the early 1980's to the 21st century.
Dan Rubenfield has been a game designer for over 11 years. Dan began his career at Origin Systems where he worked on such titles as Ultima Online and Ultima IX: Ascension. He has also worked extensively on Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars Galaxies: Jump To Lightspeed, DC Comics Online, Deus EX and a number of other projects. He now works at SCEE and lives in Cambridge with his wife and 3 cats.
Paul Wheeler, HD Cinematographer
Paul Wheeler started his career as a junior member of the BBC’s film department and, twenty six very happy years later, having become a Senior Drama Film Cameraman, resigned to pursue a freelance career.
Since leaving the BBC Paul has won many awards and shot some fascinating productions covering almost every format from DV to 65mm film. He is now active in several fields, as a Director of Photography, a respected trainer and an author of several books on Cinematography.
While at the BBC Paul spent two years training incoming new directors
in the art of shooting with a single camera. After leaving the BBC Paul continued his career as a DP with much success wining many prestigious awards, and continues to
shoot with both film and digital cameras having become particularly well known for his work with High Definition.
He has twice been Head of Cinematography at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). He has also been Head of Cinematography at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and devised and run many courses both in film and Digital Cinematography at the National Short Course Training Program (NSCTP). He has also taught at the London International Film School (LIFS) and teaches Advanced Cinematography at the New York Film Academy in London (NYFA).
Paul Wheeler is a Fellow of the British Kinematograph, Sound and Television Society (FBKS); he was awarded his Fellowship both for the quality of his photography and his contribution to the society’s training program. He is a member of the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC).
Steve Wallis is the Head of Business and Operations for High Definition TV at the BBC. He has been overseeing the BBC's HD trial from the business and operational perspective and has been heavily involved in putting together the proposal to launch a BBC HD Channel. He has been working closely with both BBC and Independent programme makers to ensure the smooth migration of production from SD (Standard Definition) to HD.
Imre has been creating games since his early childhood. This interest became a hobby, then a part-time occupation developing pen & paper role playing and board games, finally a full time job, working for Digital Reality, creator of the famous Imperium Galactica IP.
Today, Imre is the Head of Game Content for RuneScape, a massively successful browser game. RuneScape is one of the largest MMO games based on its more than six million active players and is the fifth most played game at the moment based on a recent Nielsen research.
Imre will try to present a more grim side of the HD story; analyzing how the inappropriate use of this amazing technology can harm the game industry and looking into the reasons why HD products can fail while low-footprint games enjoy unprecedented success nowadays.
Graham D. Finlayson,
UEA and Im-Sense Ltd 
Professor Finlayson is interested in how color can be used to solve problems
in computer vision and allied disciplines such as image processing and
digital photography. He has made many contributions toward solving the color
constancy problem (removing color bias due to illumination from images) and
his algorithms have been implemented in commercial cameras. His current
research interests include dynamic range compression, the automated removal
of shadows in images, photometric invariance, and the application of
computational techniques to the understanding of human vision. Professor
Finlayson is also the Chief Technical Officer of Im-Sense Ltd.
Graham D. Finlayson gained a BSc degree in computer science (with honours) from the University of Strathclyde in 1989, and MSc and PhD degrees from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, in 1992 and 1995. His PhD dissertation was warded a Dean's medal for academic excellence. From 1995 to 1997, he was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in the United Kingdom. In 1997, he was appointed to a readership at the University of Derby, where he was a founding member of the Colour & Imaging Institute. In 1999, he left Derby to become Professor in the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
Peter Swinson started off as a Development Engineer at Marconi Instruments in the early 70’s, but became involved in the world of film when he joined Bell and Howell, as product development manager, selling optical effects printers and high speed printers. Through the 80’s and 90’s he was the Telecine Products manager at Rank Cintel, responsible for the introduction of the famous URSA Gold and Klone High Resolution Film Scanners, the backbone of the explosion in digital film in the 90’s. Later, at Cintel International, Peter was heavily involved with promoting the C-Reality telecine system. In 2003, Peter launched Peter Swinson Associates Limited, offering his unparalleled knowledge of film scanning, telecine and digital intermediates, as a consultant to the motion picture industry.
An active member of SMPTE and a Fellow of the BKSTS (The Moving Image Society), Peter is a champion of 2k and 4k data scanning of 35mm film, and has several patents to his name.
Peters presentation at Megapixel examines how films development has been honed to match the human subconscious visual system.
Alan Peacock, University of Hertfordshire 
Alan Peacock is Subject Leader: Screen Cultures and Interactive Media at the University of Hertfordshire, School of Film, Music and Media where he teaches on postgraduate courses in digital media. A teacher, artist and theorist (although not necessarily in that order), his current interests relate to mobile media, location, presence and placedness, with an emphasis on story and the spoken word.
Starting from a meditation on the cybernetic loop and how it may inform a discussion of 'high definition' in terms of sensation and perception, attention and information, Alan's presentation explores what 'high definition' might mean in an 'Age of Information'. It looks to a world where small devices and displays, embedded and mobile, isolated and networked, proliferate. It considers what high-definition' might mean in a time of 'selective attention', 'media saturation' and interactivity.SIMON PAYNE, Film Maker
Simon Payne studied Time Based Media at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Maidstone, and Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. He is currently undertaking a PhD project by practice at the Royal College of Art in London, which is an investigation of the aesthetics of digital media in the context of experimental film and video. His videos are discussed in detail in Nicky Hamlyn's book Film Art Phenomena published by the BFI in 2003, and are distributed by the artists' film and video organisation LUX.
They are also kept at the British Artists' Film and Video Study Centre at Central St. Martins College of Art. His work has been screened in numerous venues worldwide. He teaches at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. See www.simonrpayne.co.uk
IVAN PHILLIPS, University of Hertfordshire
Ivan Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Music and Media at the University of Hertfordshire, where he is joint Programme Tutor on the BA in Screen Cultures. After studying English at the universities of Manchester and Nottingham, he completed his PhD on the poetry of Paul Muldoon at the University of Wales, Swansea, in 1998. He has since written articles for a range of journals (Times Literary Supplement, Word & Image, The Wyndham Lewis Annual) and has contributed to various books, including the recent Revolver edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth, published to accompany Geoffrey Wright's film adaptation.
Ivan's presentation is concerned with the drive for realism within popular media forms. Starting from the premise that the landscape of 'new media' has been mapped through reference to a succession of mythologised landmarks of invention (from the printing press to High Definition), it argues that each key achievement has been characterised by a necessary reappraisal of representational practices.
