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Join illustrator Sarah-Lisa Hleb for her talk on character design, in which she will share her creative process and tips and tricks on how to bring your characters to life.
Starting with the basics, she will explain the fundamentals of strong design: how to use silhouettes, shape language, proportions, and strong poses to create drawings with personality and purpose.

The talk will highlight both commissioned work and personal projects, ranging from mascot designs to children's book and comic book characters and much more. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at sketches, iterations, and the challenges of developing memorable characters under various creative conditions. Sarah-Lisa will share not only her visual results, but also the decision-making processes behind them.

At the end of the session, she will present her process in a live demo.

Join us to explore the creation and challenges behind building lifelike
worlds in simulation-focused games. We take an in-depth look at the
development of the upcoming Winter Resort Simulator 3, uncovering what
it takes to design realistic ski resorts - from initial concepts and planning to
the creation of believable, fully realised environments from an artist’s
perspective. We also discuss how our commitment to technical accuracy
merges 3D artistry with engineering principles to deliver authentic and
engaging experiences for our community.

Brain Main is doing a Life Drawing Class

Bring pencil and paper or your drawing implement of choice and sketch away!

I'll start with a brief overview of my background, growing up, and my journey, becoming an artist at the dawn of CGI. Analogue vs. Digital. Intermedia means our tools do not define us. Funnily, the more and better tools we got, the bigger the contrast became between those who are technically excellent and those who cultivated an artistic vision.
Changing media, cinema to streaming, media consumption habits, Art Direction for the tiniest screen. Media saturation and short attention spans mean that Quality is constantly at risk; it is also harder to stand out than ever before, with shorter runtimes and shorter production schedules.
COVID, the Bubble, and the Strikes. How working from home opened up opportunities as well as created a weird playing field. We might be more efficient, but culture for creatives is pretty important, daily cross-pollination of ideas, team care became more important than before, and so did individual mental health, etc.
AI, and its use cases. Getting ready for the end of the “Era of Defiance”, how to stay cognizant and look for areas where AI use will be expected, and how it can remove strain from artists and productions, especially if these trends of short runs keep up.
Democratization of tools means we are finally having more diverse voices in the industry, more indie projects, and more varied stories, perspectives, and visions. But the more people try their hands in filmmaking, the more they realise it is still not easy, industry processes still cannot be ignored, even in short-form production; the best way to learn is still to work at a studio. It has also never been more confusing to see where to begin, what to study first, and what tools we should master.

The International Student Competition at PIXELvienna serves as a dynamic platform for emerging animators worldwide to showcase their innovative works. This curated selection features short films that exemplify the diverse storytelling, artistic expression, and technical prowess of student filmmakers. It celebrates the fresh perspectives and creative risk-taking that define the next generation of animation.

1. SUCKER – Angelina Damm
2. Not Alone – Momo Cao
3. IMMATURE – Eddy Wu
4. Stardust and Camp – Jayden Van Win
5. Wasting – Laura Breslin
6. 91 Times Smash – Yuxin Yang
7. Zootrope – Léna Martinez

PIXELvienna’s Austrian Competition is a showcase of homegrown talent where Austria’s most inventive and expressive voices in animation are presented. This competition is part of the Animation Festival segment of PIXELvienna, which itself lives at the intersection of art, storytelling, and digital craft.

1. Between Waves (Halt zwischen den Wellen) – Beate Kulha, Karin Bukaces, Cassandra Vonier
2. Clown Act – Mina Armin
3. EMBER –Howard Wimshurst
4. Fisherman's Plight – Judith Maria Veis, Fiona Gruber
5. The colour of god – Jonas Rosicka
6. The Goo – Jan Pscheidt
7. Those Boring Bleeding Humans – Jascha Hanisch, Florian Winkler
8. Norbert – Nora Németh
9. Trial of the Concubine – Simon Young
10. Undark – Alissa Calliari, Samaa Mizar, Emily Lasthofer
11. Yarn Over – Veronika Wielach
12. Midnight Concert – Sonja Draczynski
13. Dry Food – Janka Dósa
14. Einwegwurzeln – Paula van well

The International Professional Competition at PIXELvienna stands as a premier platform for showcasing the pinnacle of global animation artistry. This curated selection features short films that exemplify the diverse storytelling, artistic expression, and technical prowess of professional animators worldwide. It celebrates the innovative approaches and creative excellence that define the contemporary animation landscape.

1. Strawberry Squid – Arthur Dantes Porto Lara
2. Gravity – Robotina
3. Butterfly Kiss – Zohar Dvir
4. Swol – Eva Grandoni
5. Snake Soup – Zack Demirtshyan
6. the boy who cheated death – Pipou Phuong Nguyen
7. 2nd Day & the End of the World – Sara Koppel

The International Professional Competition at PIXELvienna stands as a premier platform for showcasing the pinnacle of global animation artistry. This curated selection features short films that exemplify the diverse storytelling, artistic expression, and technical prowess of professional animators worldwide. It celebrates the innovative approaches and creative excellence that define the contemporary animation landscape.

1. Paradise Buffet – Santi Amézqueta, Héctor Zafra
2. Nabu – Joanna Rusinek
3. The Shadow – Petra Balekić
4. Tuu Tuu Til – Veronica Solomon
5. T-Zero – Vicente Nirō
6. Everything we missed – Marta Prokopová
7. Where Blue Meets Red – Tamás Patrovits

Join us at the Award Ceremony for the categories Best International Student Animation, Best Austrian Animation and Best International Animation.

In this session we'll provide you with a look back on the journey of creating the art style and animation of Mipumis upcoming roguelike deckbuilder BLACK JACKET. As a studio that always strives for our games to be visually unique and stand out, we'd like to share a peek behind the scenes: our inspirations, the process of establishing an art style, the detours we took to get there and a glance at how we set up the hand animations in the game.

Failure & Its Role in Story Structure, Directing and The Creative Life
A PIXEL workshop by Toni Weiss

Ever feel like your creative life is just one long blooper reel? Perfect. You’re doing it right.

In this funny, frank, and occasionally painful session, writer-director Toni Weiss (who’s been fired, rejected, replaced by AI, and still somehow thriving) explores why failure isn’t the opposite of success — it’s the fuel for it. Drawing on over 60 scripts, a handful of actual productions, and a heroic 90% failure rate, Toni reveals how the storytelling process itself mirrors the messy, glorious journey of creative life.

Through the lens of his 8 Sequence Model — a simple but powerful story structure used by huge studio production small indies and countless filmmakers and screenwriters — Toni shows how protagonists must fail at least seven times before they finally win. Turns out, that’s not just a plot device. It’s biology for the creative soul.

Expect to laugh, cringe, and possibly rethink every “flop” you’ve ever had. You’ll leave with a new appreciation for the F-word (no, not that one... Failure), and practical ways to turn your next creative disaster into an artistic breakthrough.

Whether you’re a filmmaker, animator, writer, or professional overthinker, this workshop invites you to fall flat on your face — joyfully, purposefully, and with style. Because the only real failure? Is trying to avoid it.

Together, we will have a look at how game and film studios handle 3D props, characters and environments and why they have different workflows.

Sian Warren is a Creature Modeler with over 7 years of experience, working for large VFX houses like ILM London and MPC Film character Lab. Starting out on ILMs Jedi Academy Graduate scheme, concepting and creating prehistoric creatures for Netflix: Life on Our Planet to an anatomical deep dive into lions and character design
for Disney's Mufasa: The Lion King. She has worked on a broad range of species; alive, extinct and alien for films, advertising and tv production to publications with The Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology; collaborating alongside Professor of Biology: Dr Stuart Sumida. She is now working as a Freelance Snr Creature/character Artist at Twin and creating educational model tutorials with FXPHD.

Details coming soon.

By exploring a few of illo’s favourite projects as case studies from the past years, David Cubitt (Lead Animator at illo), will be reflecting some illo processes focusing on how they mitigate and cultivate risk in their work practices to create an environment that encourages learning, and can lead to unexpected outcomes and opportunities.

Panel: Pixels for Future

As digital media grow into all areas of society, so too does their environmental footprint. This panel brings together artists, researchers and sustainability advocates to explore how the fields of computer graphics and media production can recognize and exercise their ecological responsibility.

Peter Mindek (nanographics, Demoscene, Real-Time Computer Graphics) will share insights from the world of real-time rendering and low-resource creative coding, where computational efficiency meets aesthetic expression.

Patricia Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar's Lab, feminist perspectives on sustainable computing) will reflect on the intersection of feminist theory, technology, and ecological ethics, questioning extractive infrastructures and proposing alternative, care-centered design methodologies.

Barbara Galante (Arx Anima, Green Filming Consultant) will bring in the industry perspective, discussing sustainable practices in animation and film production, and how studios can reduce their environmental impact without sacrificing creativity.

Simon Repp (Permacomputing, Libre Graphics) will guide through the session, adding perspectives on permaculture-inspired computing and sustainability in the free and open source software movement.

On a wide spectrum from pixel generation to rendering farms, the panelists will discuss and explore practical, philosophical, and ethical approaches toward a more sustainable future for computer graphics."

Using a procedural workflow in houdini to create different assets for the latest Projects of Arx Anima (like rockformation, walkways, Boats and Vegetation). Those can be used to create easy and fast variations of assets to speed up production.

Fun and Efficient workflow
What workflow would you use when you have limited time but want to do something fun and professional using an iPad or other digital tools?

In this Masterclass He will show you a few different demos. 1, 2, 10 minutes demos, or if you have more than 30 minutes. Maybe even a month of working on just one illustration, painting or conceptart.

The Shape of Thought: Art as Research

Outline:
Art is often seen as decoration to science and technology — a way of
visualizing knowledge already found elsewhere. But what if art itself is a
way of finding out? In this talk, SpiceLabs invites the audience to explore
art as research, where form, image, and aesthetic experience are not
by-products, but methods of discovery.
Through examples ranging from molecular animations to immersive Deep
Space projections, we will show how artistic practice generates knowledge:

by experimenting with form, by making the invisible tangible, by opening
speculative narratives, and by creating embodied experiences that other
disciplines cannot.
Our focus is on aesthetic research — how beauty, composition, rhythm, and
resonance can reveal truths inaccessible to data alone. Art allows us to see
with other eyes, and in doing so, it expands not only what we know, but
how we may come to know.

Flow:
Opening – What is research when art leads?
A brief introduction: art as more than ornament, as a distinct mode of
inquiry.
Methods of Aesthetic Research
● Experiment with form and material
● Narration and speculation as epistemic tools
● Embodied and participatory experience
Case Studies from SpiceLabs
● Visualizing the invisible (molecular animations, deep space
projections)
● Sculptural thinking in digital environments
● Art bridging science and technology

Closing – Why we need art as research

Fun and Efficient workflow
What workflow would you use when you have limited time but want to do something fun and professional using an iPad or other digital tools?

In this Masterclass He will show you a few different demos. 1, 2, 10 minutes demos, or if you have more than 30 minutes. Maybe even a month of working on just one illustration, painting or conceptart.

This talk uses my “Berlin Sidewalk Generator” as a case study to explore
how everyday structures can be reverse engineered into procedural
systems. The tool recreates Berlin’s distinctive sidewalk tiling patterns
inside Houdini, with all their quirks and imperfections, and turns them into
a fully adaptable, non-destructive system.

The focus is less on the finished asset and more on the thought process:
how to observe the world as patterns, translate physical rules into
procedural logic, and reduce complexity into clear, reusable steps. Walking
through the tool’s design choices highlights the mindset needed to
approach any subject procedurally.

The goal is to give newcomers a practical framework for thinking
procedurally, showing how curiosity and observation can turn real-world
references into powerful generative tools.

Julian will go into more detail on the topics of his talk and demonstrate his workflow.

In this talk, I'll be sharing my unique experience working alongside the director of Jurassic World Rebirth and The Creator. I’ll provide an inside look into the production—from the initial creative communication and established processes to the unexpected challenges and key lessons I learned along the way. I'll be focusing on both my successes and the areas where I struggled, offering a candid and insightful look into the realities of a large-scale creative collaboration.

"On stage, a story comes into being. Step by step, a scene takes shape – visible in its creation, open to change. Together, we trace the path from the first idea through script, concept art, and storyboard to – if time allows – 3D composition. The stage becomes an atelier, thought turns into process, the invisible into form and light."

"The CFX of The Marvels" dives deep into the dazzling VFX and especially CFX that Trixter contributed to the 33rd feature film of Marvel Studios. We will visit a dead planet, witness the destruction of a living room, put on our astronaut suits to visit a space station and learn the difference between a regular cat and a "Flerken"!

"On stage, a story comes into being. Step by step, a scene takes shape – visible in its creation, open to change. Together, we trace the path from the first idea through script, concept art, and storyboard to – if time allows – 3D composition. The stage becomes an atelier, thought turns into process, the invisible into form and light."

"Stitch Head” by Steve Hudson (screenwriter-director) is a European indie animation feature currently in theaters in Austria, the US and many other places around the world. It tells the story of a small, forgotten creature awoken by a Mad Professor to (Almost-)Life. Terrified the suspicious townsfolk of the village below will form an Angry Mob and burn the Professor's Castle to the ground, Stitch Head desperately indoctrinates his fellow creations to NOT be monstrous. But then a clapped-out old Freak Show comes to town, and it’s down-at-heel ringmaster promises Stitch Head the one thing he’s always longed for…. Love.
In this talk David Nasser (animation director) opens up about the behind the scenes process of bringing Stitch Head to (Almost-) Life through animation.

Celebrate with us at Funkhaus and watch artists in our famous BATTLES as they show off their artistic skills.