Nominees for the 2010 Gemini Awards were announced this week, and a number of VFS grads made the cut! The Geminis are Canada’s top TV awards, and this year’s nominations include alumni of Film Production, Acting for Film & Television, and 3D Animation & Visual Effects.

The list includes Film Production grad John Lenic, as one of the producers of Best Dramatic Series nominee Stargate Universe, and Acting grad Benjamin Arthur for Best Individual Performance in a Comedy Program for the lead role in the series Less Than Kind.

Film grad Trevor Cameron is up for two awards – Best Direction in an Animated Program or Series and Best Writing in a Children’s or Youth Program or Series – for his work on Wapos Bay. Finally, 3D grad Clint Butler is a co-nominee for Best Direction in an Animated Program or Series, and a trio of grads are on the Gemini-nominated team for Best Visual Effects – once again, for Stargate Universe.

(Are you a VFS grad who’s up for a Gemini and don’t see your name in the list? Leave a comment! We’d love to hear from you.)

Congratulations to all! The awards will be handed out in November – we’ll be watching!

Best Dramatic Series
Stargate Universe - John Lenic (plus 3 others)

Best Individual Performance in a Comedy Program or Series
Benjamin Arthur – Less Than Kind

Best Direction in an Animated Program or Series
Trevor Cameron – Wapos Bay
Clint Butler (plus 1 other) -  Hot Wheels Battle Force 5

Best Visual Effects
Alec McClymont, Craig Vandenbiggelaar, Andrew Karr (plus 7 others) – Stargate Universe

Best Writing in a Children’s or Youth Program or Series
Trevor Cameron – Wapos Bay

The American hits theatres tomorrow, a rare Wednesday release ahead of a long weekened. The Anton Corbijn-directed thriller, which stars George Clooney as a semi-retired assassin, saw contributions by 3D Animation & Visual Effects alumni Armando Velazquez (Digital Compositor) and David Yabu (Animator). The two graduated just three classes apart in 2005.

Armando and David worked on the film out of Modus FX in Sainte-Thérèse Québec, a suburb of Montreal. In fact, if you happen to be able to read French, Le Journal de Montréal has a nice overview of the work Modus was responsible for, including the environmental touches needed to recreate parts of earthquake-damaged Castel del Monte in Abruzzo, Italy. Interesting stuff – and another early notch for three-year-old Modus!

Here’s the trailer for The American. Enjoy!

Film Production grad Paul McNeill has been appointed as a producer at the National Film Board‘s Atlantic Centre in Halifax! There, he’ll be producing an incredible array of important work in the Maritimes.

If you’re not familiar with the NFB – Canada’s public film producer and distributor – you should be. For 70 years, the NFB has supported some of the most important talent in the country, and it’s a big part of the Canadian cultural landscape. Films produced with the NFB’s support have been nominated for dozens of Oscars, winning several, spanning documentary and dramatic features and shorts, and animated films.

Paul, who graduated from VFS in 2003, counts among his most recent successes Summerhood, directed by fellow VFS grad Jacob Medjuck. You can read more about it here.

From the NFB’s press release:

“As an independent filmmaker I’ve enjoyed a strong relationship with the NFB Atlantic Centre, and I look forward to building on this and to working with the area’s filmmakers and artists to produce vital, meaningful stories from the Maritimes,” said McNeill.

Avatar is back in theatres this week. After earning almost $3 billion worldwide the first time around, and landing in the homes of countless Blu-Ray owners looking for ways to show off their home theatres, the sci-fi epic returns to the big, big screen.

What that means for us, apart from a few extra minutes of material, is a chance to once again see a whole bunch of VFS grads’ work (and names) on the big screen. They include Classical Animation and Digital Character Animation graduate Michael Cozens, who served as Lead Animator on the film, as well as 10 3D Animation & Visual Effects alumni:

Arun Ram-Mohan, Additional Lighting
Alfredo Luzardo, Layout Technical Director
Aaron Gilman, Character Animator
Jami Gigot, Texture Artist
Patrick Kalyn, Animator
Tamir Diab, Technical Director
Ben Sanders, Animator
Ben Shupe, Virtual Production Artist
David Yabu, Animator
Chrystia Siolkowsky, Motion Editor

No less an achievement today than it was nine months ago! Congratulations to you all!

Piranha 3D hits theatres tomorrow, fulfilling the summer’s over-the-top-gore and cast-of-B-listers quota in a single 90-minute spectacle. The Alexandre Aja-helmed film slipped off the Comic Con schedule, reportedly because of how bloody the footage was. Well, that footage leaked, and it created a bit of a frenzy among aficionados of the genre. The Piranha franchise also has an unlikely legacy: it gave early-career breaks to Joe Dante, John Sayles, and James Cameron.

One of the visual effects companies behind Piranha 3D is Toronto-based Intelligent Creatures, co-founded in 2003 by 3D Animation & Visual Effects alum Lon Molnar. Molnar now serves as CEO and visual effects supervisor there, where he’s had a hand in a laundry list of big features, including Piranha 3D. You can check out his official bio here. And at least one other VFS grad – lighter/tracker Christopher Buzon, who graduated almost exactly 10 years after Molnar - also worked on Piranha out of, you guessed it, Intelligent Creatures!

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, thanks to a declaration by the UN. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the true value of life on earth… and it’s a call for action. It involves dozens of events and celebrations throughout the year, all with the aim to educate and inspire.

With that in mind, the Convention on Biological Diversity is turning to work created by students in the VFS Digital Design program for help. Biodiversity is a motion design project by Roberta Ramalho, Jesse Lang, Juan Carlos Arenas Madrid, and Amanda Healey. Without further ado:

(Music composed by Steve Witt.)

Now the video will also be seen in the International Year of Biodiversity website’s Resources section – including a downloadable version!

You can find out more about the International Year of Biodiversity – and how to get involved – on the official site, and get all the latest news on its Facebook page.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is getting the kind of buzz most movies can only dream of – and longtime fans of the manga-inspired graphic novel series, which finally came to a conclusion last month, can take heart that the Scott Pilgrim they love is finally getting its mainstream due. EW, for one, calls it “a true original”. Or, as Warren Ellis put it, “It’s nice to see ‘Scott Pilgrim’ as a top Twitter trend.” We agree.

Which is why we’re happy to report that Animator Joel Meire, a Classical Animation grad whose successful career has found him contributing to films like Happy Feet, King Kong, and the recent The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, worked on the film!

We’re playing some catch-up with releases the last few weeks. Our grads are still out there, and this summer is yielding a lot of  VFS alumni achievements, both at your metroplexes and on your TV. Recently, that’s included Salt (3D Animation & Visual Effects), Best Player on Nickelodeon (Film Production), Charlie St. Cloud (Film Production), the Cats & Dogs sequel (eight grads from 3D and Film) and, oh, a little movie called Inception (Film Production). Congratulations to all!

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gets its full release on Friday.

The newest installment of EA’s long-running car racing franchise, Need for Speed: World, launched this week and Game Design grad Azlan Mustapha was one of the designers with a foot on the pedal. The development team has put together a number of behind-the-scenes videos for YouTube, the most recent of which features Azlan himself. Check out the video embedded below.

Congrats, Azlan!

It’s been a long 12 years for fans of StarCraft, so if you see a lot of bleary-eyed gamers this morning, you’ll know why: midnight saw the release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Blizzard’s sequel to one of the most enduringly popular games of all time. StarCraft‘s success, especially in Korea, virtually cements this sequel as one of the biggest game releases of the year – even of the last several years.

As a cinematic artist on the game, 3D Animation & Visual Effects grad Alvaro Buendia‘s work has helped feed the hype machine, and will be seen by countless gamers for years to come. Alvaro has been working on Blizzard’s cinematics for about three and a half years now, and we caught up with him way back in ’08, before he could even talk about any of the projects he was working on – although we had some guesses.

Here’s an ad spot from June that shows off some of his handiwork on StarCraft II. Congrats, Alvaro!

In early July, the 2010 nominees for Primetime Emmy Awards were announced, an experience Sound Design for Visual Media graduate Melody Drolet, who is among the honourees, can only describe as “a little surreal.”

Melody and her colleagues at the highly-respected Vancouver-based audio post-production facility Sharpe Sound are nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special for their work on the Syfy miniseries Alice, a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland.

For the 2007 VFS graduate who was a sound effects editor on Alice, it’s a big highlight in a young career. Melody will be heading to L.A. in late August to attend the gala, but for now, we managed to get her reaction to the nomination and some background on her professional life.

Hi, Melody, and congratulations on the Emmy nom! Let’s hear your origin story: was there a moment in your life when you realized that sound design was something you wanted to do for a living? How did that come about?

Melody: I actually stumbled on the Sound Design program at VFS by accident… sort of. I was 25, living in chilly Winnipeg, Manitoba, and doing nothing really important with my life – unless you consider waitressing important!

I decided I needed a huge change, so I started shopping for schools in BC. I found VFS and started looking into the various programs offered. That is when my life changed forever. I found the Sound Design program, read about the courses, and was, like, “I can do this for a living?!” Rad. I had no idea that such a program existed!

I called right away and spoke to an advisor. I was so excited. It was all over after that. I started saving every penny I made for school.

I suppose I was always interested in sound, looking back now. My sisters and I would “broadcast” radio shows to our friends and family via pre-recorded cassette tapes. I had no idea at the time, but we were actually incorporating foley into our radio programs – recording all sorts of sound effects from around the house to make the program more interesting. Back then, I thought that clapping your hands sounded like tap dancing!

I knew the program at VFS would be a challenge for me – and it was. But I managed to graduate at the top of my class and I loved every minute of being there.

Like many sound professionals, you wear a lot of hats – sound effects editor, field recordist, sound designer… Do you have a favourite?

Melody: That is a really hard question to answer! Right now, I am doing mainly FX editing, and I love it. It is really challenging. You have to get everything absolutely perfect. There is not really any room for error because you are designing sounds to match what people are physically looking at on the screen. Everybody knows what a door sounds like, for example, so your door better sound like that specific door. If you are doing more special effects design, there is more room for interpretation, so you have more room to play and get really creative.

Field recording is really, really fun! I was actually just in Thailand a few weeks ago and I recorded a bunch of really awesome sound effects! It’s a rush. You get to go out into the world, instead of being cooped up in a windowless room for 12 hours a day, and just listen. There are a lot of really neat sounds you can record if you just take the time to listen and explore! I know that sounds really cheesy, but it’s true!

A favourite… I’d have to say design. That’s what I’m aspiring to become. An amazing, amazing sound designer. I have a long, long way to go, let me tell you! The longer I’m in this industry, the more I realize I have a lot more to learn… which is good. I never get bored!

Our readers might not know what an SFX editor does. Could you explain your responsibilities on Alice, for example?

Melody: An SFX editor creates – either by using his or her own recorded sounds or piecing together an original sound made up of a selection of library sounds – sounds for picture which actually physically exist in real life. For example, doors, vehicles… I find myself editing a lot of fight scenes as well.

Working on Alice, I was responsible for all of the doors, the fight scenes, horses, some specific background effects, and a lot more. In the case of Alice, the vehicles, like the Scarab and the flying flamingo racers, were the job of the designer. You normally do not find flying motorized flamingoes in the real world.

When you started work on Alice, did you have any idea you were working on something special, from a sound point of view?

Melody: I knew Alice was going to be a lot of fun and a lot of work right from the start. I was also totally nervous, because it was my first time working with two of the best designers around, Kris Fenske and James Wallace. There was so much going on in the film, it was great! I even got to do a few “design-y” effects myself! I really enjoyed the opportunity to get creative and work on such a great show.

When and how did you find out about the Emmy nomination? How did it feel to have your name listed there?

Melody: Oh, gosh, my roommate works for Sharpe Sound and actually sent me a goofy text message letting me know I was nominated! I kind of still can’t believe it. It all seems a little surreal to me still! I am very proud to be listed with the others on the ballot. They are amazingly talented people. I almost feel like I don’t deserve to be listed alongside them! But I worked very, very hard on the show.

I’m heading down to the Emmys the weekend of the 21st of August. I think it’s one of those things where it’ll finally hit me walking down the red carpet or something. Hopefully I don’t pee my pants right then and there. That would be embarrassing… although they do say any publicity is good publicity… ha ha!

Thanks, Melody, and good luck at the Emmys! Readers in interested in seeing what Melody’s up to in the sound field can check her IMDB profile and her personal portfolio site.