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.
Filmgrad Trevor Cameronis 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!
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!
Scott Pilgrim vs. the Worldis 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.
That was the salvo Disney fired around the world in March of 2002 when they shuttered most of their 2D operations and released hundreds of animators responsible for creating the kind of hand-drawn art audiences came to cherish in modern classics like The Lion King and Aladdin.
“Anybody with money listening to these guys, it scared them from doing anything classically for a long time,” says Vancouver Film School instructor Jim Inkster (pictured right), who teaches digital ink and paint in the one-year Classical Animation program.
The structural and philosophical shake-ups at the near 90-year-old animation giant were perhaps due in part to the tantalizing box office and awards success Pixar had been scooping up with its 3D-animated features like Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Within a few short years, 3D movies became extremely popular, drawing on the voice talents of seemingly every A-list actor.
But to long-time VFS animation instructor and project mentor Moose Pagan (pictured below), the frenzy surrounding 3D feature films and the industry’s current push to return to the fundamentals of classical animation aren’t so surprising: “I remember in the ‘90s when, all of a sudden after The Lion King, every single studio everywhere was punching out classical films. It just went mad. And then around ’96, that was the peak. Around two years ago, it was the same thing for 3D.”
Disney’s string of underwhelming 3D features like Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons proved that there was something missing from the big picture – as if their vision for animated feature films had been lost.
And then a new day arrived. Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Pixar appeared to be an acknowledgment that maybe their earlier predictions for the future of animation were off the mark. As The New York Times noted when Pixar guru John Lasseter grabbed hold of the creative reins at Disney, “it seems likely that Disney may receive a much-needed re-education.”
“One of the first things out of [Lasseter’s] mouth,” recalls Inkster, “was that ‘we’re going to start producing classical animation again. We’re going to start producing short films again. We’re going to honour the tradition of Disney.’”
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!
Right now, something amazing is happening on the VFS Entertainment Business Management campus: a groundbreaking, truly unprecedented cross-discipline project that’s tapping the expertise of students and alumni from programs across VFS. Visual effects artists, actors, makeup artists, designers… they’re all bringing their talents to bear on a project guided by EBM students.
It’s called The Interactive Lovecraft, affectionately known by the internal codename Project Space Squid, and it’s bringing new life to the work of legendary sci-fi/horror writer HP Lovecraft, whose tales of insanity, monsters, cults, and impossibly old gods, are hugely influential to this day.
Teams of VFS students and alumni are creating a cutting-edge transmedia interactive magazine experience for the tablet marketplace, and laying the foundations of a model that future students will be able to experience with other public domain work as part of the Entertainment Business Management program. The end result – incorporating text, video, and games – will include adaptations of five seminal Lovecraft stories: The Call of C’Thulhu, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, The Rats in the Walls, and The Music of Erich Zann.
Here is an excellent teaser video they’ve put together, explaining the project’s development and showing a lot of the progress so far.
The Interactive Lovecraft will be available to the public in the fall, and, in the spirit of public domain and open source, all proceeds from its sales will go to the Wikimedia Foundation.
In the meantime, the students and grads are keeping an active development blog, where you can find all the latest and get real insight into what goes into creating a project of this magnitude.
The project is about uncovering the most exceptional talent working in video today: the talent that inspires us, challenges us, surprises us, and changes the world.
In short, it’s about celebrating an entire medium and its power.
Developed by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with HP, YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. This global online initiative is not a search for what’s “now,” but a search for what’s next.
YouTube Play is looking for submissions – including animation, motion graphics, narrative and non-narrative films, music videos, or something entirely new – of under 10 minutes in length that were created within the last two years. Up to 20 videos will be chosen to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as Berlin, Venice, and Bilbao.
The deadline to submit is coming fast – July 31, 2010. Find out more, read the guidelines, and submit your work now at youtube.com/play.
The release of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, was pushed forward a couple of days, and that means we have a rare mid-week opportunity to congratulate the fine women and men who created its effects. Are we the only ones who see Cage playing a weird sorcerer and think What took so long?
The credits include two 3D Animation & Visual Effects grads – Texture Artist Jamie Bowers and Digital Compositor Mauricio Monroy – as well as Animator Joel Meire from Classical Animation. Nicely done.
Not sure what these are?
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.
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.
Disney’s string of underwhelming 3D features like Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons proved that there was something missing from the big picture – as if their vision for animated feature films had been lost.
