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!
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.’”
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.
As we posted last week, The Hurt Locker‘s Academy Award-winning Sound Mixer Ray Beckettis at VFS all week starting today, where he’ll be meeting with students and sharing his experiences. We are, in a word, excited. We’re so glad our students will have the chance to learn from him.
But if you’re not a student, what does it all mean for you? Well, we’ve found some time in his busy schedule to sit down for a video interview – and we want your questions! Wondering about how he got his start? The life of a sound mixer? His experiences on The Hurt Locker? Where he keeps his Oscar?
Ask away, either right here in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter! We’ll compile them and he’ll answer on camera! You only have until Wednesday to submit, though, so don’t take too much time to think up some good ones!
Huge congrats to all our grads (representing six programs!) for their Leo Award wins this weekend!
The Leos celebrate the best in BC film and TV, and the VFS alumni who won are a diverse lot – they include Stargate Universe producer John Lenic, who we interviewed back in September ’09, our friends at Blatant Studios, who we caught up with just this past March, and two of the three execs of animation studio Nerd Corps for their series League of Super Evil.
Here’s the full list of VFS grads who picked up some hardware:
Pixologic, VFS’s official partner, is offering emerging animators, modelers, and visual effects artists a chance to experience VFS’s Animation & Visual Effects Summer Intensive program. For five days (July 19-23), students will learn leading techniques from a faculty of industry professionals and discover whether VFS is the right educational choice for them.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Scholarship Competition, sponsored by Pixologic,will see one scholarship (worth $1,285) awarded to one talented artist.
How to Enter
Creatively express what you’re dreaming about this summer with visual sketches or digitally sculpted images of an original character in an environment of your choosing. Once completed, upload your work to the VFS “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Flickr Group. Submit up to 5 images!
Is it a new month already? As we did for May, we thought it would be a good time to look ahead at June’s film, TV, and game release schedules and play a little game of “spot the VFS grad”! Here’s a small slice of what we’re looking forward to this month – the entertainment properties that our alumni from numerous programs have had a hand in.
We’ll give a little more detail for each as the month rolls along!
Not sure what these are?
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.
