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!
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.
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 a Shrek goes by without a VFS grad somewhere in there.
Yes, it’s time for the fourth Shrek movie, Shrek Forever After- or maybe it’s Shrek: The Final Chapter. The marketing is a little confusing on that point. Will our hero escape the weird alternate dimension in which he’s trapped? Time will tell… but probably. All we know for sure right now is a few of the VFS grads who were behind the scenes on Dreamworks’ latest.
And last but not least, Digital Designgrad Cesar Alejandro Montero Orozco, chalking up his first credit as Surfacing Artist at Dreamworks. We interviewed Cesar a little over a year ago (back when this film had another title entirely!) when he was bubbling over with excitement over landing his dream job. It’s great to finally see his work on the big screen!
Click here for our May preview of coming attractions featuring VFS grads!
Animation & Visual Effects students recently packed VFS’s Main Theatre during a special visit from Dylan Sisson, Technical Artist for Pixar RenderMan.
Dylan went into great detail to show the lighting and shading techniques the Pixar team has utilized in the production of feature films like Up.
Drawing heavily on the 2D landscape work by long-time Disney artist Mary Blair, the Up team created a word that best summed up their approach to the film’s look: “Simplexity”. As you can imagine, it refers to the creation of seemingly complex visuals with simple imagery. A sort of “greater than the sum of its parts” idea.
Dylan broke down many examples of the team’s lighting and shading work, emphasizing their use of 2D imagery to first lay the foundation for the look of each shot. Working this way saved the production a lot of money and also made it easier to solve problems, rather than working solely in 3D.
The three-hour talk wrapped up with a lengthy Q&A session that touched on everything from demo reels to very specific features of RenderMan. Before he left though, Dylan proudly gave away a number of “Walking Teapots” — a toy based on his design.
They came out in droves, they packed the Biltmore nightclub, and they celebrated an incredible diversity of talent from VFS. In every way, the Spring 2010 VFS Impact Awards were a massive hit!
The VFS Impact Awards are an event created and carried out by Entertainment Business Management students as part of their one-year curriculum. But they’re also a chance to fête an amazing array of white-hot student work from all 13 programs.
Highlighted by an array of multicultural entertainment and a ridiculously awesome buffet, the event saw winners in 12 categories. Without further adieu, here they are! Congrats to all!
The More Than The Sum Of Its Parts Award An exceptional project that incorporates multiple media to produce a resulting experience that is more impactful than any one element of the property Curtis Churn and Yu Hsin Feng, Sound Design for Visual Media, Noise
The Difference Maker Award A project with demonstrated significant social impact Raylene McEachern, Film Production, Hide No More
The Outstanding Performance Award An exceptional performance in a project, whether acting, dancing, fighting, singing, speaking, playing music or simply performing super human feats Dave Lennon, Acting for Film & Television, Appealing to Women
The Outstanding Character Design Award For envisioning and giving life to a new character that is especially inspiring, beautiful or simply very unique Scott Sawchuk, Acting for Film & Television, Phil
The Zero-To-Sixty Award An exceptional project created by a student or team with no prior knowledge of associated software, equipment, or methodologies Calder Archinuk, Jeffrey Cheng, Jonathan Hudson, Nathaniel Sinn, and Jordan Whitlock, Game Design, Eat ‘Em Up
The Public Enlightenment Award An exceptional project that makes simple a complex subject, makes common obscure knowledge, or provides a new and unique way of looking at something previously considered mundane Ana Mendez, Ezra Istiroti, Jordan Scott, and Ehab Kamal, Digital Design, Terms & Conditions
The Emotional Impact Award An exceptional project which creates an emotional connection between the audience and the content Arielle Tuliao, Jared Paul Abrahamson, Rachel Wegener, Whitney Underwood, Devon Copico, and Kyle Cossairt, Acting For Film & Television, Come Home Soon
The Outstanding Setting Design Award For envisioning and giving life to a new world/setting that is especially inspiring, beautiful or simply very unique Mario Brioschi, 3D Animation & Visual Effects, Maybe One Morning
The Friend of VFS Industry Award Industry professionals, organizations, and companies that have gone above and beyond the call of duty in providing opportunities for VFS students Next Level Games
The Technical Achievement Award Outstanding display of technical prowess in the student’s field as demonstrated through exceptional project execution Meena Ibrahim, Digital Character Animation, Change
The Storyteller Award An exceptional project that takes us on a creative journey and leaves a lasting impression Katelynn Dey, Writing for Film & Television, Red Light Go
The Mission Impossible Award They said it couldn’t be done… exceptionally ambitious or complex project scope that was successfully pulled off in the end Jeffrey Cheng, Patrick Donaghy, Russ Ding, Garrett Schram, and John Brunkhart, Game Design, Pollen Nation
And finally, here’s a sweet photo gallery from the evening, telling the story better than we ever could!
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.
