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

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!

VFS Digital Design

With only three minutes of stage time, each student took the podium and gave a concise rundown of their work, which ranged from interactive design in the cross-departmental “Project Space Squid” initiative to a community-minded social networking system, a biology-inspired motion graphics short, a darkly funny website that offers customizable wallpapers about cat overpopulation, and much more.

After the presentations wrapped, students got a chance to mingle with the industry guests and explain their work in more detail — the part of the Digital Design Appetizers night previous grads have looked back upon as a pivotal moment in their young careers.

“Students that are coming out of [Digital Design] are showing great work… and we’re always looking for people on the cutting edge,” said Marty Yaskowich, Managing Director, Digital at Tribal DDB Canada. “Some of the design that we saw tonight was for the iPad and new and emerging technologies, and that’s always a skill set that we’re looking for as we have to deliver that to our client base as well.”

“I was really blown away this time around,” said James Filbry, Art Director and Partner at Spring Advertising. “Everything has gone up quite a level, as far as the students and the work that they produced… The presentations are just getting better and better all the time.”

A host of alumni now working in the industry also came out to see the work currently being produced in the Digital Design program. It gave them a chance to meet the presenting students and industry guests, while also reflecting on their own time spent at VFS.

“[The Digital Design program] was a great experience,” said grad Rodrigo Gomez-Tagle, who is currently the Technical Experience Director at Blast Radius. “It was an intense, intense, intense experience. It really prepares you with not only the technical skills to achieve whatever they put in front of you, but they give you the foundation and all the processes behind what you need to create.”

Congrats to the newest graduates of Digital Design! Great presentations all around!

Check out some photos from the evening below, or on our Flickr page. 

Game Design Expo

With that in mind, we’re happy to tell you that we’ve just launched over 30 new exclusive Game Design Expo videos – a treasure trove of interviews, presentations, and panel discussions from this year’s event. Hear and learn directly from the makers of games like Mass Effect 2, ModNation Racers, and the upcoming Dead Rising 2.

We’re also thrilled to announce the date for Game Design Expo 2011! Our fifth annual celebration of game design and development is set for January 22-23, 2011, right here in Vancouver.

Here’s a short overview of the 2010 event, introducing you to some of the sights and sounds from this memorable weekend:

And here’s just one of the interviews, with ModNation Racers Game Designer William Ho:

There’s lots more where that came from. You can see it all, and keep up with the latest announcements about Game Design Expo 2011 – more to come! – at gamedesignexpo.com.

Film Production

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

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!

So, throughout their year, Digital Design students present the things they create, experience that becomes increasingly important for students as they barrel towards the program’s culmination at an industry night, presenting their finest work to an audience packed with designers and recruiters. The process begins early.

At a recent presentation morning in instructor Maria Kennedy‘s fourth term Branding class, a half-dozen students presented projects they’d worked on for about six weeks. As is often the case, an outside perspective was brought in – for this session, it was Subplot creative director Matthew Clark joining Maria to share his thoughts on the branding work and the presentations themselves.

Students were evenly split between new brands for hypothetical products and rebrands of real-life companies. “The project is of the student’s choosing,” Maria explains. “We debate the positives and problems with their choices, but usually by class three, they’ve settled on a rebrand or a new brand.”

And for such a small group, the variety was off the charts. Ryan Smith‘s skateboard company (with a planned extension into youth arts), Ameen Roayan‘s Saudi Arabian school for creative arts, and Ira Hardy‘s new spin on the old-fashioned butcher shop rounded out the “new brand” category. The rebrands included a Canadian network TV giant (Juan Behrens), a well-respected electric vehicle company (Joseph Boutilier), and an Edmonton garden conservatory (Taylor Zimmerman).

Reinventing the Wheel

This extensive logo development process forms just one part of Joseph Boutilier's branding project

Taking on a familiar brand, one that actually exists, means a certain focus. The business is tested and the market established. A student looking to do a rebrand has all the materials to get started – and probably good reasons why he or she thinks the company could use a new approach.

Yet a grounding in the real world also bring constraints: it isn’t necessarily a designer’s place to suggest an entirely new business plan or target audience. Students have to work with what they’ve got. How do you reinvent the wheel while keeping the brand differentiated in a real-world marketplace? ”One of the fundamentals of branding is not to look more like something,” Clark said after one of the presentations.

But those challenges are, after all, where a good designer thrives. A student who wants to do a rebrand has to “bring strong rationale as to why they are doing it,” says Maria, “and what they are trying to bring out in the identity that isn’t currently being expressed.”

Joseph Boutilier set out to rebrand E-Cycle, the first provider of affordable electric vehicles in Canada. The brand is recognizable in Vancouver but could use a fresh approach. What do you do as a “green” company when “green” is a seemingly ubiquitous feature?

His solution meant an entirely new take, beginning with the name: E-Cycle becomes “Cirkit”. The challenges Joseph identified – like an out-of-the-way retail location – were more fodder for fresh design and a clever bit of copy that, at Clark’s suggestion, may become more prominent in Joseph’s future iterations: “The Cycle of Life.”

Starting at Square One

Primary and secondary logos are just the beginning of Ira Hardy's butcher shop brand

With freedom comes responsibility. Students who choose to develop brands for hypothetical companies basically need to come up with the framework of an entire business plan and marketing strategy – from scratch.

“Usually, with a new brand, the students have a lot of freedom. With that comes the challenge of creating a brand – essentially the organization – and the visual expression,” Maria says. “Usually that ends up being a lot of work, but in the long run, more satisfying.”

These projects often spring from the personal interests and passions of the students. Ameen Roayan, for example, saw a need for creative arts education opportunities in his native Saudi Arabia – there’s a school, but it’s for women only.

Ira Hardy’s project, meanwhile, was on a much smaller scale – but the brand itself was no less complex. Hardy Meats is his fictional butcher shop, founded on principles of sustainability. It’s a throwback with a modern bent that would be right at home on Vancouver’s East Side. Ira settled on a “classic with a modern sensibility” approach to the design and a colour palette suggesting flesh, fat, meat, grass and grain… which sounds a lot grosser than it is.

“A logo isn’t branding – it’s just the first thing of a million things,” said Clark at one point, and in Hardy’s case, that meant a unified brand that reflected the entire raison d’être of the business, from signage to individual stickers on each package showing how far away the meat had been raised. Both the design and the presentation had a lot of polish – the company may be fictional but you wouldn’t know it.

Presentation Matters

Six presentations, six fascinating approaches… In the end, that’s what matters most.

“It’s all about creating, and showing that a strong process utilizing the four stages – understanding, thinking, creating, and implementing – is followed,” says Maria. “And that the student has exhibited his own creativity and strategic thinking. The design is really secondary to the process in this class.”

But that’s not to say good aesthetic choices aren’t important, and in this particular branding class, you’d see six projects that are portfolio-worthy… or on their way there. Maria puts it even more simply: ”Brilliant execution is wonderful to see.”

Digital Design

Clark has since risen to become a Partner at Subplot Design, an award-winning Vancouver-based studio that counts among its clients the Vancouver Aquarium, Okanagan Spring Brewery, Vancouver Police Department, and Caffè Artigiano.

Subplot’s Story

After sitting in and offering feedback on student branding project presentations, Clark spoke about Subplot as a kind of anti-agency agency — a four-person operation that primarily caters to more entrepreneurial clients, or those who haven’t been satisfied with the processes of larger companies.

He took students through the four basic phases Subplot typically goes through when working with a client. First, it’s all about discovery.

“At this point,” Clark explained, “we’re just gathering whatever’s out there, and trying to bring in as much information as possible.” That information, which can include a client’s previous design work, is then used to create a plan going forward — the second stage.

“We’ll usually warn clients that things will be very boring for a while”, Clark said. It takes Subplot about four months to do all the research and strategic planning before they get around to showing the client any visual work. This, he explained, is because a branding project is about more than just a logo; it involves everything from how the consumer perceives the brand to competitive opportunities not yet realized. Everything must be taken into account.

The fun begins in the third phase. Clark and his team hand-draw design concepts which they bring to pitch meetings. “You can’t trick them with computers… It’s about the idea.” Once the client signs off on the work, Subplot enters the final phase where they hand over all branding guides and designs to ensure the client can maintain the new look and approach on their own — essentially putting Subplot out of a job (as Clark jokes).

Case Study: Okanagan Spring

Clark finished off with an in-depth case study of Subplot’s complete redesign of Okanagan Spring beer. Taking nothing for granted, they did extensive market research to gauge consumers’ impressions of the previous brand.

“[Okanagan Spring's] mind was blown,” Clark said, referring to an exercise where they asked long-time Okanagan Spring beer drinkers to draw the company’s logo. No one came close — one of many signs that it was time to rethink the company’s brand. You can see the result of Subplot’s work in beer stores.

Many thanks to Matthew Clark for visiting Digital Design!

To those who might be wondering who this Vancouver oddball is, and where he gets his energy from, a team of Film Production students has found the answer.

Led by Director Courtney Barton and Producer AJ McCreadie, they recently created a short documentary on the dancing phenomenon, titled Tight, Bright & Fearless. In it, Rimer and his brother talk about the beginnings of the “Spandy Andy” persona and how he thinks the world needs more positivity and celebration.

Check out their documentary below, or visit VFS’s YouTube page.

Piranha 3D

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!