Blue GFX and Escape Studios visit

Took a trip to London on the 22nd, and just got round to writing my notes up in neat :).

The Blue GFX festival was quite exciting, it was the first time I had been to it and it offered exactly what I expected. Not really a chance to network but a really good opportunity to talk to the companies who's software I use and get an idea of what they are going to be bringing out. I enjoyed talking to V-ray, Intuos and HDR Light Studio. The graphics on their banners attracted me more than any thing. They all had some 3D modelling demo's going on, which is not what I do but it was interesting to talk to them about how much they were focusing their programmes to create better lighting and reflections to create a better, more realistic composite. Except for Intuos who simply had bigger and bigger tablets.

I also had the chance to talk to both Adobe and Autodesk. I have been considering moving over from After Effects to learn Nuke and Smoke for compositing so it was good to see what the rival companies had to say about each others programme interface and user satisfaction. I attended a talk given by Niels Stevens on the new Adobe 6 Suite which won me over and made me realise that I should be looking at Adobe Premier Pro CS6 as my compositing software because it interacts seamlessly with AE6.

I enjoyed the talk given by Daryl Shail for Pixel Farm. They are a visual effects company who are currently working on creating time effective 3D composites. The demo was fun to watch as each statement was backed up with videos (which seamed difficult to manipulate), made 3D quickly and simply.

We later went over to Escape Studios, who presented a tutorial  using dynamics in Maya to demonstrate how they run classes. It was very impressive, and if i struggle getting work after Uni I will definitely consider  studying there. There is a lot of talented staff who have worked on some big productions. Talking to the students there gave me a good insight on how the course was run and how much they learn.. But with a great course comes a great price. About £9000 for 12 weeks, is not funny. But working in the animation industry is more of a dream than a job so I'm definitely keeping my options open. 

Augmented Reality (guide dogs for the blind)

This was a project done for an advertising university group who were creating a campaign to spread the message about guide dogs for the blind. The image I created, according to their brief shows how scary the world can be for blind people.

Since the project was only for university I was comfortable using images from Google. I took two pairs of cats eyes and masked them in different ways to make them into six different pairs. I then created a mouth for each tree using the cracks and crevices already in the tree as guides to make the mouth opening look realistic. I was going to use the bear and lion as reference to create sharp jagged edges.
The day to night conversion of the image took some time to perfect because the sky is very bright, so I had to create multiple masks to get the colour just right. I added a slight glow around the faces on the trees which compliments the glowing eyes. The stock footage smoke helps create some depth in the image.

Here is the final:

Launch Conference (Birmingham Science park)

I attended this conference and represented TL Multimedia as it opened itself to the public. The company is run by Tim Lozinski, who holds the details of a group of freelancers with different specialist areas. He brings in work from large companies and the Freelancers divide it amongst themselves to  produce it. I am now effectively part of the company, specializing in Motion graphics, Visual Tricks and Digital Puppetry.

I created this ident which was played at the conference. It was made using the TL Multimedia logo, which reminded me of a rub-ix cube and I created this using 2 null objects which control the revolution of the top and bottom 3D layers and a third null object which controls the spin of the whole cube. Here is the final:

Networking at the Launch proved really effective for me, I met some really neat people from big organisations and start up companies. I'm not much of a gamer but I gave my details out to a few people for chances in advertising and creating graphics for apps.

Managed to get in touch with a start up company called WEWANA:PLAY who were looking for some graphics to go into their app. I attended one of their gaming evenings and met the whole team, this could end up with some positive work.

As I have uni projects to work on I'm trying to focus my time towards those.. 'need to make the grade before you make the trade'. I'm currently editing a music video together for Frog and Peach Productions'. which is creating a fantastic learning curve in technique, style and reaching a visual brief set by someone else which is key in being a professional.

Here is a cover of the Launch Conference by ITV and below is the link to the TL Multimedia website:

http://tlmultimedia.co.uk/