Playgrounds Digital Arts Fest 2010
7 & 8 October | poppodium 013 | Tilburg | The Netherlands

Playgrounds Fest is two days packed full of groundbreaking from cutting edge filmmakers, motion designers and digital artists.

Playgrounds is an internationally respected Dutch festival, now in its 5th year, featuring unique screenings, artist talks with Q&A’s, studio presentations, industry panels and exhibitions. Created to inspire both professionals, students and the public with the very best of groundbreaking filmmaking, animation, motion graphics, character design and VFX from around the world.

Playgrounds 2010 will feature the following artist talks:

• Rex Crowle, art-director / character designer Litte Big Planet, Grip Wrench and Disney.
• BIF , multi-award winning directing trio featured in Shoot Young Directors Showcase and awarded with the Jury Award at SIGGRAPH 2009. This talk will be together with The Mill, a leading award winning VFX studio from London.
• Nexus Productions, multi-award winning production company.
• The Blackheart Gang and Shy the Sun, directing collective from South-Africa famous for their stunning illustrative motion-designs like their short Tale of How.
• David O'Reilly, winner of the Golden Bear Berlin and one of the most innovative animation-directors of this moment.
• Young directors-panel including Radical Friend, David Wilson and others.
• Matt Lambert (dieLAMB), director and artist
• Minivegas, collective of motion and interactive designers with a fresh focus on realtime produced visuals
• Fons Schiedon, director, character designer and contemporary artist worked for Pictoplasma, MTV and Motorola.
• James Medcraft, contemporary artist and designer at United Visual Artists.
• The Blender Foundation, open-source 3D software development and film production platform.
• For this years edition Motionographer has curated screenings and there will be a talkshow hosted by David O'Reilly and Fons Schiedon.
• More of the 2010 programme will be announced soon.

More info: http://www.playgroundsfestival.nl

An experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott's legendary film 'Blade Runner' (1982). This film was made as a unique picture with a resolution of 60.000 x 60.000 pixels (3.6 gigapixels). It was made with 167,819 frames from the film.

(From Vimeo on the making of):

1>first step : the "picture" of the film
I extracted the 167,819 frames from 'Blade Runner' (final cut version,1h51mn52s19i)
then I assembled all these images to obtain one gigantic image of colossal dimensions : a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone, 3.5 gigapixels (3500 million pixels)

2> second step : an illusion
I placed a virtual camera above this big picture. So what you see is like an illusion, because contrary to appearances there is only one image. It is in fact the relative movement of the virtual camera flying over this massive image which creates the animated film, like a film in front of a projector.

source : Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (the final cut)
duration : 1h51mn52s19i > 167819 frames >>
one picture / format psb : 60 000  X 60 000 : 3 540 250 000 pixels >> 3,5 gigapixels
sound > from the original score by Vangelis
compositing> logiciel : Combustion. Mac pro 2X 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon. nombre de layers : 1!

Star Wars Uncut is the brainchild of Casey Pugh, a developer dedicated to creating new and fun experiences on the web. Working as a developer at Vimeo, Casey became interested in using the internet as a tool for crowdsourcing user content. Star Wars was a natural choice to explore the dynamics of community creation on the web - the response from fans has been overwhelming worldwide and the resulting movie is incredibly fun to watch.

Watch the whole damned thing at www.starwarsuncut.com/watch.

Matthew Taylor explores the meaning of 21st century enlightenment, how the idea might help us meet the challenges we face today, and the role that can be played by organisations such as the RSA. View Matthew Taylor’s lecture at the RSA

"Voicings" - Dawn Buie from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.

"Voicings" is an aural composition installed in the North lobby of the MaRS Heritage Building, prototyped by the residents of the TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program at the CFC Media Lab. It's created by Dawn Buie, David Goorevitch and Liz Gallo.

Listen in on a journey of discovery and creation, revealing the human passions and motivations that drive the process of innovation. From the everyday to the truly profound, hear a symphony of voices offering insights into the personalities driving innovation at MaRS.

MaRS - Building Canada’s next generation of global technology companies. marsdd.com

(Source: bbh-labs.com)

http://www.iamironman2.com/home/

In the last of our blog posts with Dan Light we’ve saved the trickiest questions for last. What, if any, are the roles for brands in these transmedia extensions of the narrative? Can it ever get deeper than product placement and, if so, can brands ever make a legitimate contribution to the storytelling experience?

In the past decade we’ve seen that the music industry had to get screwed before it would change, the newspaper industry is struggling and the film industry is being forced to reinvent itself. Can entertainment industries transform themselves? Where do you see the film industry going?

I think the film industry is going to polarise. I think you’re going to have your Avatars – they will be big 3D events that will be 15-year projects and will command bigger and bigger sums of money.

At the other end will be the classic independent films, built around a good story but also written from the ground up, with a view to all the ways in which that story can be told, developed and audiences be found.

So brands need to find new ways to engage audiences and clearly sponsorship of this kind of content is a legitimate path, albeit it represents a fairly transactional relationship with the producer. Is this how you see the role of brands developing?

I always thought CASTAWAY was a reasonably good example, with the FedEx brand being woven into the very fabric of the film.  I’m sure some people hate it, but I’d rather that than a film where there are ten different consumer electronic products brandished in clear view at some point in proceedings.

... read the full article at: bbh-labs.com.

Our wonderful friends at SubmarineChannel let us know that they just posted part 2 of their video interview with Kyle Cooper (on Forget the Film, Watch the Titles). In part 2 Cooper discusses the three classic main titles that made a big impression on him: The Dead Zone by Wayne Fitzgerald, To Kill A Mockingbird by Stephen Frankfurt and Walk On The Wild Side by Saul Bass. He also talks about how he prefers to design story-based title sequences. Go there now to watch it.

(Source: Brain Pickings)

Automating anti-establishment, or what street art has to do with disaster relief.

Much of street art revolves around the cult of the individual creator, creeping through the night to meticulously paint, stencil or tag a wall by hand. But can technology subvert this ethos? Facadeprinter is an inkjet printer in architectonical scale — a simple, software-controlled robot that shoots artwork from a distance of up to 12 meters, dot by dot, onto the target surface area. Think Banksy meets paintball meets ChalkBot — in other words, graffiti for geeks.

Designed by German duo Martin Fussenegger and Michael Sebastian, Facadeprinter can render artwork as large as 8 by 10 meters and, depending on the paint used, can produce permanent or temporary images. Besides the obvious uses in large-scale street art and advertising installations, the technology could have some interesting and rather useful applications in disaster relief, where the rapid printing process can enable quick and effective visual communication signaling shelter, food and water, danger zones, or medical aid.

... read the full article at Brain Pickings.