It is amazing the things one stumbles upon while in the depths of a procrastination binge. Caldera is a visually stunning 3D animation created by Evan Viera, Chris Bishop, and a host of students and professionals that donated their time. The project was produced under the Bit Films program at Hampshire College, Amherst. While dark and dealing with tough subject matter, Caldera is beautifully realised, touching and thought provoking. There are also some serene moments that soften the impact, while making the experience all the more compelling.
The film was 4 years in the making and is inspired by Viera’s father’s experiences with schizoaffective disorder. It depicts a young woman who decides to go off her medication and flee a threatening and oppressive city. The film doesn’t attempt to push a particular perspective on us, but instead poses questions for the viewer to consider.
Caldera has been to many film festivals and picked up numerous awards. Bit Films is currently working on a number of projects including Tube, a 3D short animation that seems to be in the latter stages of production. Bit Films is currently taking on interns for Spring 2014.
Anyone with a taste for sci-fi will find Big Lazy Robot’s (BLR) spec film, Kaloid, a tantalising treat, and all the more so if AIs and mechanized armour are your sort of thing. The film is effectively a high impact trailer for a film that doesn’t exist. The plot, as typically presented by a trailer, is not fully apparent but there are allusions to humanity having installed AIs to keep the world’s population in order, perhaps under the thumb. It seems something has gone wrong, or significant elements of the human population have grown tired of their tyrannical custodians and have decided to revolt.
The film spent two years in the making for a completed film of just 3 gripping minutes. The production values are nothing short of AAA, and has purportedly attracted attention for a possible full production. The first thing I thought when I saw the robotics designs was that it looked like some of the design talent from District 9 was somehow involved. This turns out to be true. The guy, as I know now, is Aaron Beck, who is based out of Wellington, New Zealand. In addition to his work on District 9, Beck has also worked on Avatar and Elysium. Beck’s Blogger currently has a modest following and is home to some very inspiring works of cyborgs, androids, and other sci-fi goodies.
However it pans out for Kaloid, BLR, the small Spanish based firm, has made its splash with their production work to date. Just check out their worked on the rather stylish Absolute Vodka ad. Or perhaps more interesting to us 3D enthusiasts, why not check out the fantastic advert they worked on for German electronics retailer, Saturn. For this they made and rigged the models and animated the some of the sequences.
I’m doing that thing where one try’s to do a million things at once, like some kind of human blender taking the tiniest of chunks out of each task as I pass by. So, work is getting done, but is this the most efficient I can be? Probably not. Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick obligatory getting excited for SIGGRAPH 2013 post.
Getting to SIGGRAPH has been a lifelong dream of mine ever since this time last year when I first heard about it. Yeah, call me green but being utterly obsessed with CGI (and a life-long pure blooded technophile) I have developed enough knowledge to get myself all excited about new software, tools and techniques, even if I don’t always understand the finer details. Well, replace “don’t always” with “a little bit frequently”. Also, I’m a window drooler. Yep, I can’t afford to even consider 99% of the software and hardware in these shows.
SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival
So, suffice to say I won’t even be getting to SIGGRAPH, unless by some awesome luck I get rich quick. In which case I’ll see you in Hong Kong. Ok, that’s enough rambling. The primary reason I started this post was to share the very spiffy SIGGRAPH 2013 Computer Animation Festival preview video, but alas it is presented in a custom player I can’t embed here. Of course, you can follow the link to feast your eyes. I did manage to find last years, which in my humble opinion, doesn’t have the same omphf, but still exciting all the same.
Real-Time Live
Also looking like it will be an absolute nerdy blast is the Real-Time Live presentations.
Real-time technologies are developing and emerging at a spectacular rate and giving us visual feedback that once would have been thought impossible. State of the art graphics, animation, dynamics, radiosity, huge poly counts – all these things are going real-time in a big way. Can you feel an interactive RT revolution coming? Perhaps in the near future these technologies will be the exact sort of thing that will be testing our new super-fast broadband infrastructures we’re building.
LightWave: Join The Rebellion
And finally, SIGGRAPH is one of those dates that all the 3D graphics software nuts get very excited. It is that time when many of the modelling, animation, and rendering players unveil the next salvo of upgrades. Of course, a key focus, for me, will be on finding out what NewTek/LightWave are up to. It’s something! We want to know now, but we’ll have to wait for an announcement made later this month at the Anaheim, California convention. The below promo poster was uploaded to the LightWave FB page on the 29th of June. LightWave 12? 11.6? Something huge and exciting? If I can get some new modelling tools I’ll be happy enough.
It is amazing the things one stumbles upon while in the depths of a procrastination binge. Caldera is a visually stunning 3D animation created by Evan Viera, Chris Bishop, and a host of students and professionals that donated their time. The project was produced under the Bit Films program at Hampshire College, Amherst. While dark and dealing with tough subject matter, Caldera is beautifully realised, touching and thought provoking. There are also some serene moments that soften the impact, while making the experience all the more compelling.