On Wednesday this week I was lucky enough to head out on a 'school' trip to the BAF (Bradford Animation Festival) which was one of the longest days I've ever experienced but also one of the most inspirational!
I attended a series of fascinating lectures from many big names in the industry including;
*David Bennett from Faceware Technologies. (Worked on Avatar, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Polar Express).
*Christine Phelan from Valve. (Dota 2, Team Fortress and Portal 2).
*Jaromir Plachy and Peter Stehlik from Amanita Design. (Botanicular and Machinarium).
*David Brown, Philip Gray and Bill Martin from TT Games. (Lego Franchise)
*Neil Thompson from BioWare. (Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age 2 and Command and Conquer).
All had uniquely inspiring points and opinions in particular Christine Phelan displayed some creature design sheets and concepts for Star Wars' Rancor which I found similarities between my own work including silhouettes, rough skeletal line work to final bone structures and final concept presentation; from this I can apply these further to my own presentation for my portfolio!
Also Faceware is an interesting piece of software I'd like to attempt to use for one of my creature designs if I get the chance before D-Day! It's is a software package enabling photorealistic facial motion capture, which was very impressive!
Furthermore Amanita Designs approach to games design was linked greatly with being able to interact with everything within the game world specifically discussing their new game Botanicula and even providing a comical value making their game addictive, interesting and so pleasing to the eye with its colourful 'crazily fun' environments. Amanita Designs and BioWare couldn't stress enough the importance of working outside the box, taking inspirations from everything around us not just games but nature and other art forms.
BioWare's Neil Thompson also stressed the importance of being able to draw in the games and entertainment industries, everyone can have ideas but these are useless without the ability to show, design and display those ideas to their full potential!!!
All in all it was a fantastic day and would recommend to everyone with an interest in games and animation to attend next year! I will be!
No comments:
Post a Comment