Image courtesy of Epic Games. All rights reserved.
Just recently, the crew at Epic opened their doors to show the characters and environments for Gears of War 2 to the readers at CGSociety. Chris Perna and Jay Hawkins talked about steering the team, creating the assets and upping the ante for the reprise of the big game. Chris explains that Epic and Microsoft wanted everything to feel larger in scope in Gears 2. The Locust architecture had never been seen before, so it had to be something special. With so many below ground elements, Epic also wanted the underground to take on a different feel in these areas. they are more organic with lots of pulsing molds and fungus, root systems. To an outsider, the FPS looks like more of the same but after a couple of hours jumping around in the game personally, I am impressed with the appearance. A very cool escapist adventure.
Once again, the technical effort of the PIXAR short lives up to the tight comedic story. Good old slapstick. But Presto is a mix of the old and the new. The simple character dynamics mixed with the gorgeous Pixar environment.
The result is a wonderfully timed, sensational lit gymnastic show with timing, grace and comedic brilliance. I actually thought this one would make it higher in the list but there you go.
All hail the Open Source. In these days of corporate takeovers, economic resizing and foreclosures, it's good to know that there are geeks out there producing software to forward the greater creative community for the love of it.
And just to prove their insatiable appetite for creative passion, there are crews out there volunteering their skills to produce short films that display their best.
Here is a wonderful example of technical and artistic selflessness that in fact built this industry. Well done guys, thank you.
The VFX world lost one of the greats this year, in Stan Winston. Winston was a visual effects supervisor, make-up artist, and film director, best known for his work in the Terminator series, the Jurassic Park series, Aliens, the Predator series, and Edward Scissorhands. Stan Winston was a frequent collaborator with director James Cameron.
The established areas of expertise for Winston were in makeup, puppets and practical effects, but he never stayed still, shifting to digital with the establishment of the Stan Winston Digital company. Here, his visions were explored for the latest blockbuster productions, many of them climbing to the VES and Oscar podiums for VFX excellence.
The amazing amount of hi resolution 8.4K IMAX work done by Paul Franklin and the large crew at DNeg makes the resulting action-packed movie well worth seeing frame-by-frame. I can vouch for that personally. The city vistas, the car/bike chase.
The Creative Suite from Adobe has been through a few upgrades that fine tuned interfaces and made several of the apps rather larger than the community thought was necessary. But with CS4, Adobe has brought many high-end production features into the suite, as well as introduced very heavy versions of Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. The packs are released in six flavors for Premium and Standard applications of Design and Web work.
