From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: This is Amazing: LEGO Inception

 

An academic team project, spanning 12 weeks, representing approx 1000 hours work. This project represented approx 120-160 hours per person, and one quarter of their final semester workload.

All content originated by BA(Hons) VFX : Visual Effects + Concept Design students, Pedrom DADGOSTAR, Hollie PRICE, Jack MILTON, Simon STIRRUP, Sam SERRIDGE, Jack BOSWORTH and Sidney THIBAULT.

A great project people, especially given the challenges the film posed. Fantastic team work, great technical solutions and professional approach throughout.

Rendered on Workstation Specialist’s great WS2610 systems… Including dynamic / particle effects simulations…

[VFX]

 

from Geeks are Sexy Technology News

From Wired Top Stories: Why Steam-Powered Distribution Made Sense for Indie Game: The Movie

For independent moviemakers, film festivals can be like speed-dating — show off your best qualities to as many distributors as possible and hope that someone wants to take you out to theaters. And at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the creators of Indie Game: The Movie entertained nearly every suitor at the party. Then they decided to go stag, becoming the first full-length feature film to be released via videogame delivery service Steam.

from Wired Top Stories

From Ars Technica: Valve’s Source engine to power upcoming animated film

Valve’s Source engine will make its big screen debut in a movie called Deep, Variety reported on Saturday. The small-budget animated movie will use Valve’s engine as a low-cost solution for real-time rendering and editing, an unusual approach that may grow in popularity for smaller studios. The partnership between the developer and the film production team may also result in the release of the movie on Steam.

The Source engine debuted in 2004, and has powered games including Counter Strike: Source, Half Life 2, and the Portal series. Valve has a working relationship with production studio Brown Bag Films, according to Kotaku, and agreed to license the engine for Deep. The animated film is set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of World War III, where the remainder of mankind huddles in abandoned ship hulls and struggles to survive.

Deep has a budget of €15 million ($18.7 million)—sizeable by European standards, but small by American ones. Companies like Pixar spend well into the hundreds of millions on their 3D animated films. By using Source, Deep may well be one of the first feature film instances of beginning-to-end machinima, a type of animation that involves using game engines to animate (usually short) movies. Red vs. Blue is the canonical example of machinima, and the style was used throughout the World of Warcraft-themed South Park episode, “Make Love Not Warcraft.”

 

from Ars Technica