Archive for February, 2008

You’ll have to excuse the apparent lack of imagination in the title, but when you see the picture – hopefully you will understand the constraints I’m working inside of here!

Here’s a little something we thought you all might like to have a quick look at:
This piece of 3D was originally intended to be part of a project we did a couple of months ago.

It ended up not making it into the project in the end – the feel of one part of the project took a change in design direction.

So, here you have it – one ’splash’, lovingly created in 3D and rendered with a smattering of Depth Of Field, to help with the sense of scale.

I will admit to a small fiddle with colour levels and general ambience as a post-render operation too. I am naughty.

And below is the scene as it was shown inside our 3D application of choice – LightWave.
It’s true what they say…. it does have a very sexy render engine straight out of the box.

Yes, you eyes are telling you the truth, you can interactively preview Depth Of Field in the program, before render time.

Well, that’s it for this small round up of geekdom and fine imagery. We’ll be sure to gether more impressive stuff for next time.

Keep well all.

Today, EESB successfully delivered the finished product of DVDs to WMG, a company owed by the University of Warwick.

This was a job where, once again, @Warblefly Productions came to Eight Eyed Sea Bass with some rather nice looking footage (shot in DVCPro50 – for those who care) and asked us to edit together a promotional video.

Initially expected to be an 8 minute video, it quickly grew into a 20 minute corporate video, due to the volume of information and footage within! We spent a lot of time getting the edit just right, and during some of this period, the end client was enjoying the experience of sitting in our studio on sofas viewing the work as it was made on a large HD screen. After this, EESB then set about giving the film a bit of a Top Gear look through careful colour-correction and grading. The guys at Warblefly expressed how pleased they were with how much more depth and richness the finished footage had compared to the already fairly tastey original source video.

At the same time as the video was being edited, we were also working on the DVD menu and rough authoring in parallel.

Once everything was approved, we then pressed 2,000 copies of the DVD, with full-colour print, full colour case inlay and full colour 16 page booklet, and shipped them to the client just 7 working days after the master had been approved!

Needless to say, the client was extremely pleased with the quality of the finished product, and that it arrived 1 day before a big event they were going to attend.

EESB_Pins
Video sent by EESB

Some R&D of making a virtual pin displacement toy – a bit like the map system used in X-Men.

News from a project we worked on in December, is about a DVD we authored.

An editor at BBC Birmingham, named Neil Stacey, had gone and made himself a short film titled Home Movie, with the aid of some of his Beeb colleagues and some other chums.

What made this short film a little more special was the fact that a clever lady, also at BBC Birmingham, had mixed all the audio in 5.1 surround. This meant, obviously, that Neil wanted his DVD to reflect all the efforts that had gone into the making of his film, and provide the most enthralling method of storytelling.

So, unsurprisingly, he came to Eight Eyed Sea Bass to get his DVD created. We carefully encoded his video and created his 5.1 Dolby Digital audio soundtrack (as well as regular stereo for good measure). He actually went on to comment on how good the quality was when he saw it on the big screen, premiered at Birmingham’s Electric Cinema, to which we were also invited.

A good night was had by all.

Congrats to Neil for completing his own movie.
More info can be found at http://www.homemovieshortfilm.com/

**WARNING** This post contains images, text and video of a geek nature.

If you are easily offended by words or phrases such as ‘voxel’, ‘gimbal’ or ‘quaternian rotation systems’ – please do not read the following.

Right, that’s the legal stuff out of the way!

R&D comes in many shapes and sizes. And aspect ratios too. (see what I did there?)
This latest segment was born from a piece of work we did for a London based multimedia company, for a print based campaign.

Using the same principles, we wanted to see how to do things on a slightly different note. So we did.

The following were a test of ideas. These ideas have (by the very nature of R&D), given birth to other possible implemetations of the systems that makes this doohickie work in the way it does.

The object you can see in the scene here is made up of dots. Not – as you may think, vertices.
To give them their full technical title, they are single-point polygons. A slightly oxymoronic name really, considering that ‘polygon’ means ‘many angled’ – and is defined as being ‘a closed plane made of three or more straight lines’.
Well, we know how to throw the cat amongst the pigeons here don’t we!?

Below are a couple of screenshots of the beastie in action.

Time for a quick vid?….

We hope you’ve enjoyed the small insight into some of the geeky stuff we get up to here, we’re sure there will be more soon!

Another birthday in the Bass, this time for creative writer extraordinaire, Steve!

Many Happy Returns to the Jag man. May your day be filled with joy, magickckckck and umm…. drink!

Peace out.

Ingredients for taste test:

• 1 x company Director’s programming genius brother
• 1 x absurdly comfy client chair
• 1 x Silicon Graphics O2 workstation
• 1 x 40″ monitor
• 1 x little table to rest screen and feet upon
  

Room for improvement:

• Drinks holder
• Headphones / 5.1 speakers
• 2 x 50″ monitors?

This experiment did give us a nice vision of how we would like our graphics artists to be working in a few years time. Talk about productivity!

Thanks go to Joe Osborne for his help over Christmas, a highly talented programmer, now working at Frontier in Cambridge on PS3 games after years of writing cutting-edge code for market-leading games, with more efficient code than the games-makers themselves could create (just for fun).

Got any other suggestions for improvements? Send ‘em along to: answersonapostcard@eesb.tv