Archive for May, 2008

Graduate Showreel 2008.

Eight Eyed Sea Bass are both happy and proud to once again work for and alongside the Birmingham School of Acting [BSA], to help them produce the 2008 Graduate Showreel.
One thousand copies, wonderfully packaged with an accompanying 24 page booklet. Please, have a look at the unashamed self-promoting photos…. Oooooh, shiny.

Previous years have seen EESB produce four quite different ‘Brummiewood’ DVDs to use as student and facility promotional tools.
Brummiewoods 1,2,3 and 4 had stories penned by established regional writers, which were filmed by professional crews and Directors, with the BSA students picked for the various roles in the short films.

The DVDs were then authored in a fairly straightforward way: Somewhere in the region of seven or eight films – playable independently or all together, with sub menus to reach info screens about the writers, Directors, crew, students, Brummiewood ethos and the BSA facility.

This year, the format had a bit of a makeover……

38 students, playing parts in scenes from 5 award-winning contemporary films, directed by BAFTA and RTS award winning film maker, Michael B. Clifford.The final DVD had to be able to: Play all films, play one film, play just the scenes [in some cases from more than one film] featuring a selected Actor, and return to a suitable place upon completing a required task too.

The above doesn’t sound like anything too special. Until you throw into the equation that each film was broken up into sometimes fifteen scene chunks, and the fact that EESB don’t really do DVD-Video like other companies; we love putting transitions from one menu to another – and from sub menus back to the main menu…. just so everything flows a little more sweetly and seamlessly.

So we have:
A main menu, with indepentent transitions from the options of ‘Play all’ / ‘Browse by Actor’ / ‘Browse by film’ / BSA info.

4 Actors pages with transitions from the main menu into the next and previous pages of Actors and a transition to the main menu from each of the four Actors screens. There are 38 Actors in total with each Actor having an intro screen before their run of scenes.

5 films, totalling 65 scene chunks. When played as a ‘play all’ selection – each film is preceeded by a screen of text.

5 info pages with 6 transition into and out of the main menu.

Now, as any DVD author worth his or her salt should know – the DVD specification allows for a DVD-Video disc to have 99 VTS elements.
If you add together all of the video pieces and transitions that we had, you are left with a grand old total of around 125 VTS elements, which would lead one to consider authoring the project for pressing to two DVD5 [single layer single side] discs or for one DVD10 [Single layer double side] disc.

If anyone around these parts is going to stick it to the man (strictly in terms of DVD authoring, you understand) then it’s going to be EESB.

Double sided discs? Two discs? Poobah, we reckon that a showcase should be conveniently placed on one side of one piece of optical media. Who wants to get half way through seeing the best that a facility has to offer – only to have to split the flow, and spend twenty five seconds turning over / changing the disc?

So, we took it upon ourselves to find a way of getting the 125 or so VTS elements onto one side of a single layer disc, and making it sure it was still within the bounds of DVD specification.

As nice and open as we are, we’re not going to give out the answer of how we achieved such a feat – but would welcome guesses as to our method via answersonapostcard@eesb.tv ….. anyone to guess correctly / guess close enough will get a prize. See, we are nice really!

EESB would like to say a ‘well done!’ to all of the Actors in this year’s showreel. In our humble opinion, the Graduates from the BSA continue to get better, year on year.

More soon, keep well all.

Open GL – test render for camera movement

Final Quality render

Yes, that’s right – the YIFTAs.
You can probably put two and two together to find out what YIFTA means…. it’s on the ticket.

Eight Eyed Sea Bass were contacted by Mike Corbett; the organiser of the event, who asked us to judge two categories of the awards [Animation and Visual Effects] – as well as announce the winners of those categories on stage.

We thank Mike for this, it’s a nice mini honour of sorts to be regarded as high enough up the chain to have your opinion and skills valued in this way. We’re generally too wrapped up in our work to think about how the world sees us.

The free drink had nothing whatsoever to do with us saying yes to it, honest!

We have to say a hearty ‘well done’ to everyone who entered a piece for the awards, not because we are contractually obliged to – but because it takes a lot of guts to put your finest on show for all to see, with the added possibility of a public critique to boot.

There were a decent cross section of genres to view…. from stop-motion animation, 2D animation / motion graphics through to full on epic style virtual-set replacements and some pure 3D animation pieces, a nice mix all in all.

We chose to give prizes to third, second and first place winners which consisted of a showreel, a few commercial pieces we had done, and a little something extra to the first place folks – a certificate entitling them to one day’s use of our HD editing beastie for their showreels. We know how difficult it can be to get a polished piece out into the world when you are a student / one man band, so a little helping hand is almost always appreciated. We are nice bods, aren’t we!

Righto, back to the old work thing.
Keep well all, more soon.