Hey, Samina here. I can’t believe it’s almost day three of FITC; the past two days have flown by. For a few weeks prior to the festival, I worked with Joe and Andrew to organize Seneca’s booth here, and it’s been awesome. Last year (the first time for both myself and the SCA at FITC) my main job was to organize the volunteers; this time around I got to take on a more involved role in the planning and truly see the process through from start to finish.
Following our last class of the semester (and of DMA, as we’re graduating this June), a few of us spent Friday afternoon loading up all our equipment and some artwork to bring downtown, Friday evening transporting and unloading it at the Hilton, and Saturday evening setting up the booth. FITC tends to be a series of late nights and early mornings (I was up at 5am today), but the sleep deprivation is completely worth it.
In between looking after the booth, I managed to finally take in a presentation today. I sat in on “Dame Judy Dench Could Kick my Mother’s Ass,” with Shaun Hamontree of MK12, a motion graphics company based in Missouri. Apparently, the company’s founders were all victims of the bursting dot-com bubble, who decided to joing forces after meeting in a coffee shop. They started making their own 1-minute films in-house, using only desktop software, and taking on all tasks themselves, including acting. One of their larger projects, A History of America, gained notice when they showed it to a member of FX Cartel. This lead to MK12 meeting film director March Forster, who asked them to produce some motion graphic elements for Stranger than Fiction (wicked movie by the way, showcasing Will Ferrell in a non-idiotic light).
MK12 worked on the opening titles for The Kite Runner (which I have no desire to see, given how depressing the book was), and then they landed what can only be described as an effing huge job: they were asked to work on Quantum of Solace, the latest Bond flick. Their first task was to simulate the “smart computer” used in the film, which in some ways looked like a gigantic touch screen. It was interesting to see how they moved from an initial idea of “brain mapping,” to filming a mocked-up set in order to give themselves a reference for motion, to progressively layering more and more into the scene to build realism. Finally, the scene was filmed with the actual actors, on-set, and the team used careful motion measurements as a basis for adding in the graphics.
Although this was already a pretty big deal, MK12 badly wanted to produce the film’s main title sequence, so they worked on a pitch. Their first two attempts involved motion tests with footage they took themselves, but they missed the mark somewhat. The Bond people wanted to convey desolation and the desert, so the company reworked their idea and storyboarded it out, arriving at a sequence in which women form from desert sand and try to consume Bond. The process involved sculpting women out of sand and working with particle animation to make the sand move. I haven’t see QoS, but the sequence looked pretty amazing.
Okay, all for now. I have plans to attend a few sessions tomorrow, so there will be more blog posts to follow!
Tags: FITC Toronto 2009, Flash in the Can, MK12, Seneca College