It’s an exciting time at VFS right now! We’re kicking off our 25th anniversary celebration this year with an amazing opportunity for the storytellers, pioneers, innovators, and creatives who are looking to transform the entertainment industry over the next 25 years.
If that sounds like you – and you’re ready right now to take the first big step in launching your career in film, TV, games, or design – then you may be eligible for a scholarship of up to $25,000 for specific full-time programs starting April 30th or June 25th, 2012.
This is a limited time opportunity, so don’t delay. Visit the 25th Anniversary Celebration site now and get started!
Here’s a quick look at some of the Oscar-nominated films VFSers helped create: Best Picture Animated Feature Film Visual Effects Check out the rest of the nominees and air times on the Oscars website.
Maggie kicked things off in October and has lately been posting bilingual interviews with VFS students and alumni like Teresa Chang, Jeff Chen, Lina Zhao, Owen Chen, Yuan You, and Benson Chang. With nearly half of VFS’s student body coming from outside of Canada, students in any program can expect a wide variety of nations represented — which, in this increasingly globalized entertainment industry, can only serve to expand a creative network of future collaborators. We’re lucky to have Maggie providing us with a look at Asian students and grads from Digital Design. Visit Oomph to check out her posts, along with a host of other content for design-minded students and pros.
While Dionne Gordon and Jennifer Siddle, the Program Managers for Writing for Film & Television and Entertainment Business Management, respectively, are amongst the many Mad Men fans who can’t wait for season five to finally arrive. They decided to take the critically-acclaimed series into their own… hands. With the help of many VFSers, they launched Plaid Men this past weekend – a web series that puts hand puppets inside the feisty Manhattan ad agency and picks up where season four left off. You can catch a new episode every Sunday night at PlaidMenWebSeries.com. In March there will be two episodes per week on Sundays and Thursdays in the lead up to Mad Men‘s season premiere on the 25th. Plaid Men features the talents of Writing grads Bob Woolsey, Derek Thompson, Steve Toms, and Wade Fennig; Film Production grad Ryan Jackson; Writing/Film instructor Rudy Thauberger; Acting for Film & Television grads Naomi Dayneswood, Shannon Lang, Lauren Martin, and Aaron McCallum; and Head of Acting Bill Marchant. Oh, and that title sequence? It’s created by Ian Berg, a grad of both Foundation Visual Art & Design and Digital Design. Check out the first episode and ‘like’ the series on Facebook.
2011 has been a year of incredible accomplishments by VFS students and alumni. For the first time, we saw a Writing for Film & Television student screenplay produced on a global stage with grad Seth Lochhead’s Hanna. A team of Entertainment Business Management students took their Compendium short down to Screamfest LA and beat out seasoned pros for the Best Short Film award. And Digital Character Animation grad Rafael Cardenas took home his first Ariel Award – Mexico’s answer to the Oscars. As any regular reader of this blog knows, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for VFS alumni achievements this year. Students and grads from all programs raised the bar even higher for the next wave of artists to come out of VFS, and we’ve pulled all of their stories together at vfs.com/2011. Browse through the milestones of 2011, month by month. You’ll see a special video feature, VFS Blog and In Focus magazine stories, YouTube highlights, and what the wider VFS community had to say about it all. Congratulations to everyone on an amazing year – and thanks for letting us tell your inspiring stories!
Digital Design grad — and the Creative Director at Buck — Ryan Honey visited VFS recently to give back some of the experience he’s gained in the industry. (He even wrote a diary of his time here!) During Ryan’s visit, he sat down for an on-camera conversation with Head of Digital Design, Amber Bezahler, where they talked about Buck’s work, Ryan’s interaction with students, and what it takes to be a successful designer today. Check out the video here, or watch it on the VFS YouTube channel!
“Everything is mediated by an illusion, meaning anything we create as an illusion can be considered real.” Peter uses scientific research into perception and brain activity (he was formerly a marine biologist and geneticist) to inform the decisions he makes as a user experience designer. But he says his best advice for new designers is advice he was given when he started his career: “Go out and live”. After Peter’s opening remarks, each member of Digital Design’s graduating class had three minutes to impress the crowd, made up primarily of industry professionals, with descriptions of their final projects. It was a truly international and cross-disciplinary affair, with students coming from China, Turkey, Hungary, and Indonesia, and from backgrounds as diverse as biology, psychology, and full-ride hockey scholarships. From real-world problems such as brain injuries and child poverty, to social networking sites for sandwich lovers and collectors, the final projects offered a diverse selection of talent and interests. Appetizers is just one of the ways Digital Design students integrate with the industry. To find out more, head over to the Digital Design program page.
The talk was delivered by partner Örn Ólason, who described the creation of the company as a meeting of “men of few words, who love visuals and love animation”. The work he showed certainly supported this: a series of campaigns for Swatch that started with 3D renderings of the products and extended those images into motion graphics, videos, and even store design. The company works from the perspective of seeing just how simply they can approach a problem. “We love it when it starts to hurt,” Örn said. “Can we do it that simply? But we come from Scandanavia; we’re allowed.” Thanks, Örn and everyone from Thank You!
Inspired by the work of Vancouver writer Niina Chebry, two Digital Design grads – Drea Morin and Kelsey Armour – collaborated with former Entertainment Business Management instructor Christine Baudry to create Auguste RoDent: The Artist of Abundant Talent, an interactive storybook for children. Spearheaded by Sharing-Books.com, a social enterprise focused on supporting young readers, the project is now available in the Android Marketplace. You can learn more about it here. The Sharing-Books.com team already have another storybook in the works – which you can support through their IndieGoGo campaign. Check out the full story on Oomph to learn more about Drea and Kelsey’s great work!
Now — even while Antonio’s been busily creating award-winning work at Tribal DDB here in Vancouver — he’s managed to be named the 2011 Young Blood Interactive winner and is once again gracing the pages of Applied Arts magazine in the current issue. Check out Oomph for the full scoop and an exclusive Q&A with Antonio!
VFS Connections to Oscar 2012 Hopefuls
This weekend’s Academy Awards will celebrate another great year in film and alumni success. VFS grads contributed to a number of celebrated films in 2011 — garnering credits on 9 of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the year. On Sunday, we’ll see how many of those films take home the top prize in the biz.
*The Descendants — Acting for Film & Television Advisory Board Member Matt Lillard played “Brian Speer”.
*Hugo – 3D Animation & Visual Effects grads Elena Topouzoglou (Stereoscopic Compositor), Michael Eurek (Junior 3D Generalist), Geeta Basantani (Lead Compositor)
*The Tree of Life — 3D grads Jeff Tetzlaff (Modeling/Texturing Artist), Jesus L. Yapor (Compositor), Stephen King (Animator)
*Kung Fu Panda 2 — Digital Design grad Cesar Alejandro Montero Orozco (Surfacing Artist), and 3D grads Claudia Keene (Key Assistant Clean-up Artist), Nicholas Augello (Character Effects Artist)
*Puss in Boots — 3D grad Javier Solsona (Lead Character Technical Director) and Digital Design grad Cesar Alejandro Montero Orozco (Production Testing)
*Rango – 3D grads Cedric Lo (Lead Animator), Henri Tan (Creature TD), Jamie Bowers (Texture Painter), Kieran Tether (Digital Artist), Michael Lum (Animator), Scott Jones (Creature Lead), Stephen King (Animator), Teh-wei Yeh (Digital Artist), Will McCrate (Lighting TD)
*Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 — 3D grads Annabelle Kent (Digital Compositor), Henry South (CG Modeler), Joshua Herrig (Lead Lighting Artist/Look Dev Artist), Jozef van Eenbergen (Pipeline Developer), Kevin Mah (Effects Technical Director), Mike Rhone (Effects Technical Director), Nuno Nisa Pereira (Visual Effects Technical Director), Sara Hilmarsdottir (Matchmove Artist), Sofus Graae (Visual Effects Coordinator), Will Towle (Camera Tracker)
*Real Steel — 3D grad Aruna Inversin (Lead Compositor) and Makeup Design for Film & Television grad Cristina Atkin (Mold Making, Legacy EFX)
*Rise of the Planet of the Apes — Digital Character Animation grad Chad Moffitt (Animator), Film Production grads Gary Hawes (Second Assistant Director), Gord Dunick (Visual Effects Set Supervisor), Classical Animation grad Michael Cozens (Senior Animator), Makeup Design grad Mike Nickiforek (Animal Effects Fabrication), and 3D grads Abdullah Ecirli (Digital Compositor), Anthony Di Ninno (Previs Artist), Carolyn Wong (Creature Technical Director), Cesar Rodriguez Bautista (Digital Paint Artist), Chrystia Siolkowsky (Motion Editor), Jesse Sturdy (Witness Reference), Kristin Sedore (Lighting TD), Matt Weaver (Animator), Patrick Henry (Witness Reference), Richard Sur (Lighting Technical Director), Tamir Diab (Lighting Technical Director)
*Transformers: Dark of the Moon — 3D grads Anna Tonrungroj (Stereoscopic Nuke Background Prep), Borae Cho (Pipeline Technical Director), Cesar Rodriguez Bautista (Stereoscopic Prep/Roto Artist), Chelsea Whittet (Digital Production Administrator), Daphne De Jesus (Digital Paint Artist), Henri Tan (Creature Technical Director), Jamie Bowers (Texture Artist), Jooyong Lee (Roto/Paint Artist), Kelsey Ayukawa (Stereo Roto/Paint Artist), Kieran Tether (Digital Artist), Louis Cox (Visual Effects Artist), Pedram Daraeizadeh (Digital Production Administrator), Samson Wong (Integration Artist), Serguei Kalentchouk (Rigging Lead), Stephen King (Animator), and Film Production grad Justin Hammond (Lighting Technical Director)
*Hugo (as listed above)Oomph Interview Series Features Asian Students & Alumni
Readers of the Oomph blog — especially those with any interest or knowledge of Chinese — have been treated with the recent ‘Dragon Tales’ blog story series, written by the Digital Design program’s visiting scholar, Maggie Guo.Plaid Men Web Series Unveiled
VFS is a place focused on helping students spend most of their waking hours on amazing projects, staff and faculty also find unique ways to work together creatively.2011 Retrospective: Looking Back on an Amazing Year
Video: Buck Creative Director in Conversation
Peter Jin Hong Shares Experience from Google
“What does sex with geese have to do with user experience? As it turns out, everything.” In terms of unique openings to presentations, Peter Jin Hong’s first few minutes at Digital Design‘s Appetizers event will be very hard to top. The user experience expert, now working at Google+ Photos, and Digital Design alumnus spent a riveting fifteen minutes covering the aforementioned geese “stimulating”, done for tagging purposes as they were shipped to Oklahoma, the amount of time people take to decide on actions, inaction, or opinions, and how our frontal lobes have given us the capacity to make illusions into reality.
Danish Motion Studio Visits Digital Design
Thank You, a motion graphics studio based in Copenhagen, were so taken by the VFS grads who have worked there, that they took time out from a business trip to the Pacific Northwest to visit VFS Digital Design students and share their work for MTV and Swatch. Supporting Young Readers with Interactive Stories
As you might’ve noticed this morning on Digital Design‘s Oomph blog, there’s a great story of alumni innovation and success. Grad Named the 2011 Young Blood Interactive Winner
On-the-rise design superstar Antonio Alarcon Roman continues to garner attention for his impressive skills. A grad of Digital Design and Foundation Visual Art & Design, he made Design Edge Canada’s list of notable designers under the age of 35 in 2010 and one of his student team projects was also recognized by Applied Arts magazine.