Archive for July, 2009
Mr Z Designer Challenge – Day #2 (Thursday)
Posted by Administrator | Filed under Competition, Sliced Bread, Social Media, Twitter
Good day today plenty of progress made, Z800 machine running well couple of issues with encoding audio via Premiere CS4, seems to be a software issue though not the machine. Most of the shots are now planned through, story just needs a little tightening against the new voice-over.
Mr Z Designer Challenge – Day #1
Posted by Administrator | Filed under Sliced Bread, Social Media, Twitter
As some of you know we are involved in a competition for HP called the ‘Mr Z Designer Challenge‘ (more info here). Yesterday the machine arrived just before lunch, and we busied ourselves loading the software in and adding plug-ins ensuring that we could comfortably start production.
From an initial observation the HP Dream Colour monitor is amazing, the colours are showing very vibrant and rich against our normal monitors and it doesn’t seem to reflect the outside light so much either. The Z800 machine itself is quite compact for sooo much power, its also very quiet! Working in Maya we haven’t noticed a massive change in speeding up the workflow (yet) compared to our normal machines, but we ran a few test on the rendering last night and it is comparably faster.
From a production perspective, it has been agreed with all studios, that all sequences will be kept closely under wraps until all they are all put together. A couple of frames from our storyboard are shown below but that doesn’t really give away much! Last week we worked on some preparation including the story and also rigging the character, so that we can get the animation we require during our week.
Caroline Hampstead – Copywriter (www.carolinehampstead.com) has kindly written a voice-over for us and Green-Shoot (www.green-shoot.com) has provided the voice recording (more on the voice-over artist and sound FX later). We will try and blog progress on a daily basis, so check back back here for regular updates . . .
Philips Sonicare Toothbrush on a Philips 3D WOW monitor
Posted by Administrator | Filed under Animation, Product, Stereoscopic
We were recently commissioned by award winning MS&L (Manning Selvage & Lee) to create a 20 second 3D animation piece for the new Philips Sonicare toothbrush. The sequence was designed to give the user a full ‘wow’ experience with the product appearing to come out of the screen via the Philips 3DWOW monitor.
Philips 3D Solutions offers a 42″ autostereoscopic 3D display family, for professional applications, that provides today’s best 3D viewing experiences without glasses. The slanted multi-view lenticular lens technology affords full brightness and full contrast and allows multiple users to view 3D content at the same time, within a large comfort zone. Moreover, a true colour representation is ensured by the lenticular lens technology.
The images below provide an insight into how the monitor works, on the left you will see the beauty image and on the right the z-depth registration. The z-depth dictates how the 3d is read by the monitor through the light and dark gradient. There are lots of variables with the settings (with some basic set-up provided via the Inition website) and therefore some ‘trial and error’ required. The final file is rendered an exported as a .s3d file for use on the monitor [video clip to follow].
Updated video clip:
Avanti Communications – Infomercial
Posted by Administrator | Filed under Jobs, Product, Sliced Bread
We recently completed an animated informercial for Avanti Communications PLC (one of our neighbours here in Rivington Street!) Business Internet Continuity (BIC) product. The sequence is 1 and a half minutes in length and explains how the product works and its benefits to the business user/ ISP. You can view the video here on Avanti’s website.
Avanti’s Business Internet Continuity (BIC) product provides an automatic alternative route to the Internet for a business customer over a satellite link. The service is triggered when a customer’s fixed–line connection to the Internet fails and automatically maintains the IP addresses used in the customer’s network.
HP – Mr. Z Designer Challenge
Posted by Administrator | Filed under Animation, News, Sliced Bread
Sliced Bread Animation are pleased to announce their involvement in the HP Mr. Z Designer Challenge. Our ‘week’ comes in a couple of weeks and we are busy thinking through ideas. We will blog regular updates on both the machine’s performance and the animation developments. More info here
HP has given the UK’s leading digital content creation (DCC) agencies a tough, yet exciting task: capturing ‘a day in the life’ of Mr. Z, a superhero designer with SFX superpowers.
Using HP’s recently–launched Z–800 workstation and Adobe’s Creative Suite software, each DCC agency selected by HP accepted the challenge to develop a 30–second animation or film clip about Mr. Z and his powers. Once all the clips are produced, they will all be joined together, to create a ‘A day in the life’ of Mr. Z.
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