Jim Cameron on stage
Sunday night was the annual VES Awards. This year we honored Jim Cameron with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Ed Catmull with the Georges Melies Award.
Bill Paxton did the introduction, which was part honor and part roast (“Jim calls his parents on his birthday to congratulate them.”).
Milk, food coloring, soap, plus a crop and white vignette in Lightroom. The shading around the edges is courtesy of the cup.
Ron Diamond of Acme FilmWorks brought his Animation Show of Shows to Electronic Arts today. The 85 minute show included 11 different shorts, plus a Q&A session with two of the directors afterward. Koji Yamamura (left) directed “Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor”, and Alexi Alexeev (center) directed the (very) short “KJFG #5.” Ron Diamond is on the right.
My personal favorite was “Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight,” which was director Felix Massie’s graduation film for his animation degree. (You can see an excerpt here.) He uses simple stick figure animation in a Sim Tower type environment with a wonderful narration voiceover.
Harter Ryan from Microsoft’s Ensemble Studios gave the opening keynote speech at ICON2008. Kudos to Harter for not using a single bullet point in his presentation (a tenet I believe in wholeheartedly, but violated myself this time). Here he’s silhouetted in front of an image of a large crowd as he discussed the potential size of the video game market. By not having text on the screen you focus on what the speaker has to say.
Yep, I started another company. Couldn’t help it.
I have a passion for media, and I was getting way too anxious watching the TV/broadband world change without being a part of it. Coincident with that, the commoditization of media creation tools is incredibly exciting, and of particular interest to me is the impact that is having on teens.
The amount of content being created by teens is astonishing; a significant amount of it is actually good, and some is even great. This isn’t dad’s home movies anymore. Today’s youth have grown up consuming media at a rate beyond what we could even have imagined when we were kids. The availability of multiple forms of media on multiple devices and honed multitasking skills give modern American teens the ability to expose themselves to over six hours a day of media during their leisure time. (And they accomplish it in around four hours.)
From these hours of eyepounding exposure, teens are developing styles and techniques for storytelling that are uniquely their own. The content that they create is imaginative, funny, disturbing, insightful, and deeply personal.
At Uth TV, we’re finding the best of the young media creators and giving them a highly visible outlet for their work.
