The Pixel Crush

-------------------------------------------|Digital Animation & Game Criticism|-------------------------------------------

Sunday 23 September 2012

Encounters

Kernel was recently screened at the Bristol animation festival "Animated Encounters" as part of the 'best of the south west' screenings. This is very cool, and I even attended the screening. Watching the film on a big screen again was great, it looks so good with all its revisions.

There was some drama leading up to the screening with problems surrounding the projection of the film in a special DCP (digital cinema package) file and frames being dropped, but I'm pretty sure what the projectionists were noticing was the duplicate frames that were already in Kernel to compensate for corrupted renders. The DCP format is now something I'm really interested in as the ideal way of showing a film, there are open source ways of encoding a film down from the highest quality possible (16bit TIFF 4K frames) onto special servers that stream the video into the projector. The only problem is unless you have one such fancy projector there's no way of testing what was just encoded I don't think.
I may, or may not, be working on something related to this...
I bumped into tutors Andy Wyatt and Derek Hayes at encounters, and caught up with how the course was expanding, how the London show went- which I unfortunately missed. I also saw Omari at the festival and he introduced me to some of his new producer friends, master networker that he is. Everyone seemed beyond impressed at my current position at Aardman so it was nice to revel in the incredibly humbling successes of the last few months. I'm now a graduate for god's sake, weird weird weird.

I'm missing being able to talk about my work on the blog, I'm guessing I will only be able to resume real posting once a project I've been involved with becomes complete and is finally released, then I can expose its inner workings! Everything I create at Aardman seems to be better than the last thing, I'm constantly improving with new tools and fewer technological boundaries, it feels great and I'm dying to share it. So until then, or something else of note happens, The Pixel Crush will be transitioning in and out of hibernation.