Glory Days – Football in Times of War is a short film aimed at engaging teachers, students and football fans of all ages with the website of the same name at cwgc.org/glorydays

Introduced by David Beckham and enthusiastic football manager Boyce Dungood, Glory Days tells the stories of some of the footballers who gave their lives for their countries and how they are remembered. It explores how the two world wars affected football teams and how football played a part in times of war as entertainment, for boosting morale and for propaganda.

Argos have recently launched this Sliced Bread created game (client: Meteorite) to coincide with their ‘Toy Tester for Year‘ competition and ‘Big Play’ Roadshows. The game has 3 competency zones, each with 4 playable levels. Players can also invite their friends to join them in mini high scoreboards. You can play the game here.

I’m Angus and this is my awesome Toy Testing factory. It’s my job to make sure all the toys are off the Fun-o-meter scale! But there are so many great toys here, I need another Toy Tester to help me. So let’s see if you’re up to the job. Collect as many toys as possible from the Big Play Area zones – the clock is ticking!

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 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’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 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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Preloaded have created the web-based 1066 The Game to coincide with Channel 4’s 1066 documentaries. 1066 The Game puts the player into the muddy boots of the English, the Vikings and the Normans, to play through the actual battle situations of Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings.

Using historically accurate troop formations, battle styles, troop makeup and featuring a voice-over by Sir Ian Holm, 1066 The Game is educational and battle strategy gaming at its very best.

To give the user a full game ’simulation’ experience it needed a sufficient library of character sequences to make it work. Preloaded pre-planned them and we considered the best approach in getting them delivered in the timeframe. We did this by creating a generic character, then modelling and animating bespoke assets for each character trait, there was also a requirement to create a horse for the Norman soldiers. We devised a working pipeline that allowed us to manage all the game requirements from build to animation, and then finally to render. We also needed to consider the correct historically accurate shields, weapons, helmets the soldiers used. Using the render layers in Maya, we were able to turn on/ off the required elements after the animation move had been completed. All the sequences were rendered as vector for Flash.

Pre-planning pipelines and considering the best approach  is integral within any animated production. This is because once you are committed to production it is very difficult to go back and re-think the approach, timeframes for online projects seem to be a lot tighter than TV or film. We were very fortunate in this particular production that the ‘nice-to-haves’ (i.e. different ways of  the soldiers being killed) were also able to be delivered.