The State of the GeoSocial Universe
8:10 pm
Zoic Studios wins Emmy for VFX in CSI
4:00 pm
Zoic Studios won an Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Series last Saturday for their work in CSI’s season premiere entitled “Family Affair”.
“What a fantastic night for the CSI team and Zoic,” says Zoic VFX Supervisor Rik Shorten. “I’m so proud of the artists whose immeasurable talents helped make this episode special. It was nice to be recognized for all our hard work. A truly great moment.”
Congratulations to the whole Zoic Studios team!
Ten One Design’s Pogo Sketch Contest!
3:30 pm
Ten One Design is following up on last year’s contest and upping the ante, this time offering up $1000 in prizes for your iPad.
“There’s no doubt that the iPad has become a respected platform for artists everywhere,” said Peter Skinner, Ten One Design CEO. “We know our loyal Pogo Stylus and Pogo Sketch users are extremely talented and possess unparalleled creativity – and we want to show the world just what they can do. We hope this contest allows our fans to showcase their true skills and more importantly have fun.”
The contest began yesterday, and concludes on October 29th. Anyone can submit, with one grand prize and four secondary winners to be chosen by their panel of judges. Full details after the break, and at their site.
Leroy+Clarkson Spots for the Cooking Channel
3:00 pm
Scripps Network just rolled out their newest channel, the “Cooking Channel”, dedicated to 24/7 focus on gathering, preparing, and eating food. To promote it, they hired Leroy + Clarkson to create a series of short-form documentary style promos.
Lightning struck during the pitch phase for the new network’s graphics package. In developing a cohesive voice and identity that represents the promise of Cooking Channel as a place created for and by ”Food People,” a pitch video was created featuring food people expounding on topics ranging from the role food played in their childhoods, to food destinations, to their passionate opinions on the word ”foodie.” This video aligned perfectly with the brand voice being developed internally at Cooking Channel, prompting the network to award Leroy + Clarkson a launch campaign that would tell the story of this new brand.
The resulting promos were shot on RED hardware, and edited in FInal Cut Pro and After Effects for the motiongraphics work. Read the full release after the break, and view the promos here.
Dexter Returns to TV with some help from SWAY
2:00 pm
Dexter Morgan is about to return to television, and his newest promo shows his world literally turning upside down courtesy of the folks at SWAY. See their impressive work in the new promo, available online here.
Credits:
Dexter
Visual Effects: Sway Studio:Creative Director/VFX Supervisor: Mark Glaser
Executive Producer: Jason Cohon
VFX Producer: Les G. Jones
VFX Coordinator: Andrew Gilson
3D Layout, Modeling and Animation: Scott McNeff
3D Lighting, Texturing, Rendering: Erick Schiele
Compositing Supervisor: Marguerite Cargill
Flame Artist: Elad Offer
Flame Artist: Kevin Prendiville
Flame Artist: Tim Bird
Flame Artist: Brad Scott
Nuke Artist: Olivier Sarda
Full release after the break.
The VFX of Prince of Persia
1:00 pm
FXGuide has a great article up on the visual effects of The Price of Persia, discussing how Cinesite, MPC, Framestore, Double Negative, and NVizage all worked together to create the many VFX shots in the film. In particular, I love the part about the similarities between crowds and cities.
Drawing on the underlying structure of MPC’s existing proprietary ALICE crowd system, Town Planner gave MPC an initial pass at the city that could be augmented with other surrounds like gardens, streets and trees, as well the surrounding mountainous environment. “Buildings are pretty much a crowd that doesn’t move,” noted Ceretti. “We already had layout tools for the crowds – why not make it similar? In the end, we stripped out everything we wouldn’t need in terms of simulation of crowd motion and just used it for layout, but it was still a huge render so we had to split up parts of the city and bake out different renders in RenderMan to make it possible.” In the end, this amounted to about 20,000 buildings and 180,000 props – things like canopies, piles of wood and pots. For shots of the invading army and other crowds in the city, the ALICE software was used to generate 10,000 agents made up of soldiers, flags, citizens, horses and camels, and then integrated into the city shots. Further projection work was done in both Shake and Nuke to allow for 3D space adjustments and other details to be added, along with the layering of atmospheric dust, mist and rays of light.
Zooming Into Sun-Like Star HD 10180
12:00 pm
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument have discovered a planetary system containing between five to seven planets orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. Five of the planets are approximately the size of Neptune, which is about 17 times the mass of Earth. All five of the “Neptune” planets that are orbiting the star would lie within the within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars.
There is also evidence of two further planets. The first planet is a approximately 65 times the mass of Earth, making it very Saturn like (which is 95 times the mass of Earth). This planet orbits the star every 2,200 days.
The second planet is being called Earth-like. That is because they think that it has about 1.4 times the mass of Earth. However, there is one problem. This Earth-like planet lies very close to the star, at approximately 2 percent of the Earth–Sun distance. It orbits the star every 1.18 days. This makes it too hot to support life as we know it. Mercury, on the other hand, orbits our sun every 88 days.
In this zoom sequence we start with a wide-field view of the southern sky, including the Magellanic Clouds. We gradually close in on the apparently unremarkable star HD 10180 in the little-known constellation of Hydrus (the Male Water Snake). Observations with the HARPS spectrograph, attached to ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, have revealed the definite presence of five planets and evidence for two more in orbit around this star. This system is similar to the Solar System in terms of number of planets and the presence of a regular pattern in the sizes of the orbits. If confirmed the closest planet detected would be the lightest yet known outside the Solar System, with a mass that could be as small as only 1.4 times that of the Earth.
credit: ESO/A. Fujii/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Music: John Dyson (from the album “Darklight”).
VizWorld.com 
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