Village Gamer

Vancouver – Last evening our local ACM SIGGRAPH chapter presented a post-mortem panel for the movie Watchmen, featuring four of the development team from MPC Vancouver.

Watchmen was the first project for the brand new west coast studio, which completed a total of 300 shots for 24 sequences with 50 team members in only nine months. The team wanted to accurately recreate iconic moments from the original graphic novel, which at times proved to be a big challenge, but they rose to the challenge and succeeded. Archie, the owl ship was by far the heaviest asset in the show and played a major part a pivotal part in the show, during the sequence known as Call to Account.

The panel members – Ben Cole, Landon Bootsma, Harry Mukhopadhyay and Tim Mulvihill led the audience through the processes used in building the major shots from reference photos to 3d builds to finished product. Mixed with bits of humour the session was very educational and offered some very good insight into the amount of time and work which goes into the making of a movie such as Watchmen.

Watchmen Revealed was sponsored by: BCIC, 3vis, VanArts, Sophia Books, AnnexPro, Stash Digital Media, VEAbc and Society of Graphic Designers Canada, Vancouver Chapter.

Vancouver – AnnexPro is pleased to be presenting two educational events this summer. First up is the Matrox MAXimum Roadshow on June 23 at the VFS Cafe. The seminar will be showcasing Matrox MAX technology for faster than realtime H.264 encoding for Blu-ray, the web, and mobile devices. Matrox MAX is available in the Matrox CompressHD accelerator card and in the Matrox MXO2 series of I/O devices for the Mac.

The second seminar is the AJA Ki Pro Worldwide Roadshow: From Lens to Post. You are invited to join AJA on July 14 at the Vancouver Film School for a demonstration of their latest innovation in workflow enhancing technology – the Ki Pro. Finally, shoot on the same codec as you edit with, full raster 10 bit Apple ProRes 422, built natively into Ki Pro’s stand-alone, portable hardware. You’ll get a high level overview of AJA and see a live demo of Ki Pro. Ask questions and get answers from AJA executives, and leading industry experts.

British Columbia – Tonight’s ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver Chapter AGM has been postponed to a later date. The AGM was slated to take place prior to this evening’s soldout event, Watchmen Revealed.

Just a reminder that the Canary Derby will be running on June 27 in Vancouver and June 28 in Victoria.  Village Gamer is supporting Brenda Bailey, who is participating on the Wired Woman team – and we challenge you to support a team too! We have all lost loved ones to cancer – please get involved in supporting early detection research.

New Media BC is presenting a case-study on the Canucks Fan Zone, a user-generated editorial and fan media web portal followed by a good old fashion networking mixer in partnership with the Anton Sledgehammer Creative Agency. The seminar will take place on June 25, with a registration fee of $35.00 ($25.00 for NMBC members).

The joint Annual General Meetings of WINBC and Wavefront will take place on June 22 at Nokia’s offices at 9200 Glenylon Parkway, in Burnaby. They are combining the AGMs with the end of season MoMoVan party. The event will run from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm, and the AGMs will be held at 6:15 pm.

Victoria – VIATeC has two activities planned for July.  First on the schedule is a seminar to aid businesses who need to work around fluctuations in the US dollar, and this July 7 seminar will help businesses to develop hedging strategies to protect technology businesses. This is followed by VIATeC’s July VIAFest event, which is an open house event at Contech. Come out for a tour their facility and view Contech’s unique designs as a provider of advanced animal training and control technologies for pets, their owners and gardeners worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

Stratford – The Canada 3.0 forum concluded Tuesday with the declaration that all Canadians should have the opportunity to participate in a fully digital world and reap the economic benefits of commercializing innovation.

“We have the opportunity to lead the world in digital media and create a national advantage by investing in innovation and turning that into commercially viable content and technology,” said Tom Jenkins, newly named Chairman of the Canadian Digital Media Network’s Advisory Board, and Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Open Text.

To be a leader in digital media all Canadians should be connected to content and able to access that content on an equal level, organizers agreed. Content needs to be respected and copyright and ownership protected, says Ian Wilson, Strategic Advisor for the University of Waterloo Stratford Institute. “We need to connect Canadians to content on a fair and transparent basis,” said Wilson. “And every citizen in Canadian society regardless of geography – whether in an urban area or not – should be able to connect to Canadian content in an increasingly mobile world.”
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Vancouver – The June 17th presentation of Watchmen Revealed, which features Ben Cole, Landon Bootsma and Tim Mulvihill of MPC Vancouver will explore the pressures of recreating one of the most acclaimed comic books in history, revealing the challenges they faced in assembling some of the more complex scenes and answering questions surrounding the diverse techniques used. MPC Vancouver is hiring, so be sure to bring your demo reel and visit their recruiting booth during the pre-show event.

The evening will begin with the Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH chapter’s first Annual General Meeting since its formation as a non-profit organization. Members are asked to be at the VanCity Theatre at 6:00pm for this very important meeting. Following the meeting at 6:30 will be an industry social mixer. It is not necessary to have tickets for Watchmen Revealed in order to attend the AGM and the mixer. Contact Siggraph Vancouver to register for these two pre-show events.

Watchmen Revealed is sponsored by: BCIC, 3vis, VanArts, Sophia Books, AnnexPro, Stash Digital Media, VEAbc and Society of Graphic Designers Canada, Vancouver Chapter.

Toronto – Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto 2009 today announced the addition of Express Site Clinics in the Expo Hall, which will be taught by Shari Thurow, Jennifer Slegg and Ken Jurina. The largest search engine marketing conference and expo in Canada opens today at the Sheraton Centre Toronto.

Now in its sixth year, SES Toronto is considered the definitive digital event for marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketers (SEMs), including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. The event is organized and programmed in cooperation with the SES Advisory Board, Search Engine Watch and Andrew Goodman, the founder and president of Toronto-based Page Zero Media.

Goodman says, “Don’t miss the opportunity to visit the Expo Hall and take in the added bonus of an Express Site Clinic! No need for appointments as these PowerPoint-free, interactive clinics are ‘first-come, first-served’ offering you a rare chance to get your Web site reviewed live by one of our SES experts.” Read the rest of this entry »

Banff – As nextMEDIA Banff wrapped its final day, Innovation Week was unveiled to an international delegation of digital media creators and social media mavens. Innovation Week is a ground-breaking event that merges nextMEDIA, the Canadian New Media Awards and Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). Created to integrate the communities from Canada’s technology and digital media industries, key technology and media companies, entrepreneurs and investors, Innovation Week will take place November 30 to December 2, 2009 at the Design Exchange in Toronto.

“Canada is currently facing a critical challenge in transforming its economy in a time of global economic uncertainty and constrained investment. Innovation Week is both a rallying point and a platform to enable the individuals, companies and communities central to the innovation economy to come together and advance their respective agendas,” comments Robert Montgomery, CEO of Achilles Media who is also an investor and Co-Chair of CIX. “The three events which have combined in Innovation Week are only the beginning, as we reach out to include all the key communities in the coming weeks leading up to the big event.”
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Vancouver – It’s been a somewhat busy week as I’ve tried to keep up with all of the news from our Canadian developers and industry representatives down at E3 – and I have decided that next year I am going to the expo. Once everyone has returned from their E3 adventures, I hope to be able to sit down with them and get their views in a look back at this year’s event.

Tuesday evening we attended Launch Party 7, where we met up with a few friends and met a few new ones. It’s always interesting to find out what projects are being worked on in the city, as we have such a vibrant development community. I found out about this event when we attended the recent Digital Kung Fu event presented by MDM during Vancouver Digital Week, and I believe Launch Vancouver is an event which we will be attending more often. Some of the interesting people we met include the Twitter Boot Camp instructor Gregg Scott, who will be leading a soldout boot camp session tomorrow.

We also listened to a very interesting presentation by Nick Bouton about his site, Protaganize. This site is an interactive community for writers and aspiring writers, supporting “addventures” which is an “add-your-bit” style of story writing that the whole community can participate in. The site also supports linear story writing and allows authors to both give and get feedback on their writing efforts.

Tynt Tracer was the winner of the “Startup Most Likely To Succeed” presentations for this event, winning over both the judges and the attendees. Tynt Tracer is a Calgary-based referral tracker, which lets you know when and where your site’s content is being copied. Tynt has received funding from iNovia and AVAC to develop its product. Read the rest of this entry »

Vancouver – Last evening, the GD12 students at Vancouver Film School presented their grad projects to an evaluation audience in the VFS Main Theatre. The students spend several weeks in pre-production developing their game concepts, and then an additional 12 weeks in production, bringing their concepts to life.

The first group up to the podium was Team LightSpeed, presenting their 2D Action Platformer game Travis’ Terror. The target audience for this imaginative and colourful game is children under 10, and to that end I feel that they came very close to making a product appropriate for the age group. Developed on Citrus

Light Speed

flash engine, the game’s environment is comprised of artwork which resembles colouring book drawings. The gameplay involves two modes: dreamtime and nightmare. In dreamtime mode, the environment is bright and colourful while nightmare mode has a darker colour palette. The premise of the game is to help Travis get through the game and defeat the boogeyman lurking in his closet. As the player advances through the levels, he is confronted by monsters such as dinosaurs and robots. In dreamtime mode, the monsters are small and easily defeatable. In nightmare mode the monsters are bigger and more challenging. Game progress can be saved at nightlight checkpoints, and there are toys and candies to collect along the way. The player can choose several different paths through the game, each path presenting different challenges. Travis’ Terror is a game which I feel showed hard work and attention to detail on the part of the development team, who overcame many challenges including losing a team member partway through the project.
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Toronto – Search Engine Strategies (SES) is offering search engine marketing (SEM) training workshops following next week’s conference and expo in Toronto. The largest search engine marketing conference and expo in Canada will be held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto June 8-10, 2009.

According to comScore, there were 3.5 billion expanded searches in Canada during March 2009. Google Sites had an 80.7 percent share, Microsoft Sites had 4.9 percent, and Yahoo! Sites 4.5 percent. During the same month, there were 21.0 billion expanded searches in the United States. Google Sites had a 58.8 percent share, Yahoo! Sites had a 14.7 percent share, and Microsoft Sites a 5.9 percent share.

Now in its sixth year, SES Toronto is considered the definitive digital event for marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketers (SEMs), including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. The event is organized and programmed in cooperation with the SES Advisory Board, Search Engine Watch and Andrew Goodman, the founder and president of Toronto-based Page Zero Media.
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