It has been said by family, friends and colleagues that I do in fact use the A-word (awesome) a lot! Unbeknownst to me at the time, my family ran a sweepstake to see who could correctly guess the amount of times I uttered the A-word last Christmas. As soon as I realised what was going on, I felt even more obliged to use the word more than I usually would.
But at its core is one very simple fact.. I love awesome. Awesome enthuses me. It always has, whether it’s smack bang in your face VFX, or VFX so subtle & nuanced, you wouldn’t really know until you saw the VFX breakdown. The path to these amazing visuals is as lengthy as it it circuitous. Dozens, in fact many dozens of artists can touch a shot before it’s finally given the hallowed status of FINAL. Factor that into the number of shots in something as huge as Guardians Of The Galaxy or Avengers: Age Of Ultron and we’re talking about hundreds of VFX artists working away to bring us (the movie lovers of the world), the next wave of cinematic eye candy. And of course, very early on in that process you’ll find us. Scanning away. Day, nite and yes… even surrounded by wolves!
Our sole purpose is to laser scan any environment, vehicle, set or location in order to provide production with a digital asset of that acquisition. But having worked for so long within the VFX pipeline myself, I know just how that data is going to be used (and quite possibly, by whom). This has a huge impact on the way we scan, because (believe it or not), every vendor has a “lidar sweetspot”. Larger vendors (for example, the big 4) can chew away at pretty large data sets. But smaller boutique operations may prefer “smaller portions”. We work very closely with all VFX vendors to ensure that they get data that is tailor made for their unique pipeline and help get their modellers and matchmovers off the starting line in record time.
Fully understanding VFX, as well as how quickly disciplines can evolve and change helps Motion Associates deliver exactly what you require. We fully understand Matchmove, Mocap, Hero Modelling, Proxy Geo, Pre-viz, Set Extensions and FX Sims, because we have worked in those fields personally. And it’s this insight into your workflow and unique pipeline that ensures that we keep things very simple.
Sadly, we have one area to which I will openly admit that we are far from awesome. And that area is web design. With all our energies focused on scanning and processing, i neither have the time or the know how to really make an impact online.
But that’s all set to change (yay!). We have been working very closely with our friends at yomp marketing to launch our new web site this year. As well as our online presence, we will also be (for the first time) hitting the trades with a nice bold full page ad (pictured above) that hopefully gets our message across.
The web site design is very exciting, and Yomp have come to the table with some great ideas that are very much in line with my own sensibilities. I cant wait to unleash it all onto the www.
With 2016 proven to be a fantastic year for Motion Associates and 2017 looking set to be fantastic, I look forward to giving past, present and future clients (as well as the public) more insight into the lengths we go to to “keep it simple” in order to assure lots of awesome!
C
