SOA Academy Day 4 Diary Part 2

We've seen SOA Academy Day 4 Diary Part 1 and today We're keep continuing with The Second Part SOA Academy Day 4 Diary. Unifor...

We've seen SOA Academy Day 4 Diary Part 1 and today We're keep continuing with The Second Part SOA Academy Day 4 Diary.

Uniform

Celebrating their 15th yrs anniversary, Uniform is a creative agency founded by Nick Howe, Pete Thomas and Nick Bentley two weeks after graduating from a Product Design degree at LJMU in the summer of 1998. Since then it has grown from a three-man team to a 30 strong creative agency. The agency was named MiNetwork Design Agency of the Year in 2011 and 2012. Over a 15-year period the agency has won over 30 awards for design and business.
In SOA Academy Day#4, Nick Bentley, Mark Lee & Steven Thierney tell us about their works and walk us through their process, analyzing some of the works they did whether on a pioneering architecture project like Manhattan Loft Gardens or for one of the world’s leading brands, (Confidential stuff). You will only find out once you attend SOA Academy Day#5 next year. Nick talked about their passion for finding new ways of communicating with different audiences & the importance of communicating own process (philosophy film).


Being brand strategists with entrepreneurial thinking & attitude, they know a great brand story can become the foundation of a company’s success. They have identified four core strands that every business should focus on to ensure their story is heard and their message is understood. They have created a brand behaviour model that helps attract and retain the right customers for their clients. The model has a number of key principles that create a structure to develop effective and compelling communication and drive consumer engagement and loyalty. This in turn creates a relationship built on trust, and facilitates more opportunity to obtain vital customer information, willingly. They find an opportunity in each project to make something amazing which also result in increasing footfalls, generating sales & raising profits, therefore happy clients which will return and recommend.

The key principles of this model are as follows:
1 . Relevance – are you attracting the right people and in a relevant way?
2 . Conversation – is it good enough to share?
3 . Authentic – is the campaign creating an experience that is true to your brand?
4 . Ownership – is there an opportunity to become part of the brand’s future?

Their wide range of projects varies from Architectural Visualization to Comprehensive Product Branding, however their focus in SOA Academy Day#4 is more of Architectural Visualization. To be a “Different Thinker” we urge you to go to their website and study their works. They talk about their approach to some of the projects & explain further in detail showing the story boards and mood references they collect.
Their approach to Architectural visualization is of Photo Realistic and they incorporate Graphic Editing & Typography to create a memorable product which stands out amonst many others.



then Mark & Steven share some tips with the audience explaining their workflow and a list of the scripts & plugins they use on a daily basis. Obviously Mark was on commision by PRManager.

* RPManager
* Deadline
* Xmesh
* VMC – Vray Material Control
* Cleaner
* Copy / Paste
* Relink Bitmaps
* Wire Colour Tools
* Collapse Script
* Rendermask


Mark also talks about some creative projects he is doing, a 10 second sting for the 2013 E4 Estings competition. All modelling, lighting, texturing and animation was done in 3ds Max, compositing in Fusion, audio and edit in Premiere. He rendered out at 12fps for the ‘claymation’ look with some traditional squash and stretch style animation on the individual objects. In order to get the dough look he has used finger print bump maps on the 3d mesh.

See a Quick breakdown:

To let his creative juices flow, he creates a set of images called “Play-Doh Architecture” celebrating a selection of iconic buildings he has worked on over the past few years.
He plans to do more with this project so make sure to check out his website.

The second day showcasing some of their unpublished projects in details Steven explains briefly how to do some major post production in photoshop.
1 . General Grounding
2 . Mass Reflection by clone source
3 . Mass Relight
After a charming and inspiring presentation, they announce that Uniform is hiring. So if you think you could be an asset to an amazing forward thinking team, drop them a line plus your portfolio. We thank Nick, Mark and Steven for their generous, inspirational & educational presentation.

Ars Thanea

Peter Jaworowksi and Marcin Molski, are some of the founders of Ars Thanea, a wellknown Creative Agency located in Warsaw/Poland.
To break the ice, Peter starts with their story: They were 3 friends with no academical background in CG, a geologist, a plumber and Peter, whom their talent and passion, led to create “Ars Thanea”, which means the Art of Imagination.
Located in Warsaw/Poland they have gathered a very talented team of directors, creatives, designers, accountants, illustrators, programmers and developers who works with a high profile list of clients such as Disney, Discovery channel, General Electric, HBO, Mercedes Benz, Nike, Ubisoft, etc.
We thank Peter and Marcin, for their amazing stories and being such an inspiration to many.
They talk about their exciting projects by going through details and showing the break down of the work.
Usually the projects they do is in Rectangular format so that marketing departments of their clienst can use the art work in both portrait or landscape format for printing the size of the images is usually around 15k to 20k pixel.

Creative studio Ars Thanea and photographer Michael Warren worked with TBWA\DAN\Shanghai to launch the latest ad campaign for General Electric China. Ars Thanea employed the iconic visual texture of Chinese porcelain in a series of visuals that tell the story of how GE technology (GEnx, Vscan, GE Gas Turbine) transforms the lives of Chinese people. The team mixed traditional and digital art, as well as CGI, to produce the textures across a series of visuals. Everything is prepared as layers and smoothly post produced for the desirable effect, which is porcelain blue. Four ads ran from late 2012 through Spring 2013 in Chinese airports and in print media.

GE - Today's Future Project on Behance

Then they talk about another exciting project they did as Sao Paulo football club ad campaign, Soccer is arguably the biggest sport in the world and team loyalties run thicker than blood, a concept that comes into play in São-Paulo Football Club’s latest ads. Ars Thanea was approached by Young & Rubicam Sao Paulo to produce two key visuals for their “Before Anything Else, São-Paulino” campaign. In case you’re not familiar, são-paulino is the term used for fans of the team and for them, soccer is life. The concept for the ads was to show a são-paulino tearing away his skin to reveal a São-Paulo Football Club jersey.
To achieve the unusual effect of very realistic skin tearing away they combined photography, creative retouch and CGI techniques. As we heard, Marcin is an avid football fan, so we maybe know where did the original idea came from, the model is not Marcin and they said they weren’t present at photoshoot.

While everyone was watching their amazing achievements with awe, suddenly there came a slide showing some moment of Roberto’s dog which we dont know how to explain! And, you will only find out once you attend SOA Academy Day#5 next year.

Once they got everyone’s attention back, they shared another project they did for Rushplay AB / Casino Saga which took them over 3 months time from concept to the completion and resulted in producing the most complex mini world to date - 40 themes, 40 villian’s, 10 avatars, webdesign & logo. We suggest them to update the details of this project on their website.

US based agency Nomadic needed a hand in creating complex and rich in detail image that would capture the essence of Disney brand for the purpose of Disney Vacation Club Sweepstakes online boardgame
experience. Boradgame was meant to cover five islands where you could find many Disney Vacations Club attractions.
The team produced a visual of very high complexity and quality that fits in perfectly into the Disney world. Starting of with a stellar research on Disney Vacation Club attractions that were meant to be a part of the image and following by many hours of concept work gave them a base for 3D work that later on was combined with stock photography and digital painting.

Discovery Networks CEEMEA approached Ars Thanea to create a campaign to promote spring programming in one of their top portfolio brands - Discovery Channel. In the tv show rooster the highlight
was put on ‘Dynamo The Magician’, ‘Bearing Sea Gold Rush’ and new season of ‘Storm Chasers’. They came up with an idea for a campaign that was based on a very powerful and dynamic visual that
merged all three tv shows together to create a Discovery Channel world. They shoot a grey ball to facilitate compositing artist with ligting reference. These show the 3D lighting artist where you put your lights and will help him to match the 3D lighting to the studio lights.

Too much information
Therefore we decided to add a part 3 to the review and Bertrand’s presentation will be covered in the third part, so we know you will come back. The third part will cover the amazing features of Itoo software, long awaited Bertrand’s presentation, and hopefully of peter Guthries presentation. Stay tuned.

Related and Credited:

http://uniform.net
http://www.stateofartacademy.com
http://www.arsthanea.com
http://www.markandrewlee.co.uk