Light Up Bristol from crustea on Vimeo.

Light Up Bristol happened once again in December. This time bigger, better (and more chaotic) that before. There’s a whole load of pics up on the Flickr group, although with this year being in motion images don’t do it justice.

We’ve got some more video in production (yep, I know it’s March, we’ve been busy!), but for a preview check out the AntiVJ reel, which contains a little of the event from 1:34. (Note: The installations presented at the beginning of the reel are other works by the AntiVJ label)

5 nights
17 artists
100+ meters wide worth of building
6 dam large digital projectors
20 other lighting projectors and lights
3 machines
Over 100k worth of lighting power
4 french men
5463 chestnuts
2 snow machines
many late nights…

Apologies also for anyone effected by the spam hacks that were affecting the SubSub Blog, I’ve finally upgraded so hopefully that’ll stop. Currently going through all the shite left on my site because of it… Damn those pesky kids.

With my time now fully dedicated to ‘creating’ rather than ‘recruiting’, the Skills part of SubSubSkills seems a little redundant. I was considering setting up a new URL, but decided that’s a little extreme, so for now I’ll continue posting general interesting goings on here.

Change always seems to happen in big clumps, with many seemingly unconnected people all caught up in one larger ’sea change’. One of these moments has been upon the creative industry over the last couple of months, with businesses being bought and sold, people jumping and joining new groups, and big decisions being made and released.

This moment of change hasn’t passed us by unaffected, as I have recently decided to take a full time role with a great company. This has come as a surprise, particularly to myself, the opportunity arising through a number of random conversations and coincidences. All in all a very exciting and challenging change is a foot.

This commitment will inevitably affect all the other roles I currently hold, and decisions are currently being made into the future of SubSub Skills, SubSub Production and Submerge. This blog will be updated as and when concrete decisions are made, but for now here’s the current thinking…

SubSub Production will no longer be able to take on full time contracts. Clients we’ve currently been working with are being introduced to other great producers in the area. Other members of the office, such as Play Nicely will be continuing work as normal. If you are worried for any reason about past, current or future projects please get in touch.

Even with my new role I have been lucky enough to be able to continue working on Light Up Bristol this year. So SubSub Production will continue it’s connection with that.

SubSub Skills has built up a great collection of freelancers, as well as a great collection of clients. For example, in the last few months we’ve provided the creative brains to help build islands (Enable and their Second Life WWF Island), set design and titles for the BBC’s Sports Round, and coders working with clients from Lufthansa to Jack Daniels.

It would be madness to lose this momentum so we’re thinking hard to find a solution. The current favorite involves giving SubSub Skills back to “the people”, and allowing the system to run independently from a commercial business model. The SubSub Skills’ site will become a place to promote these freelancers, with the group governing themselves. We’re currently working with a few of the original enthusiastic SubSub’ers to see whether this idea will hold up to the real world.

With Submerge comes my largest disappointment in this change. We were just starting to get everyone invigorated with new ideas. These ideas were falling into place alongside needs and skills within the region. Ideas ranging from musical performances to inspirational forums and the return of the Submerge Awards were all in the pipeline. But unfortunately most of this will have to go on hold for now.

We are all meeting later this month to discuss the best possible preservation of what Submerge has been doing, and hopefully finding new people to get involved. (We’re looking for young clever creative people with the want to promote themselves and their industry, know any?)

As mentioned above, development in any of these areas will be updated on this blog, so please keep in touch, and we’ll attempt to do the same.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone that’s been a part of Submerge and SubSub to date. It’s times like this you get a change to reflect on where things started, and where they’ve got to; which is pretty damn far. This journey wouldn’t have got very far without a help and support of the passionate people around us. Let’s hope between us and them we can continue to support and nurture the talented people working across the South West and the UK.

Ok, kind of old news now, with the Flex beta being out for a year, and CS3 fully integrated into most people’s workflows… but ActionScript 3 has still to be taken up by the majority of the programmers around me (apart from the recent graduates who are already on the ball, damn those pesky kids).

So, I’m about to take the plunge and try and get some AS3 knowledge inside my head and I thought to share some resources found so far. Please feel free to tell me more, and I’ll add them here.

First up for a great set of easy to munch updates check out Senocular’s thread on the Kirupa message board: The ActionScript Tip’s of the Day. These easy to swallow lumps of info come complete with questions and answers from interested parties, and therefore deliver so much more than just the facts. This thread also proves how behind the times I am, dating back to July ‘06.

Next up, Grant Skinner’s blog (maker of the marvelous Flash UML Helper), and an article on how the Garbage Collector needs to be handled in AS3.

This guy’s been creating a number of video tutorials, which although I haven’t really got into could be useful for the people starting out in the world of ActionScript.

And finally, GotoAndPlay has a great article which helps give grounding to the new structure in place with AV2 Engine.

A tiny street art project.

Assassin’s Creed has already been feverishly discussed since early demos, particularly at last years E3 event. And more recently have started showing working demos of the game… which as you’ll see are pretty unbelievable.

Now I’ll have to buy a PS3. Anyhow, check out the official site for the flashy trailer, or check out the demo below.

Alexander McQueen - continuing his blurring between technology and fashion - recently used a Musion Eyeliner System to materialise a life sized hologram of Kate Moss in the center of the show.

The system, as used by Gorillaz in their stage ‘appearances’, simulates the 3d by using a projector, a mirror and a form of semi transparent foil that sits at 45% degrees to the viewers. It’s a modern version of an old technique known as “Peppers Ghost” used in stage shows.

The output looks beautiful, particularly when crafted by Alexander (and containing Kate). Have a look for yourself:

Last night I headed over to Bluescreen @ the Cube Cinema, mainly to see the latest piece of work by Chuen Hung Tsang and Chris Hawkes. Chuen’s work so far has been beautiful, so this latest project, a personal project funded and supported by Black Dog Films held a lot of potential.

The work didn’t fail to deliver. Their work does so well because even in such a small team (of 2), they have a plethora of skills, from technical to storytelling. The visual styling is rich, with bleak apocalyptic settings with classic anime’esqe over exposed sky, the edits and cuts were strong and the story held you throughout. Well done boys.

Nothings online yet to view, so you’ll have to bide your time with their last endeavor, a music video for Leave Land For Water.

Also to note from the evening: Some fun and well put together stop frame animation from a recent UWE grad (who’s name I missed, but hopefully will get to add here soon) and the intimate-INTIMATE documentation, a piece commissioned by Black Out Arts for the tollgate house projections by Minton Film

Another long break between posts, sorry. It’s always frustrating, because these long breaks normally mean we’ve been involved in even more stuff to blog about. The vicious circle continues until eventually we’ll be drowned in our own adventures. With that in mind we better get on with it…

Been in London over the last few days at the Free Range graduate shows. We went down to see the Bournemouth New Media course, but also had a good look at the other goings on.

The Bournemouth show (i Heart Play) did live up to it’s title, many of the pieces including gaming to some degree. The pieces ranged from mediocre to damn interesting. They included sonic controlled interfaces, interactive films, alternative reality games, API mash ups, and some good old html and flash interfaces. The show was well coordinated, and felt coherent.

Although no animators/designers stood out, a number of people seemed to know their coding, so I hope to get them working with us at SubSub.

The Brighton Graphics and Illustration courses were also on show. Their work was exceptional in places, with some very powerful graphical pieces. As always it was highly ‘fine art’ influenced, with a conceptual feel throughout, therefore difficult to comprehend employing outside of illustration work.

Epson had a huge show on, with almost 120 students on show, split between new media and graphics. The interactive work was limited, with only a couple of pieces to note, and even these were reasonably unoriginal (although, the guy who had created one of them was particular nice, so good luck to him). There was someone playing with the Wii Remote API, but that wasn’t working when I was about.

The rest of the ‘new media’ course had some great design though, with one guy in particular shining out as skilled with a massive body of work. The rest was mainly motion based, of pretty good quality.

All in all a good show, but I’m disappointed with the lack of digital/interactive courses this year. Perhaps we should move next years exhibition to Free Range and put on the digital stuff?