Ollie Tristram

Here are some of my favourites from the thefwa.com and a short description about what they're about.

1) http://scruffs-game.com/ (26th Feb 2008)

This is a highly-flash orientated point and click game about a family known as the Scruffs. The idea of the game is to find out what Grandpa's secret is by searching the family home. A download is required for the full game. The music in particular is one of the stand-out features of this website as it completely sets the mood for the kooky and cartoony atmosphere of the game. Each section of the website has its own music and interactive element - for example on the screenshots page hovering your mouse over a fly on the desk causes it to buzz, then you have the option to splat it!

2) http://imagemoversdigital.com/ (7th Feb 2008)

The website to film creative 3D studio Image Movers Digital - the masters behind films Polar Express, Monster House, Beowulf and the upcoming Christmas Carol, which uses performance capture technology starring Jim Carrey, due for release at Christmas 2009. This site is nice and simple and gives you what the average internet browser needs to know and nothing more. The page simply contains the links "About IMD", "Projects", "News", "Careers" and "Contact" so its the simplicity and cleanliness of this flash site which I like.

3) http://www.coca-cola.com/template1/index.jsp?locale=en_US&site=../happiness_factory/index.html (31st Jan 2008)

Home to the short movie behind the 3D animated Coke adverts which you have seen on TV or at the cinema. The Happiness Factory is where Coke is made, and when you put your monies in lots of wierd and wonderful creatures do whatever it takes to make sure you get the best Coke taste! The animation of this movie is brilliant and the style of it remind me a bit of the music video for 'Starlight' by The Superman Lovers a few years back. You then get the chance to apply to work for the factory and get to interact with the different types of workers to see what they do. Its quite amusing. Who knew burping was a good thing?

Hey everyone.

On Friday 22nd February I spent the day at a Multimedia company based on the outskirts of Nottingham (with St. Anns) to see what work they got up to and to gain an understanding of how a company of their size works.

After being in contact with them for a week or two before visiting, I was originally going to attend an on-location shoot for one of their client's DVDs. However due to the nature of the business, the client had some issues to sort out for themselves, so that day (Friday 15th February) did not go ahead.

So a week later, I was invited to spend a day with them. Now, to be honest, I was expecting a big flashy office block with D3 Design in big letters along the side and then to be greeted by a receptionist. Was I wrong! Instead, the company was run from an upstairs room of an ordinary house in which the Creative Director and his partner lived, with their son and two chocolate Labradors.

Adey and Jo were their names and after having spent the day with them they were nice people. Me and Adey in particular had a lot of similar interests, especially that we both dislike coding! It was weird because originally I asked whether to come dressed in a shirt and tie, but after being greeted by Jo in jeans and a t-shirt and then Adey in his dressing gown I can see why I didn't need to.

To cut to the chase, their work room was phenomenal! I walked into this average-sized room to see a desk near the back with two 30" Mac screens on it. I then saw hooked up to them was a graphics tablet, mixing desk, drum machine and full-size electronic drum-kit. Not to mention the machine that was powering everything. I asked him the specs of his Mac G5 and if I remember rightly it was a Quad 3.0GHz processor, 8GB RAM, 4 hard drives equalling 1.5TB and dual top of the range nVidia graphics cards. I might have got those figures mixed up a bit, but it cost £2500. I was quite shocked that a normal house could have such amazing equipment in it.

Anyway, throughout the day I was shown all the different software they used which was pretty much anything you can think of. As a company that produces video, animation, music, graphics, flash, websites, etc for clients - Adey was the one that did all of that, he was so multi-talented. As we went through all the programs I thought I'd take advantage of my time there and ask a few questions about how to do things that would help me on my course, such as music mixing techniques and flash advice.

At the end of the day I was welcomed back anytime and I will still be hopefully going on the next video shoot they have. I enjoyed myself and time went by fast which is a good sign of course. Now after having established myself with them I can hopefully pop round or contact them by e-mail if I have any queries about software, because they seemed willing to help me, and again, they were nice people.

Check out their website at http://www.d3-design.com

You can watch my weekend break holiday video which I have edited on my Facebook videos page. But if you don't give a shit about what I did then you don't have to (there are ghosts in it though so you should).

Also, I'm going to create my own music to go in my Identities project thing when it is done. But I don't want to give anything away, other than it's very 'personal' to me.

Until next time...

After today's seminar on learning how to create a BBC Three-esque blob character, this is what I ended up with. Now admittedly, I didnt create the spiralling horns/arms, Andy Love did, but that was because I'd dared be more adventurous from creating 8 teeth instead of 4 like the instruction sheet said.

Andy makes 3Ds Max look so easy. And then when I want to go and use it I think, "oh i'll just do this and then this will happen and its easy to mould shapes etc", but then when you come to do it there is always something which I don't know how to do which prevents me from getting further and therefore resulting in my getting annoyed with the nothingness I've created. Anyway, I made a figure out of using the Line tool and then extruding it. It means nothing really but it could make a cool logo... or not.



And then I began trying to model a person until I couldn't figure out how to make more polygons on a face so I couldn't make any facial shapes or anything so this is as far as I've got so far.