You may think you’ve done this enough times to know what you know and how best to interview for your dream job.  Sure, practice is everything.  But sometimes you get so comfortable in our habits of how you dress or show up for a meeting, or how you prepare by maybe even carrying a lucky talisman around, that you might appear a bit “auto-tron” in your delivery.  It’s not that you are getting set in your ways, but changing it up is never a bad thing especially when you are out to impress.

 

THE VOTES ARE IN!

BY A THREE-TO-ONE MARGIN YOUR FAVORITE SERIES IS...

Before he croaked, I wrote a play for the great Polish animator/artist/grump Jan Lenica.

Circa. 2000.

Ionesco thinks it’s genius. Lenica said he didn’t understand.

Ottawa. It is a Sunday afternoon in late July. It is unusually hot. We are in a bar. Many unusual characters are sitting outside at the cobblestone patio. They sit in dirty white plastic chairs drinking out of dirty white plastic glasses on dirty white plastic tables. The sound of birds are heard in a tree near the patio. Ah the birds...the birds....the birds. An elderly man passes. He stops to give change to a cheerful, smooth dancing panhandler before passing under the tree, entering the patio and sitting at a table down stage centre. He is a distinguished, but sad looking man in his 70s.  At the same time a young middle age man arrives and sits at the same table. M is unshaven, with thick unkept brown hair, wrinkled clothes, spectacles. He is pale and tired. The older man, J,  carries with him a solid patch of grey hair, a black suit, red tie....not literally of course. They are meeting.

J: You’re late
M: You just arrived.
J: I am old. I told you many times.
M: So leave earlier.
J: You don’t like old people do you?
M: Why do you say that?
J: I’ve told you about my poor health many times.
M: No you haven’t. Once maybe.
J: Nevertheless.
M: Most of you become lazy and silly.
J: Stupid youth.
M: You should know.
J: I see you’ve had another late night.
M: You’re right. I was busy working on this bloody article.
J: Why do it? You haven’t even seen half the work.
M: Everyone told me you’re a master.
J: You listen to them?
M: Have you read my work?
J: No.

By John Gaudiosi

Chair Entertainment -- based in Salt Lake City, Utah -- has catapulted to the top of the mobile game development business thanks to the success of its Infinity Blade franchise. In a little more than a year’s time, they’ve spawned a full sequel, a new iPad prequel (Infinity Blade: Dungeons), a digital book from bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, a hit soundtrack and a stand-up arcade game (Infinity Blade FX). The mobile franchise has also generated more than $30 million for Chair and its parent company, Epic Games. Donald Mustard, creative director and co-founder of Chair Entertainment, talks about the multiscreen future of gaming and how mobile, PC and console experiences will interconnect in this exclusive interview.

Last time I sat and shared my thoughts, I was enroute back from a delightful trip to India.  This journey is a rather shorter one (thankfully); I’m heading to London from Viborg in Denmark, via Holland.  I’m returning from two days spent teaching a program at The Animation Workshop on producing independent animated feature films and the particular challenges of doing so in Europe. 

 

The Animation Workshop is an animation school housed in former military barracks in Viborg, Denmark. It forms a part of VIA University College. Since the late 1980s, The Animation Workshop has educated and trained animators for the Danish, as well as the international animation, computer game and visual effects industry. Teachers, as well as students, come from both Denmark and the rest of the world - as a result, all classes are conducted in English. The Animation Workshop attracts teachers from all over the world, including professional animation artists from well-known studios such as Pixar and DreamWorks.

In honor of this blog's writer graduating with a Master's degree this week, Off-Model is celebrating with a smörgåsbord of apocalyptic and futuristic scenarios. A veritable buffet of delicious dystopias await, with a unsurprising amount of CG life, some fresh ideas folded into well-trodden tropes,  and solid advice about what to do with those extra human skulls you've got lying around the post-nuclear wastes. It's the end of the world as we know it, and you may not feel so fine. 

Week of 5/11/12- ROSA (Jesús Orellana), The Gift (Carl E. Rinsch), RUIN (Wes Ball), GAMMA (Factory Fifteen), Ducked and Covered: A Survival Guide to the Post Apocalypse (Nathaniel Lindsay)

When you are in doubt, despair, or you just plain can’t do it anymore like the song says, “There will be an answer, Let it be.”  Sometimes you just don’t know where the answer will come from but chances are, when you are at your most concerned, the answer will appear if you just “let it be.”

I have been fortunate to shape academic programs dedicated to exploration of imagination and ideas, these igniting powerful, meaningful and often deep personal stories expressing the inner soul, or inspiring unique original concept designs that probe not just what is but what could be. In all such I strive to shape a system that will challenge the students to take risks, to probe, to test, to experiment, to find themselves, to discover what make them unique, who they truly are deep inside, not on the outside. I challenge them to expose themselves, not physically but spiritually. I call upon them to “take the condom off their head”, have an unsafe idea, for life is too short and precious for following in someone else’s steps, make your own path through an untapped space.

Perhaps your cozy Friday night, hard won after the long week, was feeling too safe. Perhaps you'll need something to shake you out of a well-deserved haze and back into work. This week's picks are guaranteed to to make you think, make you cringe, or, at the very least, make you re-vise your weekend plan of attack. No matter what, if you want to put a little edge back into the mix, these'll do you just fine.  

Week of 5/4/12- TOPO GLASSATO AL CIOCCOLATO (Donato Sansone), Vésuves (Kevin Manach), Cecelia & Her Selfhood (Adrien Merigeau), Bare Bones Volume 4 (Julia Pott), [BRDG007] PLMS_IV_D (SyncBody) (Daihei Shibata)

 

By John Moore

Puzzle-based games and adventure titles that feature puzzles have been a staple of gaming for years. A newer entrant to the puzzle segment is Crytek, best known for first-person shooters such as Far Cry and Crysis. The company recently branched out into mobile games with Fibble, a physics-based puzzle game that focuses on the travails of a crash-landed extraterrestrial.

Fibble, available on the iPhone, iPod and iPad, marks Crytek’s first mobile offering as well as its first puzzler. We recently talked to Kristoffer Waardahl, studio manager of Crytek Budapest, about the company’s new development direction.