A future form of entertainment

Have you ever watched a movie and wanted to be there with them or even be the main character? Huge domestic screens and surround sound suggest people really want to be inside the movie. What about those who want to make decisions which affect the course of the story? The eternal "What if?" question.

I believe a new entertainment form rose from that question, mainly as its answer. It's not a totally new thing but it is being perfected to a point it's worth discussing. It is a mix between movies and videogames. I am not talking about those damn movie adaptations to games or games adapted to movies. Just forget those for a while.

This new form of entertainment is what can allow you to have a movie storyline being told while giving you just enough freedom to feel like you're playing a game. There are a few examples of movie-like scripts that spawned games instead of movies keeping the storyline, like "James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing" or "John Woo's Stranglehold".

It's not going to threaten movies or games, it's just a "new" form of entertainment that has possibilities. In my opinion the best "cinematic game"so far is "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater". Great storiy, great characters, great acting and great soundtrack. It's like playing a really good movie. In fact it's done in such a cinematic way that in the special edition of the game there's a whole disk with all the cutscenes and other parts captured in video so the player can watch it as if it were a movie.

Pacman stuff

I am not the biggest Pacman fan but lately I have come across a vast amount of pacman stuff. Today I bring you the best so far!

Cheese Pacman


Guitar Pacman


What the skeleton of Pacman would look like.


Awesome Christmas tree.

And now imagine if they had used the original name. Thank the testers for noticing the obvious pun. "Puck Man" with those letters and the long nose...the future of videogames would have been ruined right from the start.

Overload

VFX course started yesterday and the teacher is a really amazing guy. I have had an interest in Visual Effects for a while, have watched lots of extras in DVDs and done a few tutorials to try to understand how they really do the awesome looking imagery but nothing prepared me for the sheer amount of information I got yesterday. I feel like I don't know a thing about this.

Everything is even more complex than I thought. I heard names of programs I never knew existed. I heard of techniques that are the basic element of VFX and I didn't know that they were even necessary. I am out of my element but I believe if I keep paying atention and taking notes I'll eventually get into it. Today was way more comfortable.

Now the hard part about all this is making my mind up about my current situation. I came here with the main purpose of learning how to make good 3D models for videogames but now I had the chance of being in this course I have to start investing in both areas in terms of time, attention and work. I have do develop impressive material for both areas, two showreels. Two careers until I get a job. This is tough for a perfeccionist. Time does not stretch.

This blog's subtitle may end up being wrong. I warned you.

Chapter 1 ends

Six weeks, four pens, one and a half notebook later...

Maya Core ended yesterday and that watch I posted was my final project. It took two weeks with classes everyday, so in the end I didn't have half a day to spend in it, and I tried to rest in the weekend because I knew the week would be hard. I am not completely satisfied with it but there were a few unexpected things that took a lot of time to solve.

This was insane. When I first heard of the course and saw a few student's final projects I honestly thought it was impossible to go through so much in six weeks. It is possible, believe me, but you will have to sweat and drink a lot of coffee. I have never been taught so much in such a short period of time. If you value that and really push yourself then it's worth it.

And now...a bit of rest, two weeks of dirty clothes waiting to be washed and almost no food so I'll have to go out and get some. Chapter 2 starts on Monday.

Watch

Final project of Maya Core. Modeled in Maya and textured in Photoshop.

Ninjabear

Those who know me know I have a lot of people I look up to. One of these guys is Tiago Sousa, aka Ninjabear. In a country with only a few people making games and even fewer in big companies outside Portugal this guy was handpicked by a team that was being formed in Germany! They wanted the best of each craft and they saw a demo he developed, Illuminatu. Impressed, they contacted him and he went to Crytek.

Sometime later in 2004 Farcry was released, one of the games with the best timing to reach the market I can recall. It came out right before those year's heavyweight FPSs, Half-Life 2 and Doom and was the first "next-gen" FPS at the time.

Now Crysis is out and it's probably the best looking game out there at the moment. It looks so good the four main guys who did the effects were nominated for this year's VES awards. Guess who was on that list? You're right.

Well the results came out yesterday and Halo 3 (not Crysis) won.

For me Tiago was the great winner of the night. It's rare for a portuguese guy to be working in games and I can't recall the last time one of "us" was nominated for an award in this field. He is setting an awesome example for all of us and he's proof people whould be doing what they like to do in order to achieve better results.

1up

Isn't this a nifty surprise.

I came to London to get a course about 3D for Games that was separated in two parts, the basic learning of Maya (and it goes far beyond the basics in my opinion) and the long awaited Games part. Well, the Games part was postponed for May 12. I don't usually think this but portuguese curse words swarmed to my brain after about thirty seconds of vacuum.

12 weeks of nothing in between courses, 12 expensive weeks if I stay here and a lot of time to wait. 12 weeks in Portugal would make me lose the rythm I have now and I don't want that. They were very correct and talked individually to every student that had paid for the course and they volunteered do refund them for the cost of the course they weren't having, plus £500. I really wanted to take the course so I told them they didn't have to give the money back if I was just going to take the course the next time they would teach it.

I went and talked to the course managers to see if I could get a place in a studio or something, whick is something which I usually don't do but this time I felt like it was worth taking the chance. Seems like I hit the jackpot. I was offered a respectable discount wich allows me to be in the VFX course as well. This changed my life from now on.

Now I have to study and work for two distinct areas but without a doubt I'll have a bigger preparation. It's all happening so fast.

The world's coolest wrapper

Sorry about all the posts with pictures but I just had to show you this. I went out to top up my Oyster card with a weekly bus pass but when I saw this I had to get it too.

Gaze of the awesomeness of this Snickers bar.

Fanboy

Mornings

Hello and welcome to my new morning routine in a few photos. These are some of the things I have been seeing everyday for the last month.

This is what you see when you're on the top floor of those big red buses.

This is BBC Victoria Road.

Normal-looking London street.

This is amazing and I don't know if it's an advert or just rare good-taste vandalism! Anyway I had to take a few pictures of this.

This is Shepherd's Bush Green and a big bus stopping us from seeing it properly.

...how could I forget?