Ubisoft presentation at school

(This is an old post, just grabbed this from my virb)

Ben Mattes, Producer for Prince of Persia 3 and another upcoming exciting but secret Ubisoft title will be doing a presentation about the design process (Ubisoft Pipeline) for all projects along with answering questions about his projects, Ubisoft, their studio, the Too Much Imagination Game Design Challenge (recruitment campaign) and what Ubisoft looks for in a demo reel or portfolio.

well, i just copy and pasted that excerpt from my school mail, well as it says, ben mattes, he was here for a presentation, mostly about how ubisoft works, what is’ like to create a game at the ubisoft studio.

now, i have to say, i was not interested in games at all before the presentation, i only wanted to do films, movies and stuff, never really interested in games or cinematics, and by no means i don’t wanna work on films and movies or anything, but it just opened my eyes to antoher career path for me, and i learned so much more about the production pipeline of a game.

it was really fun, i mean Ben, he’s really a geek and a gamer, and i’ve always loved games, been playing games ever since i touched a computer. and it’s funny because i never really thought of games as something i would even remotely relate to with visual effects and stuff that i’m interested in, but during the presentation, Ben was telling us about the how games are created at the ubisoft studios, and the conception, pre-production and production phase of games and they use 3ds max, WOOOOHOOO!!!!!!!! anyway, back to topic, it was really cool, the team work, and the whole creative process was really cool, not that creative process for movies and such is not cool or anything, just it’s more interesting as i thought.

and at the end, he took a lot of questions about how to apply for ubisoft, and what is required for a demo reel. and he said there will be about 1300 jobs opening in the next 2 years, and they have a CG art department which does hi-res cinematics, trailers, promo video, demo videos, and they work just like a film post production department, they use maya as well in the CG department rather than 3ds max in the game production studio. and apparently Montreal is a really low cost city which i have to say is very cool cause right now i’m living in Vancouver and Vancouver is a really expensive city.

and ben was talking about jobs at ubisoft, he said they are interested in long term relationships, so most of the time they won’t do much contractial work like in the film industry, but long term full time employments, which is cool to me as well, but that kinda kills the chance of going to europe or asia or wherever to explore and stuff, which is cool. but i’m just saying, there’s another place i’m going to apply to after i graduate, just another option, it’s always good to have options and there’s a job in the game production pipeline as well, called Special Effects Specialist which after reading the discription of the job sounds like a perfect job for me, woohoo, and i can also try to apply for the CG art department, more option the better right? don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

it was really cool 3 hours, great presentation, learned a lot, and i got myself a T-shirt, a sticker, a strap and a ipod cover which is cool, free stuff is always cool oh and one more reason to go to ubisoft, they have jade raymonds she’s cute, yeah, you know you like her anyway it was really fun and interesting, better than i expected and learned a lot as well, and i’m really excited too.

have a good one, more to come later

November 13, 2007 | Categories: Blog | Tags: Blog | Leave A Comment »

First week at VFS

(This is an old post, just grabbed this from my virb)

just finished my last day of the first week of school at the vancouver film school. great facility, great teachers, and great classes. i love all the classes i’m taking, except for maybe sculpture, maybe i’ll like it later.

before i came to the school i heard it’s intense, and all the other people just tell me how intense the program, and although it’s onlbeen a week of class, and each day we have 2 classes, and each class is 3 hours long (yeah, tell me about it), and it’s really good, i mean 3 hours of class is good cause you really get i nto the class, and it’s really cool, the instructers are relaxed, the whole class is alway relaxed, most of the time, all the intstructors are from the industry amd they worked in a studio environment and they see the classroom as a studio type of environment, so they just want to make us feel relaxed so we can work better.

let’s talk about classes, the very first class i had was classical animation, when i saw the title “classical animation” i didn’t think i’d like it one bit, but, turns out, i did like it, we got those animation papers, with the hole and stuff, really professional stuff, and our first assignment is to animate a bouncing ball, and it was FUNNNNNNNNNNN. so i basically just draw the whole sequence of the boucing ball on 1 page, and then seperate the each of the balls onto a seperate piece of animation paper, and then at the end just scan the whole animation into the computer so i can see the finaly animation, and woohoo, it actually looks great, i’ll hopefully post it up here some time.

well i’m not gonna talk about all my classes, but i do wanna talk about my 3D classes, i have 3d modeling and 3d animation, bascially we modeling in Softimage XSI, and animate in maya, and it is our first class so we didn’t really do much, but we did animate a little pendulum swing motion with a little tail at the end, fun stuff, and i stayed late after school modeling a hourse (unicorn, our modeling instructor told us we are gonna have an assisgnment on modeling a unicorn, like our first assignment, but it won’t come till later, like 2 or 3 weeks in.) anyway, it was really fun, can’t wait to have more classes.

i love working on school’s computers, they are HP XW8000 workstations with 2 dual core xeons and nvidia quadro FX 1100 graphics card, and 2gig of ram. and i heard they are changing the hardware after the christmas break, so we’ll have new machines for term two to six.

anyway, it was a great first week, loads of fun and more fun to come, weeeeeeee, very excited

anyway, it was the great first week, having lots of fun, and i think it’s gonna be great. hopefully i’ll post more updates later.

November 13, 2007 | Categories: Blog | Tags: Blog | Leave A Comment »