REVERIE by Vincent Laforet

A friend tipped me on this bit of info earlier today and I was blown away. Please do yourself a favor and go watch this video. It’s all raw footage without ZERO post production. The video quality is jaw dropping and it was shot with a prototype Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR. The fact that the video was shot with a camera and not a camcorder makes it that much more unbelievable. Unfortunately due to legal issues, I cannot post any stills so just trust me and click the link. Oh yeah and make sure to check out his blog for some behind the scenes.

Watch: REVERIE

Some Randomness

Random #1: My top 3 link addictions of the week month.

1. Chase Jarvis
2. Buysnow.com
3. Tokidoki

Random #2: Why would anyone ever shoot interlaced footage? My very wonderful, super slick, super cool Canon HF100 can shoot 24p, 30p and 60i but I find absolutely no reason to shoot in 60i. If I need to catch something moving quickly, I’ll just increase shutter and shoot progressive. I did a comparison on my computer and the 60 fields does not make any difference. In fact, all it does is create an extra step for me during post because I have to deinterlace. When will 60p be out???

Random #3: Speaking of shooting footage…the Phantom v12 shoots at 1000fps. That’s like watching a 5 minute video of a person yawning. That puts the RED camera, aka my dream camera, to shame.

Random #4: I’ve been playing around with a new version of my Burton snowboarding piece (see the ‘work in progress’ below). Winter can’t come soon enough.  

Screenshot: 

Pictoplasma 2008 Conference

This past weekend, myself along with a couple other designers from Last Exit, attended Pictoplasma 2008 which was being held for the first time in New York City. It is a 3-day festival celebrating character design and animation and attracts some pretty big names in the animation world.

Speakers included:
• Sam Lanyon Jones – Tokyo Plastic
• Philip Hunt – Studio AKA
• Sam Borkson & Arturo Sandoval – Friends With You
• Gangpol & Mit
• Akinori Oishi
• Aaron Stewart
• Motomichi Nakamura
• Tim Biskup
• David Oreilly
• Fons Schiedon

My favorite presentation was Sam’s of Tokyo Plastic. Not only is he brilliant at what he does, he is also a very humble, funny, eloquent speaker. I especially loved the story when he spoke of his time over in Thailand. Him and his partner would party until 6am, go to sleep, wake up in the afternoon, work until night, start rendering files and then go out and do it all over again. Now that’s a rockstar designer’s life if I ever knew one! The conference was small and intimate which was perfect for Q&A. I got the chance to ask Sam if he was ever going to do another project using Flash after the successful Drum Machine he did years ago in Flash 6. That was really the first project that catapulted Tokyo Plastic to fame and I found it interesting that they haven’t done many more projects with flash. He said he would love to go back to flash animation and hopefully he will in the near future.

Studio AKA was also magnificent. Their new short film ‘Varmints’ is visually breath taking. I firmly believe that they could be close to ‘Pixar’ level if they solely concentrated on film production.

David Oreilly’s presentation was also very entertaining. Everyone should check out OCTOCAT. I’m sure you can find out about the back story if you do a quick search. Absolutely hilarious.

Each speaker was brilliant in their own right and this weekend was just the sort of inspirational boost I needed. I came home flooded with ideas in mind and techniques I wanted to try but most importantly, it gave me the urge to start drawing again. Yes, drawing – the thing you do with pencil and paper. I just want to ride this wave of inspiration/creativity for as long as I can.

Xhilarate – Creative Bookmarks

Thanks to the Xhilarate team for featuring my website.

Canon HF100…finally!

I recently purchased a new Canon HF100 and can now cross off at least one item from my “toys to buy” list. I did some tests over the weekend to try and learn more about the different settings. I used my willing girlfriend as my test subject. 🙂 From first tests I’ve learned that: a) picture quality is pretty darn amazing b) manual settings are a little clumsy and c) AVCHD files are hard to work with and eat up A LOT of space after converting. Regardless, I LOVE the camcorder and will have a lot of fun playing around with it.

Below are some screen grabs from the shots I took over the weekend. You can view the full video here:

http://vimeo.com/1640367