Randy Rockafellow

This is the first event I’ve been to where we had live gunfire go off. No worries it was under strict supervision of a professional.  With over 150 people showing up things got started around 7pm  with Event Producer David Schied welcoming everyone and giving everyone an idea of what we were in for. Next we got an overview of  safety procedures for the use of live gunfire during a film shoot by Live simulation / pyrotechnics expert Fritz Gronow. This was followed by a live demonstration of a film shoot using various types of guns loaded with blanks.

The audience members were all prepared for the noise by securing clamping our hands over their ears. The actors and film crew all hand appropriate ear protection. So that woke the crowd up.

Next David Dewitt took the stage. As a motion graphics and visual effects artist he provided a visual effects breakdown of several shots he completed for an independent sci-fi film that grew out of the episodic InZero productions. Everyone got a kick out of his firecracker variation of one of the films final scenes.

I gave a short presentation after David and mostly talked about SEMAFX the local ACM SIGGRAPH chapter in Southeast Michigan and provide a few links to visual effects sites. They were:

A site with amazing tutorials and training for creating visual effects using after effects
http://www.videocopilot.net

A Michigan company that does visual effects
http://www.withatwiststudios.com

Michael Orlando,A Visual effects artist located in Michigan
http://www.matchmoves.net

Davo Photographic, a company that provides camera visual effects such as the Matrix for reasonable prices.
http://www.midwestmatrix.com

A place to get High detail 3D vehicle models of a 2008 Dodge Viper, Chrysler Sebring, and  Jeep Wrangler. That could be used for visual effects shots.
http://thecgizone.com

Producer/DP/Visual EFX artist/editor Jeremy Salo came on stage next and presented visual effects that he added to the footage that we saw recorded live an hour earlier. (The prerecorded a version a week earlier that Jeremy added effects to)

Here is the video that was produced.

Mike Mehall representing Schoolcrafts Computer Graphics technology department, http://sc-learning.net/cgt/ , gave some final thoughts and wished everyone a safe journey home.

Note: I’ll try and add some photos and additional links and mention some of the people I ran into while at the event to this post a little later.

Despite the big chill in the weather. Everyone seemed to make it to the basement of the Bastone Restaurant(or Commune as they call it) in Royal oak. Several people brought laptops and portable DVD players to show off their animations, Zbrush modeling, and image renderings.
Dan Kessler, www.kessler3D.com, showed off a 7 minute Character animation piece for his corporate client. It really was a full blown mini CG cartoon.
Blair Adams and Clarence Rice were their with the laptops out. No doubt Clarence was showing off his wicked modeling and texture work he has done for Armstrong-White.

Here are some others that I met while I was there.
Richard Miga, Synergistic solutions ,
Kirk Talon of  Flying Mustang Design,
Jon Synnestvedt 3d animator ,
Henry Dryovage http://dryovage.com/ (thanks for bringing the cookies),
Lauri Smith Westman of Buffalo Brothers Studios East,
Chris Grocock www.cgmotiondesign.com,
William Aksel www.williamakselart.com/
Anthony Williams (Who is working on producing an CG feature, Seeking qualified studios who can do the work, and additional investors) ,
Denis Lack (Glad to have you back in Michigan ),
and some students from IADT www.iadtdetroit.com

At around 8pm some of the group headed over to Mr’B’s to check out the Twitter Meeting happening at the same time. Check out my prior post about that. Thanks to Rocky www.breezestudio.com for the headsup on the twitter meetup.

I had never used Twitter before but I was invited to a TweetUp (Twitter meetup) in Royal oak Michigan.  I was already scheduled to be in Royal for another networking event for animators and digital media creatives setup by the  Southeast Michigan ACM SIGGRAPH chapter (SEMAFX). An event I was coordinating and decided to shorten the event and bring the group to check out the Tweetup.

Low and behold we walk into Mr B’s and the Tweetup had 94 some people there. It even got the attention of Channel 7 news.