king talk

The OFFF 2010 review for those of you who missed out on this years events that took place at the digital creation conference at ‘La Grande Halle de la Villette’ in Paris between the 24th – 26th June. Both myself and the Envis team were in attendance and here are a selection of the key highlighted speakers from the event.

—– Craig Ward —–

Processing particles motion test from Craig Ward on Vimeo.

Craig Ward is a British born typographer / designer currently living and working in New York City, USA.

—– Julien Vallée —–

OFFF Paris 2010 Sponsors titles from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Julien Vallée is a Canadian born creative currently residing in Montreal, Canada.

—– Dvein —–

Dvein @ OFFF 2010 from Ruben Gonçalves on Vimeo.

Dvein are a group of Motion / Animation geniuses based in Barcelona, Spain.

—– NON-FORMAT —–

Non-Format from Etapes on Vimeo.

Non-Format are design house based in London, recognised since they formed in 2000 by their directors Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British).

—– SOSOlimited —–

We’re Sorry from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

SOSOlimited are a collective of talented audio visual designers focusing mainly on interactive installations and fun weird stuff. Currently based in Cambridge, MA, USA.

—– The Mill —–

The Mill are a large scale visual FX team coming out of London, New York and Los Angeles. They were responsible for closing the festival this year and they did so with a nice group presentation focusing primarily on their post production work they did for Nike on ‘Write the Future’. An advertisement spot that notably took the Internet by storm at the beginning of the this years World Cup.

Nike Write The Future from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

They went on discussing the ‘making of’ and did a nice job of showing alot of the thought and design process. Storyboards, to the use of the massive tool used for realising large scale crowd environments alongside the VFX they covered throughout such an enormous project. They called it the biggest VFX advertisement ever made. Funny enough i believe them.

OFFF Paris 2010 Titles from OFFF on Vimeo.

To end our review; above we showcase the OFFF titles designed and produced by ‘The Mill’ for this years festival.

We just added a new project to our portfolio! »Q & Awesome« is an installation and web application for large conferences that makes Q&A sessions much faster and more effective. Read all about it on the official portfolio page.

Markus and me are currently in Paris for the DD4D conference! To give you a glimpse into the conference, we will be live-tweeting throughout the event. So follow us on Twitter and watch out for the tag #dd4d! The conference blog can be visited to check what´s going on there…

Something about four weeks agou envis jumped on the bandwagon of rumours about a new iPhone that will be released in the next months. Tonight Apple announced at their WWDC´09 event some new products like the new OS »Snow Leopard« which will hit the market in autumn one month before Windows 7. It will available later this year as a $29 upgrade to current Mac users. Apple also announced that the next version of the iPhone OS software (version 3.0) would be available in less than two weeks. In addition, Apple unveiled refreshed versions of its notebooks, which are headed to store shelves starting today.

But the most interesting part was the release of the new iPhone 3G S (S stands for SPEED). Let´s compare the rumours to the real product:

- 32GB and 16GB to replace current capacities & $199 and $299 price-points to be maintained within a 2-year contract
Right. The 16GB model will be $199 with a new contract and the 32GB model will be $299 with a new contract. They will be available June 19th 2009.

- 3.2 Megapixel camera
Not exactly. But it will have 3.0 Megapixel.

- Video recording & editing capabilities
Right, new iPhone will have a camcorder mode. You can shoot VGA-quality video in 30 frames per second.

- Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
New iPhone is featuring SMS and MMS.

- Apple logo on the back to light up
- Rubber-tread backing
- Sleeker design
- Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
Design didn´t change. In my opinion the chrome surrounding could disappear.

- OLED screen (AMOLED)
I think it´s not the time for OLED devices, but in within 9 years we will see them everywhere.

- 1.5X The battery life
Right. They improved battery life. Apple promises that the iPhone 3GS can hold up to 9 hours in WiFi, 10 hours on video playback, 30 hours on audio playback, 12 hours talk time on 2G networks and 5 hours talk time on 3G networks.

- Double the RAM and processing power
Right. Apple boasts that you can load web pages and launch apps twice as fast when compared to the previous model. It also promises improved 3D graphics for games.

- Built-in FM transmitter
Still no radio, but who needs it, if you can have Wifi access to last.fm & myspace.com ; )

- Built-in compass & turn by turn directions
Right. It automatically reorients the map to the direction you’re facing. It works in conjunction with Maps to give you street view as well.

- Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass and Google maps to identify photo and inform about photo locations.

- July 17th, 2009 release date
A little bit earlier. The end of June 2009 will be release date. Maybe the shortened it because of the Palm Pre which came out this month.

Some features were not discussed, but they´re hot. For example the return of voice control for cellular phones:

- Voice control interface,…
but not just for calls. Not only can you manage phone calls with your voice, you can use your voice to play music. You can ask the phone what song is playing, ask it to play a particular song from an artist or an album, and even to play songs that are similar to the currently playing track.

- Bluetooth tethering…
is allowed, which means you can use the iPhone 3GS as a wireless modem with your laptop.

- Voiceover,…
an accessibility setting on the new iPhone 3GS that acts as a gesture-based screen reader.

- Compatibility with Nike+ iPod,…
where it detects the Nike+ sensor in your shoe to track your runs.

Many of the improvements were exactly what were rumored to be unveiled today. The one big exception was that CEO Steve Jobs did not come back from medical leave early to make the announcement.

via C.NET News & CBC.CA & washingtonpost.com

»Where did the inspiration for that video come from?… We thought it would be cool to blow shit up in slomo.« That´s the lifestyle of Gmunk (aka Bradley Munkowitz) from the famous animation studio Buck at Los Angeles, where a fellow student (Roman Königshofer) did his internship. He was definitely one of the dazzling and most controversial personalities at TOCA ME 09. Gmunk presented his »hot shit« right out of his windows explorer system and the index of contents was displayed with a crappy .txt file, but this is the way his living and working. Fast, crazy, unpredictable, fancy and vulgar. »Fucking hell yeah!«, he would have said.

We had a word count running for »fuck« and he really managed it to say »fuck« over 10 times in one minute. »This fucking shit is sooo awesome!«  ; ) Anyway… GMUNK is a potty guy, but showed great work and his talk was really fun to listen and watch. If you´re interested in his work, just check the 2009 showreel…