Interactive Designer
The Basement Design + Motion
Indianapolis, IN USA

We are actively seeking a motivated, organized and detailed interactive designer to join our talented team. The right candidate has a passion for design, gaming, animation and innovation. They have a desire to learn, share & grow.

Must haves:

• Excellent communication skills with clients and internal project team
• Proficiencies with a pencil, PhotoShop & Illustrator
• 2+ years working within the interactive creative process
• Eye for composition, typography & interface design
• Proven agency experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design or related field

• Illustration, 3ds Max or Maya experience a major plus
• Experience designing online display advertising a plus
• Experience designing style boards for motion
• Experience designing for mobile & tablets

What you’ll be doing:

• Working with award-winning illustrators, designers, animators & developers
• Collaborating with agencies on world-class projects
• Working with international brands

How to apply:

• Please send URLs of your work examples / portfolio site to jobs@thebasement.tv

The Basement Design + Motion is a growing digital design and animation studio located in Historic Fort Ben, in Indianapolis. Please refer to www.thebasement.tv to learn more.
EOE

Lately at The Basement, we've been awarded some very interesting projects. One I'm quite excited about is a learning platform we are developing for the AMA called the AMA Flight School. The AMA is the Academy of Model Aeronautics and has been around since 1936. The learning platform will be used to educate their audience on varying aspects of flight. Here is a first look at title screen design for the module - Principles of Flight.

Grab four friends, a mountain of coffee beans and as many computers you can put on a farm.

It's time for the MG Collective's first annual 49 Hour Film Competition. The 49 Hour Film Competition is an animation ONLY event based on the 48 Hour Film Project with an extra hour for rendering. The competition begins April 1^st at 6pm. Registration ends March 30^th. Teams are limited to five (5) members. Two categories include Student and Professional. Students can enter in the professional category, however a professional can not participate in the student category. The competition will be judged by national artists and animators from Sony Animation, Fusion Digital Productions & Industrial Light & Magic. Films will be evaluated on these categories: Storytelling / Art Direction / Animation / Execution

Friendly recommendations:
Teams “should” consist of a designer, storyboard / concept artist, generalist and two (2) animators. Teams can use pre-modeled and rigged characters as long as they have rights to those assets. Start securing your location and production pipeline prior to April 1^st.

Registration:
Registration forms can be downloaded HERE.

This PDF is form based. Once you fill in your team's information, save it as TEAM_NAME_49Hour_registration.pdf and email it 49hour@mgcollective.com

After the competition and judging we will have a screening event and announce winners at The Elbow Room in downtown Indianapolis. The screening event date and time are TBD.

for more information contact:
Brian Phillips brian at mgcollective dot com
or Andy Beane at jabeane at bsu dot edu

Lately, I've been spending my evenings working on a music video for a nation recording artist with my friend Derrick Dawson. We're developing around 30 seconds of anime inspired flashbacks within the live-action video. Cuong Tran has been helping with matte painting. Here's one of the finished shots. We're planning to present a breakdown at MG Collective.

We've been working on a large animation gig at the studio. Here are some of my stills. Pretty rad setup in AE ...maybe I'll do a breakdown at MG Collective if anyone's interested.

Lately, we've been working on a shot for an upcoming agency presentation. We developed this Toad character (Jacob calls him "Boss Frog") as a concept. Joseph, Dan, Amy and I did a quick brainstorming session to get the general direction.



Once we agreed on a general direction, Joseph developed the pose drawings and began the modeling process. We are in the process of integrating 3ds max 2010 into our pipeline and wanted to tryout the new Graphite Tools. We're very pleased with the the improved edge loop tools, especially the Flow Connect. Although I've found 2009 to be a more stable release. Once we had the base model, Joseph used Mudbox to sculpt details and paint the texture which he then refined in PhotoShop.





The biggest challenge was the rigging and skinning process since the character doesn't have any define features such as a neck. So getting a balanced weight blend on his envelopes was a great exercise. I used a rigging technique that starts with a character studio biped, snapshots it to a mesh and refines the rest of the rig using standard IK solvers and constraints. Here is the first walk cycle:



In addition, we're working MatchMoving into this concept. Here's the raw plate we are using.



I'll post the final shot once it's complete.

Last night I started playing around in max and wanted to work on my character modeling techniques. Anymore, I do not get to work on the "craft" as much as the "hurry up and pitch". So I started with this technique of laying out my edge loops with a plane and building out the face from it. it worked really well!! Here's progress on a model. It feels good to be inspired, although its frustrating to be rusty. This is starting to look like a guy I use to work with named Dave.

Here are the 2010 nominations for the Best Animated Short. I'll keep my vote to myself.

French Roast:
Fabrice O. Joubert, director (Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films)


Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty:
Nicky Phelan, director, and Darragh O’Connell, producer (Brown Bag Films)


Logorama:
Nicolas Schmerkin, producer (Autour de Minuit)


A Matter of Loaf and Death:
Nick Park, director (Aardman Animations Ltd.)


The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte):
Javier Recio Gracia, director (Kandor Graphics and Green Moon)
http://212.227.136.88/press/

Recently, I received an invitation to design the album art for the Virgin Millionaires' new CD. We ended up going with a DigiPack layout which is more friendly to design. Here is the outside cover (front, back and inner art). I don't typically do print, but I must say, there is something about holding my work in my hand. The CD is now in stores at Best Buy and FYE.

Here is an inspiring short film from JP Frenay.


This is from the Vimeo page:
Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

Selected at the ONEDOTZERO festival in the WOW+FLUTTER 09 category onedotzero.com/programme.php?id=373&event=31216

Selected for the Autodesk 2009 Siggraph Show Reel
youtube.com/watch?v=Gj5tLOMxLOU&feature=player_embedded :


Production : Condor
Director / editor / compositing : Jean-Paul Frenay
Main 3D artist / compositing : Sandro Paoli
3D artists : Sylvain Jorget and Sébastien Desmet
Additional 3D operators : Otto Heinen and Okke Voerman
Sound Design : Seal Phüric feat. Neptunian8

Here's the offical event trailer:

After months of preparation, I can finally announce the event and provide solid details!!! PSST!3 is a series of 17 collaborative short films in which a different group of artists work on the beginning, middle and end. It's an animated version of an Exquisite Corpse. The screening is on Friday, September 11th at Big Car Gallery on Virginia Avenue and costs $5. The film will screen twice; once at 8PM and again at 9:30PM. This film has been screened in many cities including New York, LA, London, Tokyo and Amsterdam. This will be the first screening in the Midwest. Please come out and enjoy this surreal animated experience with me.

I will be presenting tomorrow night (Thursday, June 25th) at the Indianapolis Flash Users Group meeting. I'll discussing a recent design project I did for Mr. Clean Carwash. Here's some text from the event description (in this case "He" is "Me"):

"He will discuss the idea, inspiration, sketch, process and final design comp. He will share some of his techniques in PhotoShop and 3ds Max. Afterwords, we will open the floor for questions about tools, concepts, and anything else design related."

The meeting will be at Nothing But Noodles (near IUPUI) with drinks afterwards at McNivens.