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Finding that perfect laser gun zap, or exploding head splat can often be a painful and frustrating task. Whether having to trawl the net for fuzzy substandard wav sound files that just don’t do the trick, or trying to capture the sound of that melon hitting the floor yourself (although very entertaining, harder than you’d think to get it right), I found there to be a lack of decent content out there.
However on one such search the other day for some beautifully nasty 80’s retro sounds I stumbled upon www.soundsnap.com. A free site full of professional quality SFX and music loops, where the content is generated by the users. Originally started by a small group of sound people from around the world it has grown into a much larger community and has become a platform for sound designers, sound artists, web game developers, filmmakers, music producers, hobbyists and home video makers [take a breath] to upload and share original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD's – legally.
Needless to say I found that nasty 80’s zing I was after and went happily on my way.
Along similar lines and also definitely worth a look is, the stock photo exchange, www.sxc.hu. Very much a favorite of mine, it is full of fantastic user generated stock photographs and vector artwork that you can download for free for use in your projects. It is also affiliated with www.stockexpert.com which sells its content, and displays examples from here too when you search. So if you can’t find the perfect shot on sxc, there is a good chance there will be something on stockexpert worth paying that little extra bit for.
Stephen Tew, Video Editor and Camera Assistant, Notion Studio
Blender is a 100% free 3d package available on all platforms, and it appears to be no slouch in terms of features;
- Modeling
- Rigging
- Rendering
- Animation
- UV Unwrapping
- Shading
- Physics & Particles
- Imaging & Compositing
- Realtime 3D / Game Creation
It seems a pretty comprehensive package making great visual effects and high end 3D accessible to everyone.
Download from the website http://www.blender.org which is also full of tutorials, video tutorials and manuals.
For any After Effects visual effects fans out there, Video Copilot is a great resource, boasting over 16 hours of easy to follow tutorials, downloadable presets and free software. The host Andrew Kramer is easy to listen to and has a vast knowledge of After Effects, sharing some really innovative approaches to video effects and motion graphics production, with quality results across the board.
Visit the website here: http://www.videocopilot.net
Drawn! is a collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw. Visit us daily for a dose of links and creative inspiration.
Featuring a healthy mix of the vintage and the brand new, Drawn! is a great blog for illustrators, designers, animators and anyone else who likes looking at nice work. I particularly liked the hand rendered ink and paint letterforms of San Fransisco artist Tauba Auerbach.
Visit the site at: http://drawn.ca
I recently attended Skillset's focus group on the new Diploma in Creative and Media on behalf of Animation Forum West Midlands.
Besides the sudden revelation that 'Creative' is now a noun, the day answered many questions regarding the new work-related qualification for 14-19 year olds, and raised a whole lot more. Desperately keeping jargon to a minimum, my notes from the meeting went a bit like this:
There will be two 'gateways' or stages, with which the diploma’s will be launched (within the West Midlands at least); some local authorities will launch the diploma in 2008, others in 2009.
The Diploma is then based on the concept of 'work related learning,' which differs from what is known as 'vocational learning' ( which I understood to mean 'on-the-job training'), essentially through it’s focus on delivering school-based lessons which are relative to what actually happens in the working world.
Part of the demand for this new qualification apparently stems from complaints by some employers that they, "spend the first year of a graduates' employment teaching them basic working practise."
The Diploma in Creative and Media requires the pupil to carry out 10 days work experience over the course of the qualification (which may be several years). This raised a few questions:
If the vast majority of the UK media industry is based in London, how can a student in Cumbria gain appropriate work experience?
Given that the Creative and Media industry are predominantly composed of small to medium sized enterprises – who often to not have the time/resources to take work experience staff on – how is the sector going to be big enough to support several thousand extra work experience kids a year?
The answer offered was that work experience could be combined with long-term research tasks surrounding a creative project, possibly within a non-creative business. For example, re-designing a manufacturers' website, or building window displays in retail. The 10 days experience could then be spread over a long period of time as the pupil is given a sense of the start, middle and end of a creative project.
Although several in the room seemed enthusiastic that this would be a practical solution, I wasn't so convinced of how a supermarket, for example, could integrate work experience schoolchildren into promotional processes which are usually outsourced to external creative companies. As such, schools and consortia (groups of interlinked schools) will most likely have to gain assurances from employers that schoolchildren will not simply be used to stack shelves or cheap labour.
There are a ton of issues surrounding the issue, and as it gets closer to September's launch of the Diploma, some issues will no doubt crop in the national press.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the new Diploma in Creative and Media already? Are there any dangers or conflicts of interest in what was happily described by one employer in the workgroup as; "bringing education and industry closer together"? Ironically, could a greater focus on ingraining professional work-skills at an early age actually marginalise or suppress the more creative elements?
As a freelancer could you have benefitted from such a qualification? Or if you’re an employer, have you been on the look-out for schools to partner with?
David Allen
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