The Blog of Glen Moyes

This gives me an excuse to try out uploading videos to the blog. Here's the ads in their squint-o-vision glory (links to HD video and soundtrack downloads are in the previous post ). Edit: I started using Vimeo, so now you can click on the links below the ad to watch it streamed in HD from their web site. Enjoy! >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

Here are the links to the Computer Medical Center Ad we just finished. CMC Ad 1 : 720p, MP4/H264/AAC, 23.8 MB CMC Ad 2 : 720p, MP4/H264/AAC, 24.3 MB Music Track : MP3, 192kbit Music Track : OGG, 192kbit All content is copyrighted by Computer Medical Center. Credits Studio: Lumaglyph Creative Director and Designer: Glen Moyes Storyboard Artist: Shaun Williams Animation: Adam Weber, Glen Moyes Photography: Meggan Hayes Music: Glen Moyes (composition and engineering), Aaron Pike (composition), Shane Hunt (guitar) Design Process The goal for the TV spot was to create an ad on a tight budget that didn't look local. The ad is going to be shown in movie theaters locally and on cable TV, so we wanted to create an ad that is entertaining, communicates what Computer Medical Center does and sets it apart from the competition. The game piece concept worked very well to achieve this, and all within budget. For the second half of the ad, we decided to use photography in motion as opposed to vide...

It's 1:57 a.m. and I just finished making some last minute changes to the Computer Medical Center ad. The last frame has been rendered; it is finished. The ad is awesome. The visuals are awesome. Even the original soundtrack is awesome. I'll do a postmortem on the project as well as post links to the ad because it's awesome. But for now I can sleep and life can return to normal—wait, I have to move day after tomorrow. Crap.

I just checked one of my junk mail accounts, and received a pleasant announcement from Wacom. They just released something called the Cintiq 12WX . It's a smaller, and much cheaper model of in the Cintiq family. Now, it's been my illustrator fantasy to own a Cintiq, or at least be able to play with one. Fortunately at Siggraph 2007 I got that opportunity. The Cintiq 21UX I played around with was a US$2499 piece of equipment. That's a lot of value for the bastard child of an LCD screen and a tablet to live up to. After I used it for about an hour, it almost lived up to my expectations. Yes, drawing with it is much easier, is way more natural, and the pen tilt is easier to visualize (which is really handy because I use a lot of calligraphy brushes). However, I'm not used to having my arm cover the image I'm working on. This makes right-clicking unusual at first because the menu appears directly underneath your hand. Also, when I'm using something that resembles pe...

Wow. The Peach Project has done some amazing work adding features to Blender in just about every area: Python constraints, mesh deform modifiers, and fur simulation. This morning before I went to the gym, Adam (our lead Blender guy) showed me an SVN build he compiled that had the new hair/fur rendering and grooming features in Blender. The grooming features were pretty cool, but I was most impressed over sheer speed that the hair strands were rendered. Later this morning I checked the Peach blog and they showed their work-in-progress of the new hair simulation for their characters. I was floored. This is Pixar quality stuff! This image is a screenshot from a test video (OGG Theora) they put together showing the character in motion with the fur simulation. The Peach team reported that Blender can now "render 2 million hairs in HD resolution in about one minute." Gamera, the chinchilla character shown in the image, has 1.5 million hairs. I can't wait to get my hands on t...

This came out on November 29, and it's one of the best lectures on game design I've listened to. It's called "Design Reboot" and it was given by Jonathan Blow at the Montreal International Game Summit 2007. If you go to the page on his blog about the lecture , there's a link to the Zip file that contains the MP3 and the PowerPoint presentation. He talks about what games really are, what they can teach you, why game designers lack discernment, and architecting vs. exploring in game design. I highly recommend this talk because it's a surprisingly truthful analysis of game design. Jonathan said everything that I've been wanting to tell the industry over the past 6 months, was in a position to do so, and told me some things that I didn't know. I'll do a summary of his talk and interject a few things of my own towards the end of this very long post, but first I should start this out with some of research I've been gathering on the subject prior ...

Speaking of video games, This is proof that I need more free time. This is entirely due to a television ad that I'm working on. The visuals should be done tomorrow and I'll get the audio done a couple of days after that. It's been neat taking part in the entire process of creating an ad, and being able to see a design project of this magnitude from beginning to end. I've had a lot of help from the rest of us in our little 5-man studio: critiquing, concept art, and animation (lots of animation). I'll likely post the ad up here when it's done. I wish that's all I had to do before Christmas, but I have to move and job hunt too. Oh well. Until then, I miss you Team Fortress 2. Here's the link to my Steam profile so you can see what dirty rotten games I've been playing and for how long. There's also a picture of a scary possessed evil satanic squirrel there too (the spawn of a graphic designer when he did have too much time on his hands). So that...

Update: Here's a great article on 1UP called " GameSpot's Sad State of Affairs " that covers the history and the repercussions of the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, former Editorial Director of GameSpot. The gaming community has assumed for a while that big video game publishers pay game journalists for positive coverage, hyped articles, and skewed reviews. Of course, we've had no proof of this kind of activity--up until November 28, which has now been called Gerstmanngate. Since then there's been a huge uproar in the gaming community, a flood of conspiracy theories and gamers have even been organizing GameSpot and Eidos boycotts. It wasn't until today that GameSpot finally released their official explanation about the firing of Jeff Gerstmann after an unfavorable review of a game that GameSpot received large sums of money to advertise. When I say "advertised," I mean that the entire site was skinned so that it was a giant site-wide ad, paid for by Ei...