Hey everyone,
This blog was long overdue for an update, feels like last blog post was from a different era entirely. I blow the dust on these old manuscript to tell you about five things:

I'm back to teaching!

I don't even know if I posted about the first time here, but I've taught a 8 weeks course to 15 students over zoom last year, and I'm doing it again via The workshop Academy on October 9, 2020.

This is a 8 week advanced environment design class with a focus on concepting environments within gameplay, technical, and story constraints. These constraints are often unique to each game, but there are a few common principles whether we make a single player top-down tactical RPG or a survival FPS MMO.  

Voyage LA interview.

A local magazine was interested in what I have to say about a few topics, here's an excerpt:

"The amazing new tools at artist’s disposal (2D,3D Animation, games) might look like they can change this top-down problem, with open-source lowering the barrier of entry, platforms to publish independent games, etc. All over the world, successful artists from fairly diverse backgrounds finally see their works picked up by a Kickstarter and elevated to a beautiful entertainment product. If this is happening, why are we not seeing more TV series and games that tell the emotional truth about climate change? Not the sugar-coated “we are all universally responsible, we are all in this together, we must do better, and in the end, technology will save us,” but the raw “This is the ugliest cover-up in history, the oil companies knew, and the innocents will suffer the most. Keep it in the ground, shut it all down and prepare equitably for the storm”. "

Like what you see? Wanna hear what I've been up to? Read more here.

Artists Vs Extinction.

During the height of the amazon fires a bunch of artists were talking, "What can we do, what can we do?". We thought it would be cool to have a place to hangout and craft ecological/ social movement art, then publish it out. The group now grew to about 500 members between AvE Discord and AvE FB. We use it to share knowledge, resources, talent with the aim to produce ecological political art. The participants are from all over the place, and we even have some scientists onboard. I've been delighted to see connections, networking, ideas shared on this group. Moving forward I'd love to figure out ways to partner up with orgs doing sci-com in the climate or ecological sphere, leveraging the combined resourced of AvE and learning trough a cooperative design challenge.

(Cover art by my friend Sean Bodley)

Editorial feature

I've been a big fan of Drilled (the podcast and news organization), and it's an honor to be featured as a cover for Dr Kate Marvel's excellent essay 
"I am a mad scientist".

When I set out to paint the resistance against fossil fuels, this is the type of things I had in mind as a low-hanging fruit. Creating little visual seeds of resilience and non-cooperation with Ecocide. No matter what happens, one more image exists that depicts the struggle of humans against inhuman fossil fuel corporations (they don't even care about their own workers).
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I have more to share but I'll keep it for the next blog post!

I get asked pretty much every day about what resources to use, which videos to learn from, etc, so I decided to compile a list of the stuff that really taught me a lot :

BOOKS:

The art and science of digital composting 2nd edition  (Ron Brinkman)

A huge, complex but complete volume on anything digital composting ; history of VFX, computer graphics math components, the nature of digital images, signal, all the way to production breakdowns of some of the most groundbreaking VFX shots of the last two decades.
I think I read it about 4 times, one of my friend borrowed it but I forgot who that was, so I'm probably going to order it again, just to have it in my library :D

Framed ink  ( Marcos Mateu Mestre)

Practical examples of framing, lighting and storytelling  (comic book oriented).
Cheap and good .

Framed perspective ( Marcos Mateu Mestre)

Great book on perspective drawing, I also recommend Framed perspective Vol. 2

Alla prima II  (Richard Schmidt)

A must have for every wannabe painter, you can easily apply that stuff to digital painting.

The Color Correction Handbook (Alexis Van Hurkman)

This book goes really in depth about color grading for cinematic images, but it drops some little gems of knowledge about human perception of colors, temperature and contrast along the way.

The VES Handbook (visual effects society)

If you thought the other books I mentioned are in depth, here comes the winner!
This books covers the entire  visual effects (VFX) production system down to the last polygon, it's organised by chapter, each one being a discipline / role in a VFX studio,
prepare for an avalanche of information!

COURSES:

Schoolism:


They just recently started a new subscription model, for a hundred bucks  you have access to all the courses (1$ to switch, hehe), it used to be like 500$ a course when I started out , so you guys are so spoiled ! Here are a  few that I recommend :

Lighting fundamentals (Sam Nielson)

This is the courses that transformed me into a lighting geeeeek, I just loved his scientific approach to a seemingly abstract topic, this is a really complete course.

Designing with color and light (Nathan Fowkes)

Listen to this guy's smooth voice as he explains lot of cool stuff about light and composition, great for beginners.

Painting with light and color (Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo)

I was quite surprised by this one, I was expecting to be a bit bored since I learned a lot about lighting already, but they have some interesting way of explaining things, and also the way they use digital life painting to explain is great.

EdX : (website)

EdX is a online learning platform hosting various MOOC (massive online open classroom).
I think platforms like these are the future of scalable, high quality education.
You can get free courses from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley.

FXPhD: (website)

Same kind of subscription  deal  as  schoolism, y'all lucky!
The website is focused on technical VFX and 3D animation training.

I recommend you start out with :
History of visual effects , I promise you'll have 10.000 more questions by the end of lecture, this is the perfect place to answer them :)
I recommend any courses by Matt Leonard or Mike Seymour, (especially on math stuff), if you want to go deep into software training, they got you covered!
Also they have theses great breakdown and blog post about news and technology advancement.

YOUTUBE / FREE VIDEOS:

Free doesent mean bad ! so here's a list of good ones:

Cinematography Database is a YouTube channel dedicated to explaining cinematography and cinematic lighting techniques trough 3D rendering and how it translates to a real world movie set. ( Thanks to Marek Tamowicz for the suggestion )


Illustration vs concept art (design cinema EP 53)

Visual library (design cinema EP 52)

CTRL PAINT this Matt Korh dude put so much work into making this library of free videos, high five!
It can cover you from total noob to beginner in digital painting.

FESTIVALS / WORKSHOPS

THU is a crazy awesome festival that happens in Portugal in September,  but it's also 50 hours of kickass content for about a hundred bucks. The conferences are really packed into content so it's definitely a good one if you're short on time! btw fuck you Andre <3

IW  is a ton of cool workshops happening  in London also in September, like THU,  it's getting better every year, like a bottle of wine.

IFCC Was very interesting too. It's happening in Zagreb, Croatia.


I will keep adding things as I probably forgot a lot of cool ones, but this is the list so far, I hope you are hungry for knowledge, because dinner is ready !