Bradford Day One

So we rolled up in the coach on Monday after all day on the road and then we just chilled in the hotel. But today, Tuesday morning, we went straight to the Bradford Media Museum to where the festival was being held. we had tickets to a bunch of lectures and the first day is all about Gaming, Games design and other similar things. The after we acquired our passes we got to play around on all sorts of old consoles ranging from the NES (Nintendo entertainment System) to the Comodore.
Soon we were off to talk number one, all about The Image_Metrics Faceware software. It plugs straight into most big animation software and so you don't have to learn new software. What it does is take normal video footage and without any markers (as you would need with motion capture) and uses it as reference for your model to base its movement on. From there its takes a bit of work, but it is much quicker than the alternative manual work.
This software was used in all sorts of hits like Crysis 2 and Red dead redemption. Its free to download though if you want to convert video footage into the format faceware can use then you need to play.
That was my favourite talk as it was very animation based. the others of the day were interesting, but not all that relevent to animation. There was one on game story-lines, one on Independent design companies,one on a software called unity, one speaking all about creating Kinectimals and Disneyland Adventure Kinect(which was cool) and the final one on learning in gaming. We also watched an experimental film called Vlogger which was interesting but not all that good, and it broke down before the end so it never finished.
I may update this post at a later date, using my notes, when I`m not using someone else's laptop in the early hours of the morning before another day of festival fun.