Quantcast
Channel: AAUGA in KC » computer graphics
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Kansas City Digital Heroes event

0
0

We had a great turn out at our event last night.  Special thanks goes our or local sponsors, Boomer Labs and Uncut Sports.  Keep an eye on the blog for special upcoming posts about these two great sponsors.

Our event was hosted at HNTB’s downtown Kansas City office.  The evening started with some food and fun with a backdrop of digital art playing on the main screen.  The local 501st Legion deployed a few folks to make sure things didn’t get too out of hand.  We had a mix of people show up.  Including our two Digital Heroes, we had professionals from the architectural field, civil engineering, film/video artists, traditional animators, illustrators, to freelancers, students, and hobbyists.

Our Executive President, Larry Kleinkemper, was briefly detained by the Trooper, but after ‘explaining’ he didn’t have the droids the Trooper was looking for, he was let go.  
First up was local President, Chip Weatherman starting the event and welcoming everyone.  After some brief announcements, including a future logo competition for the KC chapter, he past the festivities over to our Executive President, Larry.  He started off with some giveaways, then went on to thank some of our national sponsors, AMD, Render Stream, and Autodesk.

 

 

With the giveaways given out and the sponsors thanked, Larry started with our first Digital Hero, Stephen Goldblatt from Bazillion Pictures.  Stephen and Larry talked in-depth about everything from when Stephen started out as a traditional matte painter on various motion pictures, to the Walmart years, to his company’s current work with Quixotic.  Bazillion’s collaboration with Quixotic led to being invited to do a TED talk, which was a very artfully done multi-media piece using live dance, video, Unity game engine, and controlled with a Kinect.  We’ll definitely keep an eye out when that talk is available on the internet.

 

After a brief intermission, he moved on to interview our second Digital Hero of the night.  Jim Lammers from Trinity Animation has been a fixture in the KC CG community for years.  In fact, the original user group Jim started, KCAGA, is where Stephen, Jim, and Larry had all met many years back.  Jim and Larry discussed everything from Jim’s introduction to 3d, to transitioning different software, authoring support books, Trinity’s role as a reseller, to their current breadth of work.  Trinity’s animation group is responsible for creating many types of art for a varying array of clients.  They do everything from architectural renderings, motion graphics, to creating the background sets for the FX shows Archer and Unsupervised.

Needless to say, the Kansas City area has an incredible amount of talent and coupled with the midwest atmosphere, there’s no wonder people gravitate to artists in this market.  Trinity and Bazillion are living proof that it doesn’t matter where your studio is located.  You can still create incredible work with the demands this industry expects.  Check out our gallery to see other photos from the night’s festivities.

20120403-105552
20120403-105633
20120403-105649
20120403-110221
AAUGA Executive President 'arrested'.
20120403-110250
20120403-110257
20120403-110310
20120403-110347
DigiHeroesEvent_edit

 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images