Context of Practise: Bradford Animation Festival 2012

After visiting BAF 2012 you get a very good insight into how important and also how influential the animation industry at the current time due to recent advancements in technology. There were a lot of interesting talks this year that the public are very fortunate to get to hear but the best one to listen to, which was definitely the most exciting and engaging, was Ben Hall's talk who is the Senior Modeler and Lead World Designer at Criterion Games. Criterion Games are a well known company known for producing AAA titles and more recently the Need for Speed franchise. The company is very interesting to research and they are most popular for creating their car and racing games in which a few to name would be Burnout Revenge, Burnout Paradise, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. 
 

The reason behind the interest into this particular talk was not down to the fact that they produced car games, as this is not an area that was particularly interesting, but it was down to Ben Hall's talk himself. It was the most exciting talk by far due to the interesting insight he gave into how he came about creating the environment for the new Need for Speed: Most Wanted game, an area which is extremely interesting.

One of the most exciting areas of this talk was when he went through each of the stages taken into being able to create the environment for the game, and this could have inspired anyone into thinking about how they would create their own environment and put what he explained into practice. The different stages were extremely interesting to think about; from the drawing stages where you think of the initial ideas and start sketching everything out as this was the stage where all the concept art is drawn out and ideas are allowed to be freely expressed; even if they don't ever get used. This stage is able to give a clear representation of what the aim of the final product is meant to look like and is the most exciting part as all the ideas that are floating around get to be sketched out. The next stages include narrowing down the initial ideas and then developing the best one into a final idea. 

The last stage is probably the most exciting due to the fact that the final idea gets modeled in a 3D software and the design is then brought to life using the program. This is probably the part that excites most people as it is the stage where the 3D software comes into play and can be used to render out full cities or perfect natural environments, or anything that is in your mind at the time, and thanks to the talk at BAF the love for this subject and environmental design comes flooding back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z90m9yKaT1M