Innovation with crowd-funding: 3D Movies

When:

6 February 2013

18:00 Hour - 21:00 Hour

Event organizer: Business Administration

Description

Lecture by Jeroen Bakker. He is a member of KIVI NIRIA and an entrepreneur. He innovates with his company in the special effects market and is doing good business there. He will talk about his findings and challenges in this market.
He was recently asked by a customer to develop a technique where special effects can be added to a film, but afterwards. The product that came out of this request was named Blender. In short, this product does to videos what 'Photoshop' does to photos.

Financing was a challenge, but a modern solution was the answer. Using the magic word Crowd funding, this project went off the rails and successfully. Jeroen is happy to share his success story on this form of funding this evening.

Two weeks back, a new film, 'Tears of steel', went into production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6MlUcmOul8. This film was used to develop an open source special effects pipeline.
The framework for this special effects pipeline (called Tiles compositor) was developed by At Mind. A small innovative company based in Amsterdam. The objective was to be able to give quick feedback to the filmmaker on what the result of a change is and to make optimal use of modern hardware architectures. New technologies were used here that use the GPU to perform calculations in addition to multi-core CPUs. This involved collaborations with Intel, AMD/ATI and NVidia.

GPUs are now much more powerful and cheaper than CPUs, which could make this a very interesting topic for the ICT Department. I think it would be very interesting if we make a full-length activity explaining the project from start to finish. We can do this without disclosures.

The framework is integrated into the Open source project Blender, which is used worldwide for creating 3d content

Screening of the film 'Tears of steel' (15 minutes)

Introduction: Tears of steel; 100% crowdfunded open VFX movie (10 minutes)

Crowdfunding practical example - funding project
Crowdsourcing is a magic word. It is widely used these days
but what do you need to make it successful. (30 min)

Applied techniques
Explaining the pipeline used with new techniques for tracking, rendering, compositing & colouring. (25 min)

The solution - the final product - demo
Demonstration of the VFX pipeline where we show in detail how a piece of the film was made. (30 min)