A couple of nice things have come up lately that I’m quite proud to be able to mention. I was at the Museum of Contemporary Art on the weekend checking out part of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. Browsing in the museum shop afterwards, I came across a book with a familiar sounding title – Design and the Elastic Mind, published by MoMA (that’s right, the Museum of Modern Art in New York). I knew Elephants Dream had been featured in the web component of this exhibition a little while back, but had no idea there was a book. So, I took a look inside and there it was, published art, with our names in the index too!

Another nice piece of news came in from Exopolis yesterday, mentioning that Lighthouse had appeared in Shoot magazine’s Summer 2008 top 10 visual effects and animation chart, coming in at 2nd place! Because of this, there’s also an article on the project too. Not only is this very flattering to see in itself, but especially looking at some of the other names below us, such as The Mill, Framestore, Digital Domain and Psyop, all huge studios with great reputations, it’s very satisfying to see that our little team is in such esteemed company.

Last week, Lighthouse was released online, a short film project that our studio had been working on for the last couple of months. The full details about the project, with the movie itself viewable online, high res stills, and production breakdown video are available in the post we made at CGTalk, so please do go and check it out there. The response so far has been great, we got featured on the front page of said website, and have had several thousand views with very encouraging comments.

Although it was a bit tricky for me, being the bottleneck responsible for the texturing, shading, lighting, comping, with a couple of weeks of late nights towards the end of the project, it was quite enjoyable overall. Exopolis, our clients in LA, were fun guys to work with and gave us a lot of room to work without being micromanaged. It’s interesting that Liberty Mutual (the insurance firm who commissioned the work, in the form of the ‘responsibility project‘) are now spending their marketing dollars on producing themed art, rather than usual commercials. It’s certainly the kind of work I’d love to be doing more of.