Amazon Buys MGM for $8.45 Billion
variety.com/2021/biz/news/amazon-buys-mgm-studio-behind-james-bond-for-8-45-billion-1234980526/
For Amazon, snapping up MGM — which has more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows in its catalog — is a way to supercharge its Prime Video service with a slew of well-known entertainment titles.
In addition, Amazon is anticipating being able to mine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer properties like the Pink Panther, Rocky and, the 007 franchises for new originals.
Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive – book by Veteran animation director and author David B. Levy
www.awn.com/animationworld/your-career-animation-how-survive-and-thrive-now-available
“The new edition of his book is filled with insight and advice from over 150 animation industry professionals, a wide-ranging tome of suggestions, reality checks, and inspiration on how to set your sights and blaze your own career trail. He shares practical tips on building a reel, portfolio, and resume; pitching and selling shows; and taking to heart and learning from on-the-job criticism.”
“Everyone seems to agree, and I certainly do, and it’s my POV in the book, that self-development is everything. You shouldn’t wait for anyone to make you anything, to give you opportunities you haven’t earned yet.”
Amazon Nimble Studio – cloud based virtual production studios
Using Amazon Nimble Studio, customers can create a new content production studio in just a few hours. Artists then have immediate access to high-performance workstations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4dn instances with NVIDIA GPUs, shared file storage from Amazon FSx, and low-latency streaming via the AWS global network. Content production studios can onboard remote teams from around the world and provide them access to just the right amount of high-performance infrastructure for only as long as needed – all without having to procure, set up, and manage local workstations, file systems, and low-latency networking.
https://aws.amazon.com/nimble-studio/
Official Pytorch implementation of Detailed Expression Capture and Animation
DECA reconstructs a 3D head model with detailed facial geometry from a single input image. The resulting 3D head model can be easily animated.
The code is based on Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images
Learn Django 3 and Start Creating Websites With Python
Learn how to do back end web development using the popular Python Django framework. You’ll build data visualization web apps using Pandas dataframes, Matplotlib, and Seaborn. You’ll also work with PDF rendering and even base-64 encoding. (7 hour YouTube course)
Reuben Wu – Glowing Geometric Light Paintings
www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/04/reuben-wu-ex-stasis/
Wu programmed a stick of 200 LED lights to shift in color and shape above the calm landscapes. He captured the mesmerizing movements in-camera, and through a combination of stills, timelapse, and real-time footage, produced four audiovisual works that juxtapose the natural scenery with the artificially produced light and electronic sounds.
The Rookies – Creative Industries Certification
The Rookies is working on an ambitious task to create a free online resource that will standardize the skills and knowledge for digital artists on a global stage. The resource will outline essential creative and technical skills required by all artists before applying for industry positions in VFX, video games and animation.
To get involved, give back and help others as they start their career pathing, click on links below and give your insights! Everyone has value to add!
3D Animation: https://lnkd.in/gSJPdFS
Visual Effects: https://lnkd.in/gk2-gNM
Games: https://lnkd.in/ghdGVbN
The Farm to acquire Technicolor Post and VFX in the UK
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/tech/the-farm-to-acquire-technicolor-post-and-vfx/5159141.article
The companies involved are the businesses operated under the ‘Technicolor Post’ and ‘Technicolor VFX’ brands, and not Technicolor-owned facilities such as The Mill and MPC.
