Atomic Fiction Travels 40 Years into the Future for ‘Looper’

Atomic Fiction recently teamed up with visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas to realize the fantastic science fiction environments of Rian Johnson’s Autumn 2012 release, Looper. Our crew delivered top-tier art direction and matte painting for the original story’s digital worlds and vehicles.

I’m a huge fan of Rian’s films and Looper is going to be one of his best. It was great to be given the opportunity to both design and execute the shots, and the process gained us a lot of efficiencies.

There’s a range of material that is going to be very rewarding to see on the big screen, and there’s a great story backing it up. That’s the best part. Needless to say, we had a blast on the project.

Image Metrics and Atomic Fiction Announce Joint Collaboration for Future Projects

Visual Effects Creators Behind Effects for “Transformers 3″ and “Boardwalk Empire” Add Award-Winning Faceware Software to Animation Pipeline

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Nov 17, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Image Metrics, a leading provider of 3D facial animation technology, and Atomic Fiction, an Emeryville-based visual effects and animation company, today announced a collaboration for upcoming entertainment projects where Atomic Fiction will integrate Image Metrics’ award-winning Faceware facial animation software and hardware into its character animation and visual effects pipeline.

Faceware is Image Metrics’ animation software and hardware solution for the video game, film, visual effects, commercial and television industries. The software utilizes a marker-less video analysis technology and artist-driven performance transfer toolset to deliver ultra-high fidelity and truly believable facial animation in a fraction of the time it takes for alternative methods. The software contains unique collaborative workflow features that enable animation teams to achieve significant productivity gains and maintain stylistic consistency.

“During our first project using Faceware, we were able to cut animation time nearly in half while still allowing our animators to add important and subtle details that brought the work to a new level,” said Jenn Emberly, Co-Founder and Performance and Animation Supervisor at Atomic Fiction. “Faceware is extremely valuable because it allowed us to bring performance consistency across multiple animators. For these reasons, Faceware reduced our shot costs by 15 to 20 percent. Atomic Fiction is always looking for ways to be more efficient, and we look forward to collaborating with the Image Metrics team on future projects.”

“I have been extremely impressed with my initial Faceware experience — it produced excellent results, even in cases where the source footage was poorly lit or of poor quality,” added Anton Dawson, Character Supervisor at Atomic Fiction. “Faceware is an incredible and intuitive software. While it performs a great number of technically complex tasks under the hood, it remains a fun and straightforward tool for animators looking to do what they do best and without the distraction of learning curves. Overall, it is a tremendous fit for our character animation pipeline.”

Atomic Fiction is a forward-looking visual effects and animation studio launched by Kevin Baillie, Ryan Tudhope and Jenn Emberly. The company’s founders have an impressive portfolio of work and are combining their experience with a fresh business model, which includes cloud computing, cross-discipline collaboration and a generalist approach. Above all, the company’s greatest asset may be what it calls its “impassioned core,” a team comprised of tremendous industry talents, which allows Atomic Fiction to be lean and agile while doing work that is bold and inventive.

“The remarkably talented team at Atomic Fiction has the highest standards, not only for their core team and work they produce, but for the tools that they use,” said Robert Gehorsam, CEO at Image Metrics. “We’re very pleased they have chosen Faceware as part of their company-wide mandate for creating fantastic character animation and effects work while maintaining a significant return on investment for their clients.”

Further partnership details, including upcoming projects, will be announced later this year. For additional information, please visit www.image-metrics.com and www.atomicfiction.com.

Amazon’s cloud is the world’s 42nd fastest supercomputer

Jon Brodkin at arstechnica.com released an article yesterday reporting that Amazon’s cloud ranks no. 42 on the list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers:

The list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers came out yesterday with a top 10 that was unchanged from the previous ranking issued in June. But further down the list, a familiar name is making a charge: Amazon, with its Elastic Compute Cloud service, built a 17,024-core, 240-teraflop cluster that now ranks as the 42nd fastest supercomputer in the world.

Read the full article here.