On last weekend I was lucky enough to get tickets (thanks AnneMarie!) to attend the ADAPT 2006 Conference, held here in Montreal. ADAPT stands for Advanced Digital Art Production Techniques, and featured worldwide industry professionals in 2D and 3D digital production who came to talk about their craft, and show us how they work.

Among the speakers were Syd Mead, a living legend of motion picture art direction (some people call him a "conceptual designer", but I don't think the term defines who he is well enough -- I prefer art director) who presented us his career, and through that, bits and pieces of his much inspired psyché.

If the name doesn't ring a bell to you, the man is The Man responsible for the creation of vehicules, scenery and general conceptual universe for movies such as Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, 2010, Short Circuit, Star Trek and other blockbuster hits -- and still works today at 50-something. He's a true example of industry evolution adaptation, and how you can (and must) always stay in front of TEH FUTURE, conceptually speaking.

Among other great moments, he gave us his views and techniques on creating believable machinery inside believable universes, and the general creative process behind the production of ideas in visual formats.

You can check out Syd's web site by visiting www.sydmead.com . He sells some DVDs on his techniques (I actually got one, and its really great), and books containing samples of his work. A must see, and must have.

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Another really interesting speaker at ADAPT conference was Christian Lorenz Scheurer, matte painter/conceptual designer/art director, a brilliant artist and teacher who has worked on incredible productions such as Titanic, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Matrix, The Animatrix, and the recent Superman Returns -- among others.

He had this very inspiring and motivating conference about the creation of original and groundbreaking intellectual property (IP) for feature films and next-generation video games. Intellectual property is everything that one mind can create, and that becomes a known universe to the general public. For example, everything pertaining to the Star Wars universe is proper to George Lucas's IP, even though other people are working on new content creation for it. He presented us with his approach on the conception and production of digital art for movies and games, and the importance for an artist to create his own IP for better self-development, and breaking into the movie and video-game business.

I liked his views on art direction, mainly as he was saying that it was "...not a democracy, but a soft tyranny" - funny, but true. While the process behind conception and production requires teamwork, there must be someone with a definite view on how things will end. When an art director decides something will be white with blue dots, he might listen and see if anybody comes up with better ideas, but then if he doesn't like them it's going to stay white with blue dots, and that's that.

Check out Christian's Web Site at http://www.christianlorenzscheurer.com/ . You can also buy his Gnomon Workshop DVDs (I also got myself one of these), on which he presents step-by-step tutorials on different matte painting and drawing techniques.

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