Brickyard VFX

In ACP Animation, we watched this really cool demo reel made by a VFX company called Brickyard. They have locations in both Boston and Santa Monica, and in the reel, the showed clips from really high-end commercials that they've done recently. The reel was on DVD, but I think they still mention/show clips of the commercials at their site here. I recognized several of the things that they did, and all of them looked really cool. For example, they did a light-painting one to promote some sort of business technology, and showed people painting venn diagrams and such with their fingers and lines of glowing light.

We also watched their "making of" reel, which highlighted the light-painting one and a few others and went through a quick demo of what the raw footage was like, what it looked like as they added tracking data and composited it with other elements, and what it looked like at the end. The tracking data they had looked absolutely staggering, with thousands of points and arrows and just insanity everywhere. But their final product looked gorgeous, which I guess is why they're doing high-budget commercials for Volvo and other large companies.

Fun fact- there are 2 or 3 Ithaca alum working for them right now. I'm a little hesitant to work in NYC or LA (I know I'll end up there eventually, but I'd really like to look at what else is out there), so the fact that they have a location in Boston is really great. I think I'm going to see if I can contact one of the Ithaca alumni there and talk to them about what they do there and how they got there.