New York-based Guava has hired 3D animator Steve Talkowski as its director of animation. Talkowski brings over a decade of experience as an animator to Guava, most recently with New York’s Hornet, where he also served as animation director…Absolute Post Production in London reported that Chris Allen–previously senior producer at London’s Moving Picture Company–will join Absolute in January as executive producer…. New York-based design/post boutique Perception has added Curt Neumann as art director. Neumann joins Perception after having worked with the company as a freelance designer for the past year on projects for Bravo!, AMC, ABC Sports and ESPN….Burbank-based post house FotoKem has signed an agreement with Sohonet, the London-based provider of private network services for film and television, to establish a Point of Presence (POP) on FotoKem’s Burbank campus. Sohonet’s dedicated high-speed network will allow the rapid exchange of media data between FotoKem and major production centers worldwide. Sohonet maintains a high bandwidth transoceanic connection between the London Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and points in Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and Wellington, NZ. The network provides scaleable bandwidth, currently up to one Gigabit/sec, for the transfer of digital media of all types such as film dailies, visual effects files, audio, uncompressed 2k or 4k files or any digital media. Sohonet currently provides point-to-point connections to more than 150 clients worldwide, including London’s Shepperton and Pinewood studios.
Tim Burton Discusses His Dread Of AI As An Exhibition of His Work Opens In London
The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits — all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.
But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.
Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters "really disturbed me."
"It wasn't an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling," Burton told reporters during a preview of "The World of Tim Burton" exhibition at London's Design Museum. "I looked at those things and I thought, 'Some of these are pretty good.' … (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside."
Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because "once you can do it, people will do it." But he scoffed when asked if he'd use the technology in this work.
"To take over the world?" he laughed.
The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.
"I wasn't, early on, a very verbal person," Burton said. "Drawing was a way of expressing myself."
Decades later, after films including "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman," "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Beetlejuice," his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.
London is the exhibition's final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in... Read More