The Mill to let secrets behind Blackbird fly at Australia’s leading innovation festival Pause
As part of its 2017 launch, the Asia Pacific region’s top digital festival, Pause, has announced a double-bill of world-first keynotes from the heads of global VFX company, The Mill.
Now in its sixth year, Pause, will once again be taking over Federation Square, Melbourne, from 8-10 February 2017, bringing with it a program of presentations, panel debates, workshops and experiences from the creative, tech and business industries’ most prolific thought leaders.
Featuring amongst them will be The Mill’s VFX supervisor, Gawain Liddiard (right), and international executive vice president, Alistair Thompson, who will be delivering a joint keynote on the company’s development project ‘Blackbird’ – the first fully adjustable car rig that creates photoreal CG cars.
Working at the frontiers of visual narrative, in creating ‘Blackbird’, The Mill has transformed the landscape of automotive advertising and, since the company’s inception, has been behind some of the world’s most innovate visual effects, including those for Audi’s 2014 Super Bowl smash ‘Doberhuahua’; Visa’s ‘A Very High Dive’; Taco Bell’s ‘Play the Future First’ and the double Gold Cannes Lion-winning Google Spotlight Stories ‘Help’ – an immersive 360-degree short film directed by Justin Lin (pictured below, left).
Says Liddiard: “There’s been a massive growth in the spectrum of media that we are asked to, and get to, create. It’s exploded from being the set media types that The Mill has traditionally been a part of creating, from film to episodic and focusing on commercial. Now there are long-form commercials that run for five minutes on digital media platforms. There is VR, AR.
“These are just some of the major points we’ll be touching on at Pause, exploring how developing tools like Blackbird not only solves a pre-existing problem, but also opens up a ton of other ways to best leverage these new mediums.”
In addition to the Blackbird talk, which will take place on Creative Day (Wednesday 8 February 2017) of the festival, Pause will also play host to a separate keynote from Liddiard on Tech Day (Thursday 9 February). It will cover The Mill’s pioneering experimentation within the realm of virtual reality and discuss the sliding scale of immersive media opportunities for business – from small budget, to full-scale cinematic experiences.
Says George Hedon, founder of Pause: “Pause is all about giving people access to content that they can’t Google and opportunities to hear about the concepts shaping the digital future before anyone else in the world.
“The keynotes from The Mill, along with everything else on the 2017 program, have been curated specifically to illustrate the convergence of creative, tech and business ideas within the digital industries and how a project’s success is now hugely dependent on a holistic approach that encompasses all three elements.”
Further events taking place across Creative Day at Pause 2017 include keynotes from an ex-Magic Leap human experience designer; panel debates featuring representatives from Etsy, and workshops from Code Like a Girl.
Pause will run from Wednesday 8 to Friday 10 February 2017 (Creative Day – 8 February; Tech Day – 9 February; Business Day – 10 February).
Programming details and ticket options are available from the website: www.pause.melbourne.
1 Comment
The Blackbird, while an amazing bit of tech, does not make CG cars. It allows one to film a spherical environment for lighting and reflections on a CG car.
It also allows you to keep the existing wheels and creates a shadow. I am afraid it’s still BYO CG car and everything that entails. And from what I have heard will set you back around 60k per day.
Very cool though!