Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Basement Open Position - Front End Developer


The right individual is experienced with front end web development (broad) and has a passion for interactive development and innovation. We are working within, but not limited to, HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT and HTML5.

Required Skills:
  • Excellent communication skills with clients and internal project team
  • Strong knowledge of HMTL, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery
  • HTML5 knowledge a plus
  • An eye for motion design and timing
  • Building or working within frameworks
  • Experience integrating with PHP and .Net services required
  • Social media API's a plus (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)
  • Interest in and/or experience developing for mobile devices a plus
  • Experience working within a team using SVN or GIT a plus
  • Bachelor’s degree required, Master’s degree a plus, but not required

This is an in house position.

The Basement is a growing digital design studio located in Historic Fort Ben, in Indianapolis. Please send portfolio and information to careers@thebasement.tv if you are interested. No phone calls please.
EOE

Friday, October 7, 2011

Maya / Max License Transfer Utility Error

I recently had to transfer my Maya 2011 license between two laptops and the LTU wouldn't launch. With a little research I found the solution*. If the LTU won't launch and you're left in the lurch without your software, you can delete the following files and relaunch Maya:

Win XP / 7
C:\ProgramData\FLEXnet\adskflex_*.data

Win XP
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\FLEXnet\adskflex_*.data


Thursday, September 22, 2011

Open Position - Full-time Interactive Designer

Interactive Designer
The Basement Design + Motion
Indianapolis, IN USA

We are actively seeking a motivated, organized and detailed interactive designer to join our talented team. The right candidate has a passion for design, gaming, animation and innovation. They have a desire to learn, share & grow.

Must haves:

  • Excellent communication skills with clients and internal project team
  • Proficiencies with a pencil, PhotoShop & Illustrator
  • 2+ years working within the interactive creative process
  • Eye for composition, typography & interface design
  • Proven agency experience
  • Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design or related field


Good to knows:
  • Illustration, 3ds Max or Maya experience a major plus
  • Experience designing online display advertising a plus
  • Experience designing style boards for motion
  • Experience designing for mobile & tablets


What you’ll be doing:

  • Working with award-winning illustrators, designers, animators & developers
  • Collaborating with agencies on world-class projects
  • Working with international brands

How to apply:

  • Please send URLs of your work examples / portfolio site to jobs@thebasement.tv

The Basement Design + Motion is a growing digital design and animation studio located in Historic Fort Ben, in Indianapolis. Please refer to www.thebasement.tv to learn more.
EOE

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

AMA Flight School - Peek Inside

Lately at The Basement, we've been awarded some very interesting projects. One I'm quite excited about is a learning platform we are developing for the AMA called the AMA Flight School. The AMA is the Academy of Model Aeronautics and has been around since 1936. The learning platform will be used to educate their audience on varying aspects of flight. Here is a first look at title screen design for the module - Principles of Flight.


An early pitching sketch during a brainstorming session with the client. We live on whiteboards here at The Basement.

We've done around 30 -40 character sketches up to this point. We studied poses, character lines and expressions. In our initial concept, we had an elephant as one of our three characters. We really liked the Elephant, but switched to a flying Walrus for educational accuracy.

Here is Dan's Elephant sketch and Joseph's model.


The logo was inspired from pilot wing pins. Here's my first sketch for the logo.
The Walrus has made his introduction into design at this point.



Another consideration for the logo and title screen was maintaining a pleasing silhouette with all the characters. We carefully posed each asset to create interesting negative space.


Actually, the plane was added to the top left to compliment the negative space and the vapor trail was used to visually tie everything together.


Some technical details: The characters and plane started out on a sketchbook, modeled and textured in Maya. The logo is all vector in illustrator. The vapor trail was built with Particle Flow in 3ds Max. All compositing and layout was done in PhotoShop.

My main objectives for this project are education and appeal. This is driving every creative decision throughout the process.

Hope you liked seeing our progress - stay tuned for the official project launch.

Also, the AMA is celebrating their 75th year with a family event this weekend. More information can be found HERE.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Announcing the 49 Hour Film Competition



Grab four friends, a mountain of coffee beans and as many computers you can put on a farm.

It's time for the MG Collective's first annual 49 Hour Film Competition. The 49 Hour Film Competition is an animation ONLY event based on the 48 Hour Film Project with an extra hour for rendering. The competition begins April 1st at 6pm. Registration ends March 30th. Teams are limited to five (5) members. Two categories include Student and Professional. Students can enter in the professional category, however a professional can not participate in the student category. The competition will be judged by national artists and animators from Sony Animation, Fusion Digital Productions & Industrial Light & Magic. Films will be evaluated on these categories: Storytelling / Art Direction / Animation / Execution


Friendly recommendations:
Teams “should” consist of a designer, storyboard / concept artist, generalist and two (2) animators. Teams can use pre-modeled and rigged characters as long as they have rights to those assets. Start securing your location and production pipeline prior to April 1st.


Registration:
Registration forms can be downloaded HERE.

This PDF is form based. Once you fill in your team's information, save it as TEAM_NAME_49Hour_registration.pdf and email it 49hour@mgcollective.com

After the competition and judging we will have a screening event and announce winners at The Elbow Room in downtown Indianapolis. The screening event date and time are TBD.


for more information contact:
Brian Phillips brian at mgcollective dot com
or Andy Beane at jabeane at bsu dot edu

Monday, October 11, 2010

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

My First Maya Render :)

I've been going through Maya training with Joseph today. I finally got deeper into the program. There are certainly things I like about Maya, but there are a number of "wishlist" items. First off, I'm going to miss the camera tools within cam view. Its going to take a while to get use to the camera never being "locked down" like in Max. Having the same orbit options for both "perspective" view and camera view will be confusing. I really like the Frame feature, snap to vertex, the global sub-object mode, Extrude, Bevel and the Split Face Tool. Plus the History panel with editable attributes is extremely helpful, truly a great feature! I wish I could escape out of a tool, instead of jumping to the move tool. The curves are a royal pain in the "a". However I like the fact that Beizer handles are selectable, but breaking the handles into a Beizer Corner is very wasteful and critical to pipeline. I will miss the renderable spline feature of max, hopefully that will get added. The outliner is awesome, I love the parenting feature. So much more intuitive than max. Another nice feature is the way you can edit the frame range display similar to After Effects. That was always a hassle in Max. I did have a nice Pez dispenser modeled as an exercise, but Maya crashed. Not having a "save scene on crash" feature will be missed. That has saved my ass so many times.


This is what I get after 12 years in 3ds Max ... watch out now :)