Playgrounds Blend

About Playgrounds Blend

Playgrounds Blend is a 5 day showcase and celebration of the creative image. Presenting the best and brightest of contemporary animators, vfx artists, game developers, sound & graphic designers.

Speaker highlights

• David OReilly – Everything, The External World
  Golden Bear winner and an artist working in design, animation and video games. Creator of the groundbreaking animated films ‘Please Say Something’ and ‘The External World’, his film work has won numerous awards and been the subject of several retrospectives internationally. He has served as writer for the TV shows Adventure Time & South Park, and created the fictional video games in Spike Jonze’s Academy Award-winning film ‘Her’. In 2014 he released his first independent game 'Mountain' and followed up with 'Everything' in 2017. Everything won grand prizes at A MAZE & Ars Electronica and was featured as Game Of The Year by Wired, Polygon, AV Club, The New Yorker and others. Its trailer became the first ever interactive project to qualify for an Academy Award.
• Curt Enderle – art director Isle of Dogs
  A 1987 Minnesota State University graduate, Curt Enderle has dazzled both the theater and cinema worlds with his art direction and sets designs. In 2001 he won an Emmy Award for his art direction in the stop-motion animation sitcom on UPN called Gary and Mike. Further on he was a set designer for ParaNorman and art director for the animated feature The Boxtrolls, both of them produced by Laika. His most recent project: Isle of the Dogs is an animated feature directed by Wes Anderson following a boy's odyssey in search of his dog.
  
  In the theater world, Curt Enderle is known for his fabulous creations for MSU'sOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Angels in America stagings.
  
  When talking about his work, the thing he loves most about his job is immersing himself in a time and place he wouldn’t otherwise, and finding people and places during the process he didn’t know existed.
  
  He’s now freelancing, designing theater and still doing stop-motion animation work near his home in Portland, Ore.
• Marshmallow Laser Feast - VR
  London-based design studio Marshmallow Laser Feast are always looking to create ground-breaking experiences that immerse and amaze in completely unexpected ways. Headed up by Adam Doherty, Barney Steel and Robin McNicholas, the collective employs a wealth of creative disciplines, from photo-real virtual reality to robotic performance and realtime mapping, pushing boundaries, redefining expectations and exciting audiences worldwide. Their works range from commercial productions for the likes of U2, Volkswagen, Castrol andMcLaren, to extremely artistic and immersive experiences.
• Neal Scanlan & Gustav Hoegen – Star Wars
  Wookies, rodians, twi’leks and robots. The Star Wars universe is full of weird and dangerous creatures. Neal Scanlan – a London based creature and animatronic expert - brought them back to life in physical form for ‘The Force Awakens’. His outstanding work is appreciated worldwide and internationally awarded. He is a multi-Bafta Award-winning artist. Scanlan - whose past work includes an Oscar for ‘Babe’ and 2012’s’ Prometheus’– received multiple awards in 2016 for his visual effects for Star Wars, like the 2016 Bafta win: best achievement in visual effects and the 2016 Empire Award win: best visual effects.Under Scanlan’s direction, the creature workshop at Pinewood Studios built more then 100 characters for The Force Awakens.Having finished working on Rogue One, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, he now focuses on another Star Wars story.
  
  Gustav Hoegen is an animatronic expert too and known for his work for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Brothers Grimm. He is also part of the Pinewood Studios team. Together, Scanlan and Hoegen worked on a lot of practical effects. After a super inspiring talk in 2016, they are back at Blend Iin a joint talk. We will learn more about their extraordinary imagination and skills.
• Mr Bingo
  In a splendid collaboration with Graphic Matters we present Mr Bingo to the stage. Mr. Bingo was born in 1998 after a cheerful bingo night in Maidstone. It first served as a nickname among students of the Kent Institute of Art & Design, before being fully embraced as a signature and identity for its Leigh-born bearer. Mr. Bingo went on to study graphic design at Bath Spa University College and specialized in illustration, graduating in 2001 and moving to London. There Mr. Bingo was a commercial illustrator for 15 years, working regularly for clients such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, TIME, CH4, The Mighty Boosh & The New York Times. An archive of the thousands of illustrations from this period doesn’t exist online because he got bored once in a motorhome and deleted his entire portfolio website. Mr. Bingo and his work have been featured in a wide range of magazines including Creative Review and Icon. He was recently described by Caroline Roberts in Vroom Magazine as ‘a person who has redefined the traditional job description of an illustrator’.
  
  Related interview: Neon Moiré Show with Mr. Bingo
  
• Moby Francke – Riot Games
  Moby Francke is a great classically trained character illustrator, best known for his works for game design studio Valve's hits: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Born in 1972 in Washington D.C he attended from 1996 to 2001 the courses of the Academy of Art University of San Francisco. After graduating he worked at LucasArts as a conceptual designer and taught figure painting at the university.
  
  A turning point in his career represented his collaboration with Valve. Though he started working there almost accidentally and had to adjust to a new world of digital art and gaming, he ended up being the driving force behind Half Life's ground-breaking look and feel. The game is still considered one of the most iconic sci-fi shooter because it successfully managed to marry realistic characters with an immersive storyline while in the same time propelling the players through awe-inspiring environments. It remained a reference point in the industry for years on a row while in the same time it solidified Francke's key position within the company.
  
  He is currently working for Riot Games. In 2009, the company released its debut title League of Legends to worldwide acclaim. His clear inspirations are the great America painters of Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell. Francke mixes these influences with his own style and applies it expertly to the field of entertainment. He combines features expertly with scalability, meaning that characters will look great from far out and close up, something especially important with character from League of Legends. He has won several awards, including two New York Society of Illustrators Competition Awards.

And there’s more: Marshmallow Laser Feast (VR installation Hugger), female voices in illustration Yukai Du and Sylvia Liu, Toros Köse (Bladerunner 2049), Adam Smith (director The Chemical Brothers), COOL SHIT (fka Hungry Castle, they make Cool Shit), Darek Zabrocki (concept art), Guerrilla Games (Horizon Zero Dawn), Studio Moniker (interactive design), 'Ver binnen' by Jenny van den Broeke (Next talent), Bram Knol (Next talent), 'Thought Hopper 3000' by Vera van Wolferen (Next talent) and Polymorf (immersive installations).

Programme

• 9 April – workshops & opening night – AKV|St. Joost Breda
• 10 April – conference – Chassé Theatre Breda
• 11 April – conference – Chassé Theatre Breda
• 12 April – workshop digital painting and character design by Loish – AKV|St. Joost Breda
• 12 April – Panicroom (evening program) – PostPanic Amsterdam
• 13 April – conference – Pathé Tuschinski Amsterdam

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Related Topics

• Conference
• Motion Design
• Europe
• 2018
• April