Story and photos by Sasha Ostasheva and Daria Adamitskaya.
Every year in the spring time one cosy city in the mountains on the south of Germany named Stuttgart hosts giants of Film and CG industry from all over the world - from Canada to New Zealand and all the best universities and schools of computer graphics such as Escape Studio and Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg and passionate students from China, Japan, Russia to North and South America.

Alexandra and Daria

Even Iron Man himself paid his visit and let us be the first people in the world to see him in the second mind-blowing movie about him being a real man with really special effects :)

For the second time the Media students of TTVO go to this festival, the second time for Alexandra Ostasheva, this year with the private visit :) In 2012 Alexandra was one of the speakers on the conference introducing to people our school, Media Programme and demonstrated our students’ general show-reel on the presentation dedicated to our school which was by the way highly appreciated and in several conversations people mentioned that they remembered the last year presentation of TAMK.

The whole event took four full days from early morning till 7 in the evening non-stop with different kinds of workshops about different directions of cg industry from vfx, animation and games to 3d printing, business and innovations and, of course, after-parties every night for relaxing and networking.

The programme of presentations, workshops, case studies, master-classes and screenings was so extremely tight that one could not make a choice and we had to run all over the 4 buildings around the city center and be in several conference halls at the same time :)

What we’ve seen and learnt from professionals on the workshops we wouldn’t learn through the internet. The very exclusive material and breakdowns from different famous projects were shown by those who did the actual movies, animations and games.

Another exciting experience we’ve got was meeting those professionals in a special recruitment hub where you could easily come and ask about the jobs, internships, show your portfolio and get very personal feedback and tips. We’ve got interesting tips got the contacts from people of Disney Animation, Framestore, Pixomondo, MPC, Crytek and others. It was very valuable for getting a good image of what sorts of professionals are most needed in the industry.The most valuable tips were pointing on what we should focus on, what our strongest sides are, what should be improved.

A lot of fun we had in the Transmedia area. It was a huge hall of different booths focusing on interactive projects. Everyone had a chance to test all the products presented there. For example, you could have a dance with Iron Man like I did:



There we were also given a great whole-day workshop on using powerful tools for rendering and compositing VRay and Nuke from Chaos Group themselves. Every bit of information was consumed and currently is used in work :)

One the most delightful innovative transmedia stands that I discovered was Faceshift technology that allows you to do a very accurate Emotion capture with simple depth camera or kinect sensor camera and transfer it on any 3d object in real-time or record, adjust and apply as a motion capture data. There is no need in any expensive equipment and this technology is already used by the film industry. What’s interesting that this was developed by the students of german Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg. All students works from the Akademie presented on FMX were very inspiring, you can see what quality can really be achieved in the student projects and you get motivated to work harder even more. For example, the famous official trailer videos for FMX 2013

There still is a feeling that nothing is more wonderful than experiencing this overall inspiring week with your best friend in the sunny southern Germany in the huge crowd of dedicated people.

There are millions of things we could share about the event but you better go and check the event out next year ;)