Animated funk opera

Last year party-starting local ensemble Five Alarm Funk released ABANDONEARTH, a concept album about our planet’s destruction at the hands of a giant robot. Now the group has teamed with Vancouver animation studio Atomic Cartoons and plans to turn the record into a...

Weta power

To combat the increasing demands of VFX complexity, Weta Digital recently created a new ray-tracing renderer called Manuka along with a pre-lighting tool called Gazebo. These not only came in handy for The Hobbit finale, The Battle of the Five Armies, but will also be...

DreamWorks layoffs

Major layoffs are coming up at DreamWorks Animation. Details aren’t known yet, but the number of people who will be given the slip could possibly exceed the 350 employees were were dismissed in 2013, according to a report in today’s LA Times. The layoffs will affect...

Gaming iPhone

Apple Inc. has produced a resoundingly successful product release yet again with the iPhone 6, and the consumer electronics giant must be particularly pleased with the way that the smartphone has performed in the marketplace. But attention is already shifting to the...

Feel the game

Tactile feedback is nothing new. It’s been used in telecommunications and in entertainment for decades, and it became a standard feature in the late 1990s in mobile phones and video games – where vibrations alert you to new messages or help you...