Yesterday our amazingly talented, patient, smart, nerdy, impatient, committed, ingenious, thoughtful, creative, resourceful and brilliant development team put the finishing touches on the Zoom Creates self-promo reel. These guys are absolutely unbelievable. We described our vision for the reel and they told us: “That’s impossible. You can’t do that. The technology doesn’t exist. You cannot change the laws of physics. We will need super-computers, expensive software, years to write code, more chips, salsa and milkshakes than you can afford.” Then, five minutes later (slight exaggeration) came back to us with a solution–an ingenious solution: open-source software. The only hitch was they had to teach themselves how to use it. And that they did. They figured out how to use Blender for the 3d animation and Kdenlive for the video post processing. Sprinkle in some Flash and great ideas of their own (watch the mouse pointer jump from one panel to the next and the animated atom) and there is no stopping these guys.

They even used math! Lots of math. That was the most mind-boggling thing I witnessed. I like math and all but if it were me putting this thing together, I think I would have approached it more organically, finding the music then individually timing and positioning the pieces. Not these guys. After the look and feel/animation comps were completed, they looked at the music, the number of pieces and the frame rate etc. and gave each piece a number and had it all laid out on a table with little pieces of paper. Independently, Kurtis worked on the music while Kris positioned all the pieces and when they put them both together, it was like magic. The animation synced up with the music almost perfectly. It was unbelievable. These guys know what they talking about. Well done, lads.

This entire project has been such a great team effort. Everyone here at Zoom Creates contributed. The countless hours of concepting, discussing, designing, scheduling, production, learning, listening, laughing and collaborating have truly produced a project to be proud of. Not only does it show off some of Zoom’s best work, it is a portfolio piece in itself.