Everyone at Dawnrunner is beyond thrilled to announce the strategic partnership with Vinny Guastaferro and The Sport of Acting! While working on our most recent endeavor DORKCORE we had the distinct privilege of watching Vinny work. He has this intensity, and “way” with acting that speaks volumes of not only his experience, but his drive! His presence was such that it increased the level and quality of performance of all those around him. Watching this unfold on set, I took it upon myself to learn more about the acting classes at The Sport of Acting.
I will always advocate for honing your skills, regardless of the industry. If you are going to undertake something great, you should practice, train, rehearse, and prepare to do so. Otherwise you’re only hoping you do your best, and leaving the results largely to chance. So agrees The Sport of Acting! The lab style courses described in detail on The Sport of Acting website (www.thesportofacting.com) speaks to the very heart of this philosophy, and with an industry veteran like Vinny as your guide – what better place to sharpen your craft! Vinny takes a very hands on approach with the instruction of his students, and that personal interest and involvement shows in their performances. He’s like having an “inside man” within the industry that divulges all the secret workings that act as barriers to entry. Everyone knows that Dawnrunner has a “no barriers” approach to the film biz, so we like that part too!
One of the most important elements to Dawnrunner’s core principles is to inspire. My personal favorite way of acting upon that core principle is to inspire the industry leaders of tomorrow. In my 15 years in the film industry I’ve come across an incredible amount of people who say, “I’d love to be an actor! But, I’m not good enough..” or, “I can’t afford to go to film school just to be an actor.” I often recommend they take classes, a lot of them have flexible schedules and rates, and mitigated commitment levels so that you can try it out and see if it’s actually something you’d like to do. Acting is hard, one of the most challenging careers I’ve encountered, that’s why I’m behind the camera! It’s opportunities like the one provided by Vinny and The Sport of Acting that allows you to try acting for the first time, hone skills that have been neglected, or really polish and refine the skills you’re using every day – or hey, even develop new ones!
So check out The Sport of Acting with Vinny Guastaferro, and if you have somehow missed all the posting about DORKCORE – check it out and see Vinny play the stimulant addled wizard Morningside as he takes on the mighty Candor!
Just sitting down to write this update I can barely contain my excitement. We have been secretly working on the most amazing project, and I can finally announce it! Enter, DORKCORE! (You have to say it like, “Enter the DRAGON!” for the proper effect). If ever there was a love letter worth writing to Nerdom as a whole, DORKCORE is it! We are taking on the entire fantasy fiction genre with this one! The show aims to be a character driven comedy, of epic proportions, set in a world that balances fantasy and the modern era. Imagine, if the “setting” of Lord of the Rings progressed to the modern era, the 21st Century! Dragons being ticketed for flying while intoxicated, and Knights driving cabs to pay off their overwhelming student loans! Squeeee!! The plan is for principal filming to begin in March, get this, on the Big Island in Hawaii! Yep, that’s right – Dawnrunner is flying out to Hawaii! Location photos are coming in now and I just can’t even!
I use the term “disruptive” very sparingly, as our industry tends to brandish it with a flagrant disregard for the true meaning of the word. Most uses of “disruptive” could easily be replaced with “trendy.” However, for this product review I am compelled, no – required to use the word disruptive to illustrate its life-altering nature. This review will be part of a three part series, from three different perspectives within Dawnrunner – myself, as the CEO – Geoff Peck as the VP of Technology – and Elias Woo as a Digital Media Specialist. Essentially we want to give you the three main perspectives of business, deployment/tech and use-cases. The NVIDIA GRID VCA will change the industry as we know it. The post-production world has been completely altered – and hardly anyone realizes it yet. I’m going to focus my review on the impact the GRID VCA has had on our business, and leave all the technical details and user experience to the other two posts. Let me start by saying that never has there been a more truly disruptive product to be embraced by Dawnrunner in its 8 years, than this. It hit with such force that it shook us straight to our business plan. From a business standpoint the GRID VCA provides a dynamically allocatable pool of resources (rapidly becoming my new favorite DR catch-phrase). A block of graphical-computing power than can be cut up as we see fit, on an as-needed basis, for artists…Both physically in the office and in our extended virtual office!
Great, what does that mean? For Dawnrunner that means our recipe for keeping a slim workforce, and scaling as needed for projects – both up and down – rapidly is even more a reality than ever before. Previously we would have to keep a fairly balanced workforce to workstations. Essentially having an open workstation for every artist we planned on having for the year. If we got more work than we had available workforce, we were unable to accommodate the job without outsourcing, or purchasing more workstations to expand the workforce. Well that’s great, but what happens if we do that and the work dries up for the remainder of the year? Now we are in trouble, and it’s an issue that a lot of post-production facilities face. We’ve all “pillaged the farm” from time to time. Ripping out a render node, building it out a bit and calling it a workstation – though we all know that it’s not. That was our “best” practice for those odd increases in work demand that was outside any budget increases for workstation purchases. The GRID solves this entire situation by giving you the ability to have pop-up workstations, already integrated into your systems and workflow. Now our render farm remains untouched, our workstations work at full tilt, and when we need to scale up we have essentially 8 additional seats we can rapidly deploy as needed. Before the GRID I would have told you that we were at our limits in terms of project bandwidth. That without additional workforce and workstations we would not be able to increase our workload. One piece of equipment made a liar out of me. Our GRID, while not being actively used as a workstation, is set to assist in rendering wherever possible. We will also slide around our workstations to assist in heavy cpu rendering, and deploy a GRID seat for our artists so work can continue. This means our office plays a lot less Titanfall or Monaco, but we get a hell of a lot more work done. We have a company mantra – “No Idle Cycles.” To us, nothing is worse than working away and looking at idle system resources around the office. When an artist goes home for the day, and I’m still working on a deadline sensitive project, I want to steal his resources for my own. All of our efforts have been geared towards the full utilization of every possible resource at our disposal. The GRID allows for even more flexibility in that. As a business owner I know that every dime I have invested in resources is being fully utilized, at all times, even if there is only one person left in the office when I go home. As a business these key points have had an incredible impact on us, in just one year of being fully operational, and comfortable within the GRID workspace.
