Items tagged with 'Rex'

When you come back to the studio after being away on holiday for a week or so, you expect your chair or keyboard to have been been stolen by someone, and for your desk to be taken over by someone else. What I didn’t expect was for my monitor to be covered in a zillion post-it notes all with copies of the same doodle on…

The original was a doodle by Rex I planned to use in a found art piece, but just before I went away, Michelle decided to absentmindedly stamp some graffiti over it it whilst hovering over my desk chatting. The Bonnets doodle was ruined… kind of.

Whist I went away however, Michelle and her gang of ninja doodlers clubbed together to reproduce the picture a billion times, more than making up for the act of vandalism in the first place… Yay for Michelle, and yay for bonnets!

Yesterday the office was in the throws of chaos, crates being filled up with stuff, everyone getting ready to move office. Right in the midst of this chaos,  a delivery man arrived at the door with an exciting package for Alex. iPad!

Watch in wonder as Alex unboxes his iPad, and marvel at how within a mere 5 minutes,  Rex has come to draw on it.

Just like an amazing unseen creature captured on film by David Attenborough and his BBC film crew, on a recent train journey to Scotland, Alex managed to sneak up on Rex unawares, and capture this footage of the man at work, filling a page of his sketchpad with nonsense.

Click through to see the final piece, and what happened next…

Read more

I’ve always said that if you leave anything on Rex’s desk it will be covered in doodles before the day is out. I left my Macbook Air on his desk to test the theory and look what happened!

A new character springs to life courtesy of Rex’s modified business card.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s favourite image manipulation suite, and chief tool used in the making of lolcats, Photoshop.
Let’s raise an overly lens-flared champagne glass in celebration!

Computer Arts interviewed a selection of pixel-loving doodle gurus about how Photoshop has changed their lives, including our very own Rex Crowle. Here’s what he did say to them.

What was the first version of Photoshop you used?
Version 5.0 as far as I remember, before that I’d been using Corel PhotoPaint (as it came free with my “Multimedia PC”) and before that, Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.

What were your first impressions?
Initially I was a little disappointed, as it had less plugins than PhotoPaint and no animation features. But, I hadn’t learnt at that stage that plugins are generally pointless, it’s how you use the basic tools that matters!

How would your job be different if Photoshop didn’t exist?
I would destroy a lot more forests-per-day than I currently do.

What do you hate about Photoshop?
The ease of undoing! It can be easy to obsess over redrawing tiny elements to get them perfect, hammering away on the Apple-Z keys, and completely losing the flow of the main piece.

If you had to give one Photoshop tip, what would it be?
Keep it simple and don’t get too distracted by software features. A good idea should still work even if you draw it in MS Paint with a trackball. Although it’ll look rubbish, so don’t do that.

Head on over to Computer Arts to check out all the other similar interviews, including one with our friend Jon Burgerman.

Oh and remember, Photoshop is a powerful and dangerous ally, and not everyone should be allowed to use it.

Last week was the annual Develop conference in Brighton, and we were there to give some talks, come a cruel 4th in a games quiz, and win a nice stack of shiny awards!

Mark and Kareem gave a talk entitled The Art of LittleBigPlanet - A Big Medley discussing how the visual style of LittleBigPlanet was decided upon and evolved, how the feel of the game was defined by the materials, and everything being bolted together. They also discussed how you guys have been using the game to make all kinds of different visual treats for us to enjoy. Highlights of the talk included peeks at early sackboy sketches, prototype videos such as the famous YellowHead demo, and some screenshots of some of your levels and sackboy costumes.

Kenny gave a talk to the audiophiles of the conference entitled Real-time Audio: Context Is Everything in which he apparently ‘explored the history of game audio to establish how and why we’ve manipulated audio in the past in order to help understand many of the inherited methods and problems we now take for granted’. When I asked him what that meant he said ‘stuff’ and then said ‘it’s about the why, and not the how, of audio manipulation’ so there you go! Sadly I wasn’t there to see the talk, but knowing Kenny, it would have been fairly awesome, insightful and full of bonhomie.

On the Wednesday night a small gang of Molecules attended the Develop awards, where we had been nominated for five awards, all of which we won, thank you Develop! Look at all these great things we won:

Media Molecule

• Best Independent Developer
• Best New Studio

LittleBigPlanet

• Artistic Achievement
• Technical Innovation
• Best New IP

The trophies are apparently really shiny and will look great in our new trophy cabinet, but Mark took them home with him and immediately buggered off on a tropical holiday somewhere (jealous!), so the report of just how shiny they are is pure hearsay at the moment. We shall confirm in coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, we are very humbled, and overjoyed!

Shininess update! One of the awards arrived in the post just now, and they are indeed nice and shiny, also very heavy, provoking some scary murderous comments. Check it out!

Our resident office doodler Rex Crowle will today be facing off against opponent Simon Cook in a match of Photoshop Layer Tennis. What’s that you ask? Rex explained it well enough on his blog, which means we can copy and paste it, how handy!

For those that don’t know the procedure, the two of us will be taking it in turns to create artwork in a series of volleys, building on what has just gone before. And with only 15 minutes for each turn its going to be a mad flurry of paper, crayons and Wacom pens.

The match kicks off at 4pm Here in the UK, which should be 11am in New York, and 8am over in San Francisco. You can watch the progress from the sidelines over on the Layer Tennis Blog.

Above: Rex Warming up for the match

Good luck Rex, may you smash, volley and ace your way to victory!