Pete Nelson

Mixture co-founder

Plasticine, Events and CNC routing

Posted: Thu Apr 12 2012. Tags: tech

Another great night at @digibury last night with another 3 fascinating talks – the common element between them all being passion for what they are creating.  Each captured the mood of what feels like the beginning of a proper digital scene in East Kent, and one that is not driven by proximity to London. This is proof to me that creative people are staying/returning/coming to the area because there is a spark of enthusiasm that will hopefully ignite into a full-blown digital scene.

First up was a talk by the Whitstablite lens-based animation studio @animatecreate about plasticine animation mixed with computer compositing. They built a model of Simon and swiftly animated him to do some comedy dancing and then added a computer generated disco scene with sparkling mirrorball and lights – all within 10 mins – it was truly mind-blowing stuff.
We also learnt about the history of plasticine and it’s secret formula, how Aardmann make Shaun the Sheep and the rich heritage of lens-based animation at Hill Top Farm near Blean.

Next up – @streetvite. Charlie gave a great talk about his journey over the past 12 months and gave us a glimpse of his new product.  He is a convincing founder who has used his hustling skills to get his product noticed by cross-promoting with local businesses and has done well to get the app off the ground in the local area.  I’d like to see it expanding into London quickly to really get some big data coming into the system.

Finally we had a highly amusing talk from Alaric at http://woodcase.co.uk/ about his forays into product design. Despite the tight margins and production difficulties he has created a really lovely product that is pleasant to open and to sniff. I hope he can expand his audience reach beyond Swedish teenage bloggers…

On top of this was great to catch up with the fascinating stuff going on in Kent at the moment such as the PHP encoding gurus http://www.ioncube.com/ and the inspirational  ball of energy that is Chris Kempt from the previously St Albans-based games studio http://www.kempt.co.uk/