Wednesday 26 January 2011

Wanted: One Talented 3D Artist, London

Assembly Studios is an award winning multi-disciplinary design agency. Our creative CG department works with the wider studio to deliver a diverse range of content for print, web, interactive and animation.

We are on the lookout for a talented experienced 3D Artist. 3D Studio Max, VRAY, Photoshop and After Effects skills are essential, as is experience with animation, compositing and post-production. We need great team players, able to work on multiple projects simultaneously, who are passionate about CG, very creative and diverse in their skills sets.

If that sounds like you we would love to hear from you! Please send a C.V. and showreel / portfolio to info@assemblystudios.com (6MB Max)

Click to visit the Assembly Studios website.

Monday 17 January 2011

Win a brand review for your business...


What better way to kick off the New Year than by winning a brand review for your business? It can be hard to evaluate your own branding for a number of reasons: over familiarity is usually number one. What is your visual identity saying to clients or potential clients? Is it still reflective of your business goals and aspirations? Is it still fresh and on-message in this changing economic climate? Our creative team is experienced and adept at working with organisations to answer these questions and work out effective solutions where any lack of alignment is identified.

To be in with a chance of winning a brand review with Assembly Studios, all you have to do is count the number of Assembly 'A's (see example below) hidden within the image above and email the answer to daniela@assemblystudios.com by Monday 7 February 2011, including your name and company name. Please click on the image to enlarge it (you can then zoom in further by clicking again). All correct answers will be entered into a draw and the winner will be notified by email by 11 February 2011.

Assembly 'A'






Click here to watch our behind the scenes film of the photoshoot!

Competition Terms and Conditions:
1. Entrants must be over the age of eighteen.
2. The prize is not transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash.
3. Closing date for entry is 31 January 2011 at 13.00.
4. Winners will be notified via e-mail by 4 February 2011.
5. By entering the competition and supplying your information, you consent to receive relevant promotional material via e-mail unless 'no marketing' is stated within the body of the entry email.
6. The judges' decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Click to visit the Assembly Studios website.

Friday 14 January 2011

Surviving MIPIM

Top 10 Tips from Assembly’s 10 year MIPIM veterans Richard Conner and Matt Fairman

1. A first class return train ticket from Kings Cross – Cannes is the same price as cramming onto any of the budget airlines (unless you booked 3 months ago…) – more pleasant and not much longer door to door – plus the last 2 hrs down is glorious as the track follows the Riviera and gets you in the mood and you can brush up on your Franglais.
2. Be organised, have meetings pre-booked but allow enough time in between for random encounters and recovery – try to fill lunch and dinner slots ahead of getting there – however lunch is often a good recovery period so be flexible on this.

3. Talk to everyone you know before you go and try and trade events, functions and party invites to maximise your options – turning up with no invites puts you on the back foot and bear in mind it is just as useful for you to be able to bring someone along to something as you attending yourself (for them, for you and the host of the event in most cases) – Try to get invited to Hang the DJ on Thursday evening and turn up to when the mayor rocks up to the London Stand for maximum draw.

4. Gents - 2 pairs of shoes. Alternate days. 16 hrs in the same shoes, day after day makes day 2 grim let alone day 4… If you are on a stand, with a load of time standing, take a clean pair of socks and change into them at 1700 if you are not heading home to freshen up pre-evening shift. This tip has been passed down from MIPIM generations via Paul Finch MBE and I swear by it.

5. Unless you need to refer to the big manual while you are there, don’t load up with your MIPIM bag on the first day until the end of the week (you can use your pass to pick one up at any time) – it’s big and heavy and the marketing team back home needs it – you certainly don’t want to carry it about and nothing else is of value, including the opening cocktail party pass....

6. Keep your ears pinned back and your eyes peeled, various events last year were orchestrated through social media channels, facebook, linked-in, twitter, etc. Follow #MIPIM on twitter and www.twitter.com/twipim as this was one of the better, informative, unbiased live information feeds and is often quite entertaining too.

7. Get your rounds in early and then head to The Carlton Hotel and Martinez Hotel Bars on the Croisette (pricey) - later at night can be filled with very senior players that you wouldn’t normally get access to let alone assist back to their feet.

8. Don’t peak too early and pick wine ahead of beer and don’t drink it until at least 5pm, that way, you have a full drink in your hand but you stay sharp enough to make friends and influence people.

9. Despite the ridiculous temptation to justify it to yourself, drinking and socialising past midnight /1AM virtually never converts or brings as much benefit as you think so if you are going to do it, know that’s what you are doing, and that you will bring much pain to yourself and your next 8AM meeting for very little upside (unless of course the god of hangovers is truly benevolent towards you…) – be disciplined, go to bed by 1 until Thursday night – you’ll have a more productive time and your voice stands a fighting chance of making it until Friday.

10. IMPORTANT – if point 9 is ignored – this can be countered somewhat by remembering a) to take some resolve with you and b) drinking it before you fall asleep as it is twice as effective as a pre-emptive strike as it stops the headache before it happens – put it out, ready dissolved in your water glass, before you head out in the evening, ready for your return so you don’t forget – you won’t forget…

Monday 10 January 2011

Flavio Ochoa


We are deeply sorry to hear about the loss of our friend Flavio Ochoa. Flavio spent several years working at Smoothe, dividing his time between the London office and leading the Bulgarian branch. He was an extremely talented artist who contributed a great deal to our portfolio, as well as being a loved and respected friend and colleague. Flav – we are missing you already.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Plans, Resolutions and Goals for 2011.

At Assembly we've been chatting about Christmas (the office's favorite time of year to indulge - see previous post!), the New Year, Resolutions and our plans for 2011...

Christmas

A thought that came up repeatedly during our discussion was that the best gifts to receive at Christmas were the thoughtful ones - whether it was a trip to Rome(!), or quite an amusing novelty jumper from someones Grandma;






Among the other wishes for gifts from Santa were a new laptop, and Tango lessons!

A different type of 'doing' gift we'd recommend would be to check out this exhibition - it's the Rachel Whiteread Drawings at the Tate Britain, on until the 16th January 2011. Well worth a look! Or have a sneak peak at this informative review.
Or for something a little different, we're itching to check out This Exhibition. It's called 'Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography'. It's the work of five international contemporary artists, who work literally - without cameras to create one-off pictures (or works of art)...it looks really interesting and unusual.  

New Years Plans/Resolutions
A popular resolution with the team that also seemed pretty do-able, came from our Managing Director - "To free up time to engage more often with current design. It's easy to fall out of the habit."

This resonated with a lot of the office - it's so easy to focus on work, and solely on the particular area of design and creativity you're working on, it's often refreshing  and can be pretty useful to remind yourself of the other creative industries and disciplines.
 Different people choose to do this in different ways, with some deciding to make more use of the Internet - reading more design-orientated blogs, newsletters and visiting sites such as The Cool Hunter, and Its Nice That.


For other members of the team however, it translates into visiting more museums, exhibitions and different places locally, such as the Barbican Centre - a fairly unusual experience for central London!
 In 2011, Assembly Studios as a whole is hoping to attend more design talks, conferences and trade exhibitions - not only as visitors, but also hopefully as contributors!

Plans for 2011

It looks like the Assembly staff are going to be pretty busy during 2011! A few plans include;
- A Stag Do in Amsterdam
- Snow-boarding in Bulgaria (in February) & Florida (in October)
- Traveling to Sri Lanka to see my latest nephew
- Tangoing Neouvo in Berlin - apparently it's the place to dance at the moment.
- Fitting in as many festivals as possible! 
Speaking of festivals, a few of our favorites are (in no particular order);

Hop Farm Festival
Glastonbury
Benicassim
The Camden Crawl

And so so many more. We can't wait 'till summer!

However our favorite resolution/plan for 2011 had to be:
Become a year wiser.

Wishing you all you could hope for in 2011, the Assembly Studios team xxx

Click to visit the Assembly Studios homepage.