AN outdoor movie night has helped raise almost $3000 for a Cairns sporting club targeted by arsonists. More than 500 people attended the screening of The Lego Movie at Loridan Drive Reserve, Brinsmead, on Saturday.WHY DAVID ATTENBOROUGH IS BACKNETS ARE OUT: HERE COME THE STINGERSSHOCK AT CAIRNS HOSPITAL WAITING LISTSIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH'S FONDNESS FOR FAR NORTH QUEENSLANDWHY JAMIE THINKS ATTENBOROUGH IS AWESOMEThe event raised funds for the Bears Junior and Cubs Baseball Club, which lost $15,000 worth of equipment in a fire allegedly lit by two teenagers earlier this year.Cairns councillor Linda Cooper said it was the biggest crowd to attend an outdoor movie screening in the region.“The community support for it was sensational,” she said.“Hopefully now we’ve seen how successful screenings at the park can be, we can get it happening as a regular event.”Club president Toni Behrendorff thanked the council, those who attended and Neighbourhood Watch, which manned a sausage sizzle stall.“
That’s certainly given us some money to get started with, to begin replacing things like bases so we can get kids training at the start of next year,” she said.EVERYTHING will be awesome at Dreamworld later this year when the final blocks are put in place on Australia’s first official Lego store.The 350 square metre shop – the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere – will be a dream come true for blockheads of all ages. As well as browsing the country’s largest range of Lego products, Lego Australia spokesman Troy Taylor said customers will be able to find unusual shapes at a ‘pick-a-brick’ wall and mix and match pieces to create unique mini figurines.“I think for the consumers in this part of the world to actually get to experience things that haven’t been possible in this market before, it’s quite a great opportunity,” Mr Taylor said.“It will be the widest assortment Australia has seen.”Mr Taylor said Dreamworld was the perfect place for Lego to open its store.“
It made perfect sense,” he said.“From a tourism standpoint and the number of visitors that they get it’s obviously great for the Lego brand to get that also.”Dreamworld CEO Craig Davidson said the deal, which has been two years in the making, was a huge coup for the theme park.“It will allow us to offer first-to-market exclusive offers to our members, to our pass-holders and visitors to Dreamworld,” he said.“The store and the adjacent food outlet will be open to guests inside the park as well as guests outside.”Construction will start in July with the shop expected to be complete by Christmas.Anonymous asked: Hi Danny i love the banners being a old doggies boy from way back standing under the wind sock and close to the bar at written oval watching the boy's your banners make me laugh living in murwillumbah nsw brings back great memories for me kept it up cheers Dave coggerGood onya Dave. I used to stand near the windsock too, but was not old enough to care about the bar.
Students in the new Animal Logic Academy Masters will learn from the team that helped create Hollywood blockbusters such as Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Pic courtesy Warner Bros, Village Roadshow Pictures, Animal Logic The UTS Animal Logic Academy, a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney and Animal Logic, the production studio behind films such as The Lego Movie and the Academy Award-winning Happy Feet, is launching a Master of Animation and Visualisation degree which offers animators and visualisation specialists the chance to build on their existing skills and learn new ones as they are guided by industry in an immersive production studio environment. Head of the UTS Animal Logic Academy Shilo McClean said the inaugural course is unlike other Masters offerings. ‘The face-to-face commitment for a Masters in a lot of other programs is often quite light – it can be very flexible and you can continue to hold down a full time job as well,’ she told ArtsHub.
A UTS Animal Logic Academy Masters is more like being in the workforce. ‘To commit to this program you are essentially taking a year where this is what you do because it is 9 to 5, Monday to Friday for 44 weeks from 16 January 2017,’ said McClean. The course is a fully-immersive program that allows students the opportunity to learn on the job, as it were, in a real-life production studio environment. A brand new studio has been constructed on the UTS city campus in Sydney complete with all the digital tools used in professional CGI studios across industry. The course costs $45,735 for the year – and the good news is that there’s a full scholarship up for grabs. Applicants for the scholarship need to write a 1000-word application letter and there’s also an interview process. McClean says the chance to learn from Animal Logic animators as well as UTS professors is unique. Animal Logic has worked on films such as Avengers: Age of Ultron, Insurgent, The Great Gatsby, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, 300 and Happy Feet and are currently working on LEGO Batman Movie (2017) and The LEGO Ninjago Movie.
Although students won’t actually participate in current productions, they will have briefs for non-commercial projects and operate as though they are working on industry-standard projects. ‘The work you do is presented each morning at dailies and you get notes on your shots. You have your work set for the shot you are working on and you work together as a team to deliver the shots on projects that have realistic delivery dates,’ she said. The course is designed to offer practical production skills to help students transition into the industry. ‘We find people finish their Bachelor course with a range of skills and they are well-educated but making the transition to a full time work environment can come as a shock,’ she said. ‘The value of being embedded in a workplace makes a huge difference in terms of the intensity of what you learn and the capacity to translate that into industry standards very quickly.’ Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.
McClean said the Academy will act like a start-up of sorts to help fill demand for highly skilled animators. ‘We have a situation with animation and visualisation where the demand for talented people is quite voracious. We are entering into a new growth stage for this industry so felt we needed to establish an approach that would let us provide that real production experience, at industry speed and make it scaleable.’ The future of the industry is in emerging technologies, says McClean, and this course has been designed to push the boundaries of virtual reality and augmented reality – and give students the chance to be pioneers in the animation and visualisation field. ‘New jobs are emerging every day and there will be whole new studios and enterprises arising,’ she said. ‘VR is so hot right now it’s like the sun. One of the things is that graduates of this course will be doing is inventing the next stage of what CGI does in the world.’ The Masters is the first course offering from the Academy, and can take up to 100 students.