 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(February 2010) |
Kevin Allen Bjorke is an artist, photographer, writer, and media evangelist for NVIDIA Corporation, based in the Silicon Valley. His work has ranged from print advertising to video games, major motion pictures to computer books and fiction. He has been a regular art lecturer at events such as SIGGRAPH since the mid-1980s.
Bjorke graduated from California Institute of the Arts, splitting his program between the School of Film/Video (with emphasis on cinematography) and the School of Theatre (acting). He also spent time at UCLA, USC, the University of Minnesota, and AFI.
Bjorke supervised imaging and lighting for the films Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Last Flight of the Osiris . He was a technical director and lead layout artist for the films A Bug's Life and Toy Story , and built the 3D graphics studio and software for the film adaptation of Super Mario Bros. . He has worked extensively in television, is a member of ATAS and IATSE and has won a number of awards for his TV commercials and rock videos for artists such as Mick Jagger. Awards have included film festivals "Best Animation" awards, Billboard Awards, and multiple consecutive Clio Awards. In the 1990s, he worked at length in Paris with Philippe Druillet on a feature-animated film based on Lone Sloane, which was shelved after budget difficulties for the sponsoring studio Acteurs Auteurs Associés/Soprofilms.
Bjorke has contributed to several theme park attractions, creating "ride films" such as The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera for Universal Studios Orlando, test rides for Disneyland, and two stereo rides for Sanrio in Chiba City and Ōita Japan.
In gaming, Bjorke has worked with Sinclair, Atari, Square, and Pixar in a variety of lead roles. In the mid-1980s he also developed, with Timothy Leary and several other artists including Keith Haring, William S. Burroughs, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Helmut Newton, a prototype "Mind Movie" based on the William Gibson novel Neuromancer, a project which was eventually scrapped and redirected by Atari who felt that it was much too ambitious and the hardware requirements would make the available market of game-players purchasers far too small.
Bjorke created an early adjunct to the Palace virtual worlds system, and one of the earliest web cgi apps. The "BotBot" enabled Palace users to customize the automated backends of their avatars and at the height of Palace popularity often served thousands of users daily.
As a journalist, Bjorke has contributed to Little Bit Magazine and produced segments for ABC Television News in Minneapolis. He has been a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, serving for a time on the SFWA's publisher-grievances committee. He was a contributor to The RenderMan Companion and more recently served as a section editor and author for the GPU Gems series of graphics programming books. He has written for 3D Artist magazine, for Develop magazine in the UK, and CGWorld Japan.
His photography has recently illustrated magazine pages for Springer Verlag, advertising related to his own projects, and was included in a feature of the February 2006 B&W Magazine. [1]
Bjorke writes, principally about photography, at PhotoRant.com, and maintains a web community focused on Photographic First Amendment issues, PhotoPermit.Org. He continues to lecture on game design, art, and technology at events such as GDC and worldwide for NVIDIA Corporation.
The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on minicomputers and mainframes. Spacewar! was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student hobbyists in 1962 as one of the first such games on a video display. The first consumer video game hardware was released in the early 1970s. The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games were Computer Space and Pong. After its home console conversions, numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong's success in both the arcade and the home by cloning the game, causing a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.
Battlezone is a first-person shooter tank combat game released for arcades in November 1980 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a tank which is attacked by other tanks and missiles. Using a small radar scanner along with the terrain window, the player can locate enemies and obstacles around them in the barren landscape. Its innovative use of 3D graphics made it a huge hit, with approximately 15,000 cabinets sold.
The Last Starfighter is a 1984 American space opera film directed by Nick Castle. The film tells the story of Alex Rogan, a teenager recruited by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war. It also features Robert Preston, Dan O'Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart, Norman Snow, and Kay E. Kuter.
Graphics are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, in typesetting and the graphic arts, and in educational and recreational software. Images that are generated by a computer are called computer graphics.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed to accelerate computer graphics and image processing. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
LightWave 3D is a 3D computer graphics program developed by LightWave Digital. It has been used in films, television, motion graphics, digital matte painting, visual effects, video game development, product design, architectural visualizations, virtual production, music videos, pre-visualizations and advertising.
Dungeon Master is a role-playing video game featuring a pseudo-3D first-person perspective. It was developed and published by FTL Games for the Atari ST in 1987, almost identical Amiga and PC (DOS) ports following in 1988 and 1992.
Concept art is a form of visual art used to convey an idea for use in film, video games, animation, comic books, television shows, or other media before it is put into the final product. Concept art usually refers to world-building artwork used to inspire the development of media products, and is not the same as visual development art, though they are often confused.
Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior is a 1987 video game developed and published by Palace Software for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum. The game was ported to many other systems and was licensed to Epyx who published it as Death Sword in the United States.
Hang-On is an arcade racing game released by Sega in 1985 and later ported to the Master System. In the game, the player controls a motorcycle against time and other computer-controlled bikes. It was one of the first arcade games to use 16-bit graphics and uses the Super Scaler arcade system board, created with design input from Yu Suzuki, as technology to simulate 3D effects. The deluxe cabinet version also introduced a motion-controlled arcade cabinet, where the player's body movement on a large motorbike-shaped cabinet corresponds with the player character's movements on screen.
Dennis Muren, A.S.C is an American film visual effects artist and supervisor. He has worked on the films of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron, among others, and has won nine Oscars in total: eight for Best Visual Effects and a Technical Achievement Academy Award. The Visual Effects Society has called him "a perpetual student, teacher, innovator, and mentor."
Mario Artist is an interoperable suite of three games and one Internet application for Nintendo 64: Paint Studio, Talent Studio, Polygon Studio, and Communication Kit. These flagship disks for the 64DD peripheral were developed to turn the game console into an Internet multimedia workstation. A bundle of the 64DD unit, software disks, hardware accessories, and the Randnet online service subscription package was released in Japan starting in December 1999.
Previsualization is the visualizing of scenes or sequences in a movie before filming. It is a concept used in other creative arts, including animation, performing arts, video game design, and still photography. Previsualization typically describes techniques like storyboarding, which uses hand-drawn or digitally-assisted sketches to plan or conceptualize movie scenes.
Astro Chase is a multidirectional shooter written by Fernando Herrera for Atari 8-bit computers. It was published by First Star Software in 1982 as the company's first game. Parker Brothers licensed it, releasing cartridge versions for the Atari 8-bit family and Atari 5200 console in 1983 and a Commodore 64 version in 1984. Exidy licensed it for arcade use with its Max-A-Flex cabinet.
Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.
Knight Orc is a text adventure, with limited graphics on some platforms, by Level 9 released in 1987. It comes with a short novella by Peter McBride explaining the background to the story.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Gary Yost is an American filmmaker and software designer, best known for leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max.
Virtual photography is a form of new media art where images are created by taking screenshots of video games or other virtual worlds. Virtual photography has been featured in physical art galleries around the world. The validity and legality of this art form is sometimes questioned, because virtual photographers are taking photos of artwork created by the game's designers and artists. For the most part, virtual photographers share the same motivations as "real life" photographers, including a desire to capture visually interesting images, preserve memories, and demonstrating technical expertise.