Throughout the week, RocketOwl and inMotion are posting a photo a day to help each other – and you! – get to know what goes on behind the doors of Ottawa’s most exciting videogame and film production studios.  Read the flagship co-blog piece here. 

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

11 a.m. at inMotion (above):

It’s a popular myth (at least among our type of folk) that a true inMotionite is someone born with a camera strap around his (or her) neck.  On the playground, we were the ones fashioning makeshift dark rooms below the twisty slide and assembling Lego replicas of 16mm movie cameras.

These prodigal signs of obsession define who we are as adults: we fall to our knees in the presence of cinema’s best technology, but we are equally reverent of that technology’s ancestral roots.  That’s why, when it came time to today’s photo, I only had to look as far as our edit suites to find an example of old technology meeting new, and of our employees staring down the long and colourful tunnel from whence we came.  Skyler, on the left with his lovingly restored 1950s-era Yashica – C, takes a picture of Justin with one of inMotion’s C300s.  You don’t need to be as far down the road of technical nerddom as these two handsome young bucks to appreciate the symmetry of this photo: Yashica is a close collaborator with Zeiss, manufacturers of the lens you see on this C300.  It all comes full circle.

- Megan Findlay for inMotion

11 a.m. at RocketOwl:

The room was quiet. Quiet enough to hear the dull hum of the office-issued incandescent florescent lights. Jas (pictured above) walked slowly over to the Developers Den with a serious look on his face, and his hands hidden behind his back.

They could hear his footsteps thumping across the shiny wood floor, but kept their eyes glued to the screen. They were working against the clock to get a brand-new feature into the game, and couldn’t break their focus for even one precious second.

He finally reached the other side of the room. “It’s too quiet in here,” he thought. Suddenly, he pulled his hand out from behind his back, and fired a giant red Angry Bird plushy in the lead developer’s startled face. A burst of laughter escaped from someone’s mouth, and all bets were off. It was time for a developer’s retaliation, weapon of choice? Nerf Guns.

- Emily Armstrong for RocketOwl