AMC lives and breathes a culture of cultivating a gentillesse in our community’s life together, all under the spell of creating top notch 3D art and meaningful experiences for its members.
Some of us are 3D artists, others production managers, mentors, some mentees, office managers, HR, technical artists, IT support, communicators, community devs, CEO, trainers in schools and many others. Each of us contributes to this circle of mutual well-being.
We would like to share with you some of our most gentile moments in 2022:
The Big Spring Reunion at AMC
After two years of not seeing each other daily, we invited all the #wfh colleagues to this huge party at the office. It was so huge that you could see it from space, and we had so many insta-worthy moments that I found a single picture to share with you. A girls’ only moment.
All the other pics are not suitable for publication.
Forever Heroes Challenge
We regularly organise competitions for 3D artists about to start their careers, challenges that can also generate edutainment for the general audience.
Last year’s Forever Heroes Challenge was a call for stories through the symbolic gesture of making a digital statue to a personality that culturally impacted communities, a ‘hero’ that deserves to be remembered but is very often left outside public recognition. Just like Cornel Chiriac, a Romanian journalist, radio & record producer, and jazz drummer in the 60-70s. He started a rebellion in the youngsters’ consciences through the liberating power of music in an oppressive communist regime. We wanted to have a conversation with our audience about freedom, a human right that our parents struggled to gain.
Sorin Verdes, our Junior Character Artist at AMC, told the story of Cornel Chiriac, his 3D role model, to inspire the contestants:
This is how we got to read our brave contestants’ hero tales, such as Teodora Paraschiv’s, first place winner. She sculpted Desmond Doss, an American army medic serving in WW2, an example of courage and self sacrifice whose memory was also praised in the movie “Hacksaw Ridge”. He is the first man in American history to receive the Medal of Honor without firing a single shot. Instead, he got it for saving 75 soldiers in the Battle of Okinawa.
P.S. Teodora is now our colleague.
Meet the other winners and their heroes: http://amc.ro/foreverheroeschallenge
The Piscu School Museum
We learned about pottery and explored The Piscu School Museum near Bucharest, a space where cultural heritage, contemporary art and ceramics generate a cultural and educational hub in a former village pottery.
Many of us even got their hands in clay, experiencing this art first hand.
Meeting ARC Academy in Sofia
We visited our partners, ARC Academy, the #gamedev school in Sofia (Bulgaria), to share bits of fun, games & other off-work complicities from our office with their students.
AMC’s storytellers were Georgiana Toea (Community Builder) and Kaloyan Kalamov (Junior Character Artist), a winner of our 2019 Challenge, now our colleague.
Meeting their graduates was an enriching experience in terms of receiving very good vibes from the new generation of game devs. Curious and daring, informed and self aware, ARC graduates are awesome. And congrats to the school as well for creating such a good environment for learning and sharing experience.
Sofia turned out to be an absolutely go-to place if you aspire for green spaces in the city animated by locals who spend a lot of time outside, socialising. People my parents’ age hang out in rock’n roll underground gems and kpop kids do their dance routines near the Presidency, right on top of the historical site of the ancient fortress Serdika, dating 2000 years BC.
As most Romanians already agree, it’s a foodie’s oasis indeed.
ARC Academy is THE place to be for two years of learning all kinds of game development disciplines such as 3D and concept art. 😉
Seaside Sculpt Jam
What could beat a week of sculpting and sunbathing by the sea with interesting peeps and AAA mentors?
I still haven’t found the answer to this and 8 months have passed since our Seaside Sculpt Jam, a tribal gathering of aspiring and professional 3D Artists. As the organiser of this jam and Community Builder for AMC, I’m preparing some bootcamps for this year too, but this time the beneficiaries will be Environment and Concept Artists. But still, topping a week at the sea, impossible!
Our first ever get-away from home was truly epic: https://amcstudio.ro/seaside-sculpt-jam/
23 digital artists from Romania and Bulgaria were stranded in a fisherman’s village for 6 days, with computers and graphic tablets. Instead of sunbathing all day long, they sculpted 3D digital models of their roommates and of our wild waiter Taner Kasabov.
Who entertained us a lot with his perky jokes, while taking good care of our basic needs. Fine Bulgarian dining as also shown in the short aftermovie below.
RADAR: M E T A V E R S
What surely remains of the experience above is the 3D models of the artists’ beach bodies, static alter-egos witnessing it all – sunsets and tides, dolphin’s jumps, pebbles wrestling with seashells, that guy and his octopus teacher, tetrapods getting out of the sea and evolving into surfers. Godmode perspective.
Maybe we will not see each other again. Maybe this gallery is a naive gesture, but we feel we’ve left our mark on Krapets’s July nightsky just as stars on Broadway. This makes it all beautiful and interesting in the digital space, the permanency of possibilities.
The text above is an excerpt of the curatorial text of our Beach Bodies gallery presented at RADAR.
TEAMBUILDING
What really fuels our lives at work is connection. Doing things together. Learning from each other. Sharing. So we took each opportunity to meet and spend quality time with the team. We didn’t downgrade our dreams just to fit the reality. Instead, we made it happen. 🙂
HALLOWEEN
Halloween is a great occasion for our 3D Artists to put down their pens and pick up face paints. That’s how we got pirates, witches, Michael Jackson in Thriller and someone with 10 extra eyes.
What do we do at Halloween parties, you ask? We had good food, music, dancing. And because we always think about video games, no matter the occasion, we also got some friendly competition with co-op games.
Plus some zombie brain shots, those were pretty cool. 😉
DEVPLAY 2022
Our band Ambient Occlusion’s first ever concert, that’s a tale to tell. After passing through some turmoil like every rockstar band does, our dear Claudia, Alice, Marius, Vanessa, Ovidiu and Sorin rocked the stage at DevPlay 2022.
Performing a mix of covers from games like WoW, Hades & The Witcher 3.
Watch their live performance here: