LOS ANGELES: Come Nov 17, the Mill Blackbird will receive the prestigious Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation from the Hollywood Professional Association here.
The Mill Blackbird is an incredible piece of hardware used mainly in advertising but can also be adapted for many design and creative disciplines to test concepts long before manufacture.
It's the first fully adjustable car rig that creates photoreal CG cars.
Developed by The Mill over a three-year period, the shapeshifting Blackbird was designed to address problems faced by the advertising industry when creating content for automobile commercials: car availability, model revisions, limited access to locations, and footage that can quickly become outdated.
The Mill Blackbird is a car rig that can be shot at any time, in any location, without the need to rely on a physical car. The length, width, wheels, and suspension of the rig can be adjusted or swapped to mimic almost any car in development or on the market. Its electric motor can be programmed to simulate various driving experiences, and The Mill Blackbird packs a camera array and 3D laser scanner to generate a virtual model of the surrounding environment for even more realistic CG renderings.
The London-based Mill is a visual effects and content creation studio collaborating on visual effects, digital and design projects for the advertising, games and music industries. When it was set up in 1990, it was the world's first fully digital visual effects studio. It now has offices in New York, Chicago and here.
The Hollywood Professional Association headquarterd here is a trade association serving the professional community of businesses and individuals who provide expertise, support, tools and infrastructure for production, post production, distribution, and archiving of motion pictures, television, commercials, and other media content.
