What: KRE8 Studio
Where: Various venues
When: Aug. 9 through Aug. 18
Information: kre8studio.com
Tracey Moore is at the helm of a nine-day series of seminars and sessions that she believes will shape the future of film, television and online video creators in Victoria. Self-empowerment is her end goal, and she hopes to achieve it through a KRE8 Studio, which gets underway today and runs through Aug. 18 at various locations.
“It’s about taking control of where you are in your knowledge base and then expanding it,” Moore said. “To be the master of the tech and use it to create a career.”
Moore designed KRE8 Studio to give those with lots of interest but little know-how a chance to learn first-hand from veterans of the industry. “It’s really a place to get you motivated, get you going, and get you creating with the technology you already own. You become a creative force in your own field, so you don’t have to wait for somebody else.”
KRE8 Studio is offering sessions in fields ranging from voice-acting and makeup to motion capture and animation. Moore, an actor and singer, will handle a voice-acting class, which is fitting; during the 1990s, she voiced the titular character in the groundbreaking animé series Sailor Moon, and has voice credits in the My Little Pony, Care Bears, Super Mario Bros., Strawberry Shortcake, and X-Men animated franchises.
She will be joined by a roster of fellow instructors that includes Charles Porlier, a two-time Emmy Award winner who worked on makeup and effects for The Big Friendly Giant, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and X Men-2; John Stocker, a commercial voice actor who has worked on Care Bears, Super Mario Bros., The Real Ghostbusters, and Peg + Cat; and Ezra Istiroti, a stop-motion animator and digital designer who has worked with McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.
Moore is also bringing Vancouver’s Beyond Capture motion capture studio to the Victoria for sessions that will animate each participant — through a full-body motion capture suit — and turn them into computer-generated characters. “There’s a lot of platforms available and there’s a lot of creativity here in Victoria. There’s a lot of tech and there’s a lot of young people in tech. Instead of working for someone else, you can actually start creating. You want them to have enough information so that when they walk away [from their KRE8 Studio sessions] they know where to go next.”
Moore is particularly excited about the Day of the Jedi event she has planned for Aug. 16, with three events keyed at giving participants superhero experience in a sessions populated by martial arts, axe-throwing, and archery.
“You will get the idea of embodying a hero, and then try those skills in the motion capture studio. You will become a virtual character,” Moore said. “You need to know what it is to be a hero. Those are the stories movies are telling nowadays. If you don’t know how that feels, you won’t know how to design properly.”
The classes aren’t necessarily designed for hopefuls wanting to be in front of the camera. In fact, Moore said those with dreams of writing code for video games or working in computer graphics in film will find the scene-play classes valuable. “You have to have first-hand experience with the technology before you can envision what you are going to do with that technology.”
Moore knows her philosophy will eventually bear fruit with some of the very students taking classes during the next week-and-a-half. One of her former Victoria students has gone on to become the popular YouTube vlogger Kawaii Kunicorn, whose tech-friendly channel has 274 million views from nearly 960,000 subscribers — totals which have nearly doubled in the past year alone.
“We got to shake ourselves out of the idea of: ‘I buy this.’ It should be: ‘I make this,’ ” Moore said.
