gareth bouch :: stuff & things

Today’s a special day. Yep, it’s someone’s birthday.
And no I’m not talking about former MotoGP 125cc and current World Superstock 1000 rider Pere Tutusaus – happy birthday Tutu, by the way – No, I’m talking about my own baby VROOM MEDIA which turns one today.

It’s going to be a day like any other really – I’m in the middle of a raft of wireframing for an iPhone application for a travel company, and also doing some printwork design for CBBC, Children’s BBC. So it’s going to be a long and busy day. But that’s good. And it’s something I’m very thankful for after a year of kicking off a completely new business in somewhat tough times. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a MotoGP fan and an iPhone (or iPod touch) user then one thing that you really should put on your device is the MotoGP 2010 game.

It’s a fantastic 3D experience featuring the 17 riders from the 2010 MotoGP grid including Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa, and comes with the official bikes and all 18 tracks which make up this year’s calendar. There are a host of other excellent features too which make this a must-have for both gamers and MotoGP fans. Championship mode allows players to compete for the 2010 World Championship, with two camera angles giving amazing views and acceleration controls that replicate the lean angle of the bikes through accessible handling. Racing like a professional allows players to unlock all 18 circuits, and the game’s iPod library support function allows an individual soundtrack to be created.

When you put a game like this on your iPhone it’s very easy to just dive in and enjoy the experience, but given my interest in things like design and what happens to bring the sport and everything that goes with it to the fans I wanted to find out a bit more about the game and what it takes to create and deliver such a piece of work. So I had a Q&A with Tone Brennan from I-play, the producer of MotoGP 2010 Game for iPhone and iPod touch.
It’s a fascinating insight into just how much goes into developing and delivering a game, and a reminder that it’s very easy to take this kind of work for granted… Read the rest of this entry »

This news kind of falls somewhere between shameless self-promotion and genuinely useful stuff for MotoGP fans. So I’ll try to sound really really altruistic and say that it’s definitely the latter, and tell you about the new improved MotoGPLinks.com…

As I – and friends and colleagues at Vroom Media – run a few MotoGP and motorsport related websites, we’ve often found it important to have loads of different sources at our fingertips. It was this need that originally drove the build and launch of MotoGPLinks.com – a site we hoped could become the ultimate web directory for MotoGP fans around the world.

Basically, that’s what it has become – and it goes far beyond MotoGP too; taking in many other championships and country events.
Its main focus however remains MotoGP itself – all three classes, and all the rider, team and news sites related to them, along with all key blogs, forums and other sites out there that could possibly interest the true MotoGP fan. Official bodies, merchandise – MotoGPLinks.com pretty much has it all.

Nonetheless it came time recently to look again at its whole build and structure, and I’m really chuffed to say that the newly relaunched version is now fully live and up and running – bigger and better than ever, more user friendly, and still the best directory out there for MotoGP and bikesport fans.

So next time you’re needing to track down a MotoGP related site – official, unofficial, whatever… then go straight to MotoGPLinks.com and give it a go. And if you know of any sites that *aren’t* on there, then click the “Submit Site” button and make sure they get listed.

Here’s a fairly random clip it’s high time I posted.
It’s something I filmed years ago on 8mm. The long story is that I was writing “Rivercity” at the time, which puts it mid to late nineties – and I wanted to grab as much visual reference and inspiration as possible; ways to describe colours, textures, movement etc – that communicated the atmosphere of the Old Town as evocatively as possible.
I had a certain aesthetic in mind and along with Polaroids, standard snaps and scribbles, I took a load of 8mm footage as well – I just love something about the fuzziness, the saturation of colours, the depth of contrast and the strange sense of movement. The plan was to use all this material to look at and to help get my head around how to articulate Hull’s very particular ‘down but beautiful’ vibe from the time.

So here’s some of the bits I rather liked in conveying the ambience of the place – I filmed some of the ripple shots upside down as I thought they’d look just a tiny bit odd (as if there’s something wrong but you can’t quote figure out what). And now I’ve ifnally cobbled it together into a clip, I avoided any kind of special edits whatsoever, left it completely linear, and added “Sketchpad With Trumpet And Voice” from Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to the Alan Parker film “Birdy” over the top (for no better reason than it’s fab).

Rivercity Scenes from Gareth Bouch on Vimeo.

Formula One car liveries haven’t been up to much in recent years. They’ve barely improved – if at all – since Motormouth’s 2006 review, and certainly the Brawn GP livery; last year’s championship winner let’s remember, was a shocker. Absolutely pitiful.

Some good signs as we head into 2010 however, with Red Bull (one of the honourable exceptions usually) and McLaren joined by a beautifully warm yellow Renault (nodding right back to their first days in F1 in the late 70s and early 80s – although it’s also strangely reminiscent of the Jordan B&H “Buzzin Hornets” livery), a definitely more attractive Ferrari, and a return to the grid for “British Racing Green” all over the bodywork of new entrants Lotus (although there’s a certain degree of irony here as the team’s Malaysian owned).
Have a look at the pics, they’re very reassuring… cleaner, leaner bodywork, simpler colour schemes, and more differeniated branding.

Let’s hope the racing is of the same quality…