Hasta La Motion!

I spend a lot of my working life looking for great visual effects, animation and CG content. There’s a lot out there. I’m of course drawn to making ofs and studio and film profiles, particularly about visual effects, but it wasn’t until last year that I discovered a new kind of VFX content.

That’s when I got to attend Trojan Horse was a Unicorn (full disclosure: they paid). It was a stunning event held in Troia, Portugal at a summer resort that mixed art, design, visual effects, 3D and filmmaking. Both professionals from the industry and artists at all levels attended. But what’s presented at Trojan Horse was not ‘making ofs’ or studio profiles. As good as those can be, Trojan Horse, or THU, is about a lot more.

OK, what is THU about?

That’s a hard thing to describe. Personally, I found just about every speaker’s story an inspiration about why the industry is great and why it’s worth being in. That’s the thing that I could rarely find in online stories or even at other conference events. THU was just…different.

Are you just telling us to go to the conference?

I would be, if you can get a ticket. The allure of Trojan Horse is as much about who is attending as how few do – it’s limited to about 500 people and that makes it particularly intimate. But last year, the organizers tried something different and suddenly I had a new way to absorb this new kind of content I had discovered at the event.

THU TV

The ‘something different’ was THU TV, essentially a live stream of parts of the event and a way of watching the talks, interviews, masterclasses and purpose-made shows from Trojan Horse. An in-house team films the content and edits the content and you get to watch it.

I’ve watched many of the videos which are aimed at making you feel like you are there at Trojan Horse. And because I was there, I can say the videos definitely made me feel like I was there all over again. One reason is that the vids are professionally one – this is not some low-fi shaky cam production. It’s the next best thing to being there, especially if taking a week off and heading to Portugal is going to be tricky (let alone getting a ticket).

So what do you get?

What you subscribe to with THU TV is access to live coverage from Trojan Horse and then these shows that will be made at THU 2016. Just check out some of the ‘Knights’, as they’re called, already announced to be talking – these are the people who will appear on the shows. You also get to interact with the ‘Tribe’ – that’s the attendees – during Trojan Horse in September. And if you are in Portugal you can actually go to the recruitment day on September 21st.

THU TV is normally €100, but until August 12th it’s €75. If you got in as one of the first 100 sign-ups it was actually €50. Those prices aren’t bad for access to what I think is something really, really different from the normal range of VFX, CG and design stuff out there. And pretty good for content cravers like me.

There’s a lore more info about THU TV here: https://trojan-unicorn.com/tv