In a 4Talent special live event, we’ve put together the line-up for a stage at Gigbeth festival 2008, from 18:00 til midnight on 8th November 2008 at the Dragon Bar in the Barfly, Digbeth High Street, Birmingham. You can read all about this eclectic line-up of the best bands you’ve never heard of over here on the 4Talent Central site, including the winner of the 4Talent Awards 2008, music category, but we thought we’d blog here to let you know about not one, but two, competitions to win tickets.

• The first comp is sitting pretty with those doyens of the best niche music, Artrocker
• And the second comp is over on The Line Of Best Fit, you one-stop shop for all that’s good and pure in new music
• Plus BandWeblogs.com has a few more details on the acts…

Early ticketage is advised: you can get hold of £18 day tickets for the Saturday and £25 weekend tickets, plus check the full line-up of Gigbeth acts including the Sugarhill Gang and the Young Knives, over here on the Gigbeth site.

Keyboard Choir: from Brian Eno's 60th birthday party to the 4Talent Gigbeth stage in one easy move.

With the second annual 4Talent Mobile Games Pitch due to kick off this morning, here’s a quick run-down of the 9 contenders, who we whittled down from several hundred entries.

For those not familiar, in a nutshell this is a pitching competition in partnership with EA Mobile, Nokia and the Golden Joystick Awards, as part of the London Games Festival.

We asked 4Talent readers to throw us ideas for innovative, experimental games for mobile phones - and based on judges’ scores for originality, innovation, commercial appeal and technical feasibility, and in no particular order, here are the finalists:

Miles Boylan (22, from Preston)
Miles’ idea Snapshot pinpoints a player’s location with GPS, and then sets area-specific photographic tasks that can then be uploaded and rated by other users online.

Tobias Rowe (22, from Colchester)
In Tobias’ idea Finders Keepers, you’re an elusive cat burglar who must steal antiques from local museums and other players’ vaults via Bluetooth, while defending your own using bespoke puzzles and mini-games.

Nicola Depuis (28, from London)
Nicola’s idea I-Queu allows players to compare their IQ against an international playing community by setting each other questions, and working together to jump the virtual queue.

Steven Fraser (from Edinburgh)
Steven’s idea Street Art sees graffiti turf wars springing up across the world, with players manipulating photos into works of art on their phones, rating them online and challenging each other to claim the streets one by one.

Trevor Conway (49, from Belfast)
Trevor’s concept Alter-Ego places the player in a parallel existence affected by genuine real-world events and breaking news stories, making choices from the perspectives of those involved.

Matt Watkins (37, from Nottingham)
Matt’s idea Running Rings is a game of physical exertion using GPS, in which players literally run circles around each other to score points, annex space and reach a new level of networked global domination.

Dominic Brancaleone (25, from Bournemouth)
Dominic’s idea Treasure Hunt allows players to hunt for genuine loot by responding to text, photo and video clues, and can be personalised to create your own trail.

Robin Clarke (28, from London)
Robin’s idea Way of the Dodo is an adventure/puzzle game designed to encourage thinking about the natural world, in which players guide the last known colony of helpless birds to safety whilst sharing real-world info about conservation.

Hamad Hussain (27, from London)
In Hamad’s idea The Contract, players choose to be either a government agent or a sleeper, are given a unique key code and must then locate, identify, recruit or entrap the opposition, obtaining their code by whatever means possible.

Good luck to all the finalists: we’ll announce the winner on the blog soon!

It’s taken us 2 solid weeks, but we can now proudly announce the shortlists for the 4Talent Awards 2008 - 5 in each of the 20 categories.

We’ve quite simply been blown away by the quality across the board, and it’s been a real struggle getting down to that fortunate 100, who will be sent off to our illustrious judging panels over the next few weeks to select our final 20.

So here they are: massive congratulations if you’re amongst them, and please, don’t be disheartened if you’re not - stay across future opportunities with 4Talent and there’s always next year! Winners will be notified by 31 October.

Short Documentary
Pinny Grylls, 29, London
David O’Hara, 25, Scunthorpe
Poppie Skold, 26, London
Maria Andrade, 26, London
Laura Martin-Robinson, 28, London

Long Documentary
Fred Burns, 24, Sussex
Katja Roberts, 29 & Magnus Dennison, Newcastle
Tom Evans, 28, Oxford
Lorne Kramer, 25, Bristol
Stuart Kershaw, 28, Liverpool

Dramatic Writing
Ali Muriel, 28, London
Cosmo Wallace, 29, Glasgow
Carla Grauls, 29, London
Tim Price, 28, London
Stella Papamichael, 30, London

Dramatic Performance
Sarah Kempton, 22, London
Elizabeth Rainbow, 28, London
Emma Rigby, 19, Liverpool
Sagar Radia, 22, Middlesex
Helen Clapp, 25, London

Directing
Tom Marshall, 22, Middlesbrough
Adam Randall, 28, London
Dominic Leclerc, 29, Bradford
Robert Glassford, 29 & Timo Langer, West Lothian
Rob Sorrenti, 28, London

Comedy Writing
Felicity Carpenter, 27, London
Chris Grady, 29, Glasgow
Rose Heiney, 24, London
Christopher Wallace, 29, & Philip Hodgson,Tyne & Wear
Daniel Flay, 24 & Alastair Craig, Huntingdon

Comedy Performance
Anna Whelan, 23 & David Tynan, Wigan / Sheffield
Greg McHugh, 28, Glasgow
Vikki Stone, 25, London
Napoleon Ryan, 30, Kent
Eddie Kadi, 25, London

Presenting
Carly Lindon-Forrester, 23, Liverpool
Laura Marks, 22, Glasgow
Amelia Gildea, 23, Wiltshire
Ben Chancellor, 30, London
James Sherwood, 25, Kent

On-Air Radio
Alex Baker, 25, Birmingham
Adam Edworthy, 22, Coventry
Alex James Atkinson, 27, Manchester
Veena Virahsammy, 21, Barking
Steve Folland, 29, Hertfordshire

Off-Air Radio
Andy Ward, 23, Sussex
Simon Buschenfeld, 30, Bristol
Philip Dyer, 29, London
Matt Horne, 26 & Colin Greaves, Gateshead
Ann Scantlebury, 23, London

Music
Toby Trueman, 26 - The Icarus, Edinburgh
Oliver Harrison, 21 - Fossil Club, Bristol
Camille Davila, 29, Cambridgeshire
Louis Standard, 19 - Pinstripe, Avon
Iain Woods, 22, Brighton

Production Music
Ella Spira, 20, London
Blair Mowat, 22, Edinburgh
Chris Hanson, 26, London
Richard Mead, 29, Maidstone
Richard Bradley, 28, Sheffield

Music Video
Ian Smith, 26, Oxford
James Cook, 22, Durham
James Knott & James Curran, 26, Derby
Steven Quinn, 27, Belfast
James Willis, 23, Humberside

Innovation
Becki Burrows, 27, London
Jack Lenox, 21, Surrey
Kay Vasey, 29 & Jonny Emmanuel, London
Mike Young, 23, Hertfordshire
Phil Mundy, 27, Huddersfield

Multi-platform
Chi-chi Ekweozor, 29, Manchester
Dan Hon, 29, London
Steve Ellis, 26, Birmingham
Mike Cunsolo, 28, Sheffield
Claire-Frances Lennon, 25, Glasgow

Animation
Ian Wharton, 23 & Edward Shires, Preston
Mark Nute, 29, Gateshead
Jessica Cope, 24, North Yorkshire
Karen Penman, 28 & Liam Brazier, Essex
Cassiano Prado, 30, London

Journalism
Rob Sharp, 28, London
Hassan Ghani, 23, Slough
Natalie Whelan, 22, London
Lauren Carter, 23, Hertfordshire
Lee Coan, 29, Hertfordshire

Photography
Lucinda Chua, 23, Nottingham
Ellie Harvey, 22, London
Hal Sear, 24, Watford
Eleanor Hardwick, 15, Reading
Loubie-Lou photography, 30, Leicester

Multi-talented
Rob Madin, 22, Chesterfield
Oliver Lansley, 27, Surrey
James Roberts, 23, London
Allyn Lawson, 22, Warwickshire
Jamie Stone, 23, Edinburgh

Wildcard
Chris O’Shea, 27, London
Johanna Basford, 25, Dundee
David Procter, 25, London
Amy Winters, 24 & Kseniya Zagorodnyuk, London
Tanya Richam-Odoi, 27, Leeds

To hear Frankie’s pre-Bestival podcast with Rob Da Bank, click here.

Following on from our finalist announcement for Radio HaHa, here are some short biogs of the chosen 9. Many thanks to all those who took the time to submit their moments of comic genius.

Daniel Jamieson
Daniel is a 17-year-old film student from Edinburgh. His submission, AJ and Finnegan, is a spoof American cop show following partners AJ, a young hot-shot rookie, and Finnegan, a gritty old-hand maverick as they fight back threats to national security while constantly arguing about it. It was created in his college’s recording studio, and Daniel directs, storylines, edits and adds sounds to each episode, while allowing actors to improvise some real comedy gold.

Jenni Armstrong
Jenni is a stand-up comedian who writes sitcoms for radio and television, and makes comedy shorts. She uses a DIY aesthetic to enhance the surreal comedy of her work, and has filmed a mini-series called Jenni Shows and Tells which can be viewed on YouTube. In May, Jenni did a comedy review in the style of this show for 4Laughs. Jenni’s submissions for Radio HaHa include Lebacuppacoffee, a mock promo for a Lebanese coffee shop, and the surreal skit The Adventures of Gok Wan.

Lauren O’Reilly
Lauren is a 22-year-old postgraduate student in scriptwriting and drama school graduate who aims to write scripts for radio. Her idea for Radio HaHa, The Race, is an inner space-style comedy skit following sperm as they compete to fertilise an egg following a drunken encounter. Lauren’s inspiration for the piece struck following a night out where Lauren found herself watching a group of drunken men dance terribly and asked herself, “You were the one that reached the egg first?”

Madeleine Brettingham
Madeleine is a radio and television comedy writer whose work has featured on several Radio 4 programmes, including Recorded for Training Purposes, Fordham and Lipson and The News Quiz. She’s interested in comedy that provides a new take on the world, and her submission, Goth Town, poses questions such as ‘What’s it like having to exude satanic majesty while you’re buying bogroll from CostCutter, or visiting your nan?’ Goth Town follows the story of a misfit brother and sister who live in a grimy townhouse near Morrisons, and their struggle to stand out in a grey world.

Richard Cray
Richard is a former radio commercial producer who, in his words, “Left the industry to get a proper job.” He’s been a regular on the London comedy circuit, produces podcasts for Comedy 365 and is co-producing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Richard’s submission is a compilation of spoof radio ads and promos: The Dogs Must Be Carried, Top 50, and Liar News.

Nicola Depuis
After studying Radio & Theatre Production, Nicola worked as a journalist for seven years, during which time she hosted a weekly radio show. A finalist in the Galway Film Fleadh pitching competition this year, her first screenplay was recently optioned and she’s currently working on a studio assignment. Tubescent is a radio sitcom that gives a comic insight into the lives, worries and conversations of teenage friends aimlessly riding the public transport systems of their city.

Richard Kelly
Richard is a former teacher who is now focusing on a writing career. His sit-com, The Good Defenders, is a comical take on the traditional superhero story following a team of B-list heroes that protect Earth from rogue celebrities, with some hilarious consequences.

Andy Ward
A recent Keele University graduate, Andy Ward presented, produced and wrote several popular university radio shows while studying there and has recently been trying his hand at stand-up comedy. His submission, Spooky Times, is a surreal ghost story that follows a man who encounters particularly bad problems whilst attempting to prepare a barbecue, juxtaposing the presentation style and atmosphere of a serious ghost story with a comic writing style.

Stephen Yorke & Ben Harris
Stephen and Ben are a duo who write TV radio and press ads at separate advertising agencies in London. The pair recently decided to collaborate on their own comedy pieces. and came up with the idea of creating podcasts to bring their comedy to the world. Their programme, Funpot, is recorded at home on their computer and comprises 5-minute slots of the pair ‘trying to make each other laugh’ by creating comic situations and playing off one another.

As you may have noticed, over the last few months we’ve been calling for up-and-coming comics to fling their funny bits in our direction for a unique competition with E4 Radio, called Radio HaHa. The response was incredible: we had literally thousands of audio clips and scripts snippets piling into our inbox.

It took us a little while, but we have our 9 finalists. They’ll be wending their wily ways to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival next week for a day of intensive workshops, followed by a nerve-racking pitch to a panel of E4 Radio commissioners, who have pledged to match at least one of them with an independent production company to take the idea to broadcast.

So here they are:

Daniel Jamieson for his shrewd spoof of US police drama
Jenni Armstrong for her delightfully surreal Gok Wan adventures
Lauren O’Reilly for her sticky sperm sketch The Race
Nicola Depuis for teen-public-transport-com Tubescent
Madeleine Brettingham for Goth Town’s dark humour
Richard Kelly for his off-the-wall take on the superhero genre
Stephen Yorke for some witty on-air banter
Andy Ward for his dryly hilarious Spooky Times
Richard Cray for taking off local radio cliches with tongue firmly in cheek

You can also read more detailed biogs of all of the above.

More to come from the finalists: watch this space. We’ll be following the ideas through the development process in the next issue of 4Talent magazine, and they’ll even be featuring in a special episode of The Fix podcast, which launched with the first episode yesterday.

Another week, another festival microblog. The weekend just gone saw 4Talent head to Birmingham’s Custard Factory to bring you Twitter updates from the small but noisily formed Supersonic, featuring a dream line-up of sludgey, grungey, kraut-rocking noise for those who like their music uncompromisingly large of sound and eclectic of source. For those who couldn’t make it, we’ll be rolling out our interviews with teen screamers Rolo Tomassi, local lads Einstellung and the ever popular Fuck Buttons on 4Talent Central over the coming week.

But forget Supersonic for a moment and cast your mind back all of three weeks to grande dame of festivals Glastonbury, where amidst the excitement of secret gigs from Franz Ferdinand, being roped in at the last minute to interview James Blunt for Oxfam, and doing our bit for the planet by taking tea to Oxfam volunteers in a battered jeep, we just about found the time to run a live Twitter competition from the festival site.

We’re now pleased to be able to announce the winner of said competition, who with the best answer to our Oxfam-sponsored question “What gets your knickers in a twist?” will be joining us at sold-out Bestival in September to interview an artist for a 4Talent podcast. The winner, 19 year old Frankie Ward, persuaded us with an answer we couldn’t agree with more. So what, exactly, gets Frankie’s knickers in a twist? That would be: “Interviewers asking bands who they’re doing, not what they’re doing.”

Currently on a work experience placement with BBC Kent, Frankie is an aspiring journalist whose festival experiences this summer have already included standing in for teen folk sensation Laura Marling (pictured below) on stage with the Mystery Jets at Lounge on the Farm. Watch this space for her 4Talent Bestival podcast in September…

Laura Marling at Glastonbury getting her knickers in a twist.

Words: Nick Carson
Images: Courtesy of Framestore CFC & Ninja Theory

They were once a printmaker, a NASA shuttle engineer, a sound technician and a software developer. Nibbled by the CGI bug, they changed tack - and left in their wake the likes of Monsters Inc, Batman Begins and The World is Not Enough. Now they’re giving something back: 4Talent magazine grills the battle-hardened tutors at Escape Studios about the many facets of computer graphics.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

Escape’s manifesto is simple: “to provide the global computer graphics community with the best training, technology and talent in the world.” While in-house tutor and recently-crowned Maya Master Lee Danskin insists that there’s “no such thing as a 3D industry” per se, one thing that film, TV, games and commercials share is a voracious thirst for CGI production talent. It’s just the way it’s applied that differs.

Character design

“Character design is about injecting life. You may not be able to draw, but if you can sculpt then it’s much easier,” suggests Escape’s Character guru Nick Savy, whose proudest spot on his showreel is an indistinguishable 3D stunt-double for Christian Bale in Batman Begins.

Playing God with the caped crusader may sound like a small boy’s dream - and Nick admits he’s spent his life sketching comic books and cartoons - but he’s keen to point out that character building, like animation, involves a huge amount of repetition. Woe betides a rigger who puts a bone out of place.

“You have to be precise when building your rig. I once purposely made my students do a rig wrong, and then re-build it,” he smiles. “They were very pissed off, but that repetition is so important - for Batman we did 62 versions of the rig and 38 iterations of the muscle system.” It’s all-too-tempting to quip that character building builds character - although you may well risk repetitive strain disorder in the process.

Nick’s route has been something of a rambling one. When in a band in the mid-80s he became obsessed with synthesizers, mixed some tracks in the studio and ended up working as a sound engineer for five years. It was helping his brother on a corporate video in ‘92 that first broke him into his current trade: “I learned animation; he paid me with a computer,” he states simply. “I’d never touched computers ‘til then.”

When Sega were setting up a new studio, Nick managed to weasel his self-dubbed “crappy” ‘folio in front of them. One small segment made the difference: “A random animation of a psychedelic hippy. He had a pointy hat with a sphere on the end, surrounded by Saturn’s rings. When he bent forward it rotated, dangling in time - it was the secondary animation that caught their eye.”

His seat-of-the-pants journey makes for exhausting listening. He worked in games for five years; was interviewed for Glassworks while his wife was giving birth; eventually became head of the FMV (full motion video) dept, and then moved to into commercials.

After three more years he ended up at Pinewood Studios as a modeller. “They asked if anyone had experience of rigging, and ended up making me Head of Characters. Then I was taken on at Double Negative to work on Batman, where I peaked.”

His first film project, it was a hefty 8-month stint. “By the end I was bored crapless,” he chuckles. “But it’s the only one I actually got my name on the credits: usually there’s a big turnaround of staff - lots of freelancers. People get missed off.”

As the story goes, director Chris Nolan was dubious that a digital Batman would be convincing enough on the big screen, and wanted as much stunt work in camera as possible. Nick was part of a team that set about creating screen tests to be projected next to live action. Christian Bale was body-scanned in full costume, and then the resulting 3D model was equipped with a complex rig, coloured with a bespoke shading system and key-frame animated - no motion capture was used. Thankfully, Nolan was impressed.

“You’re interpreting the world into 3D - not the mechanics, but how something moves,” Nick concludes. “Modelling and skinning is very artistic: how the crease works when an arm bends; how material crumbles under the armpit; how the muscle inflates. It’s how it looks, not necessarily how it works. Then it’s up to the animator to make it move.”

Animation

Seeing animated characters interact with humans in ‘80s toon-gangster flick Who Framed Roger Rabbit sparked creative impulses in Jeff Pratt, an engineer at the time. He opted for a change, went to art school for four years, and fortuitously ended up at the doors of Pixar just as they were gearing up for a second run at Toy Story.

“They’d had story problems, and it was on hold,” he recalls. “At the time I was the fourteenth animator hired; they thought I’d be one of the last. There were 40 in the end.” In such a large team, and with CGI animation requiring increasingly realistic movement, an aptitude in engineering helped him specialise.

“I like the technical aspects,” he admits, small surprise given he started out tinkering with space shuttles for NASA. “Take the spring in Slinky Dog – I was the only animator that could understand how to make it work convincingly, using sine waves and so on.”

And while the traditional process of sketching scenes frame by frame has been replaced by tweaking rigs and walk cycles, roles are also split differently. “For hand-drawn animation, a team is assigned to a certain character to make sure it’s drawn consistently – when you’re working on computer, that’s all defined already,” he points out.

“On a production like Toy Story or Monsters Inc there’s a team of up to 40 animators – you can’t have two animators on one character while the other 38 sit around twiddling their thumbs. You work on the shot as a whole.”

With the whole team dipping into a central pool of characters, it’s essential to get the puppet controls set up properly in the first place. “A modeller and a rigger will work closely with the animators to develop a character and test it,” confirms Jeff. “The more the animator knows about rigging, the better: it helps to understand the whole process.”

Fundamental to all forms of animation is the walk cycle, and as with the character rig, this will be crafted first. “A team of animators will spend two weeks honing it down to minute details, and then it’s used by everyone in production,” he reveals. “You’re always improving: walk cycles are unique to each character, and help to define personality.”

With rival studios pushing each other’s standards higher by the day, it’s crucial to stay across all new developments – and Pixar provides its animators with bespoke preparatory software that’s updated for each production. So with a clutch of seminal CGI masterpieces behind him, what were the peaks?

“For me, milestones are technical ones,” he confesses, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background: “the fur in Monsters Inc; the clothes in The Incredibles. It’s getting close to absolute realism now: motion water works pretty well off-the-shelf; clothing still has its bugs but it’s pretty good.”

So how important were those four years studying tomes of art history, traditional drawing, photography, colour theory and the like? “It’s useful, but none of that is required for animation,” Jeff admits. “A polished 20-second piece will get you a job, not whether you can draw.”

Games

“At some point in the future, the visual quality of Film and Games will be indistinguishable,” foresees Simon Fenton, ex-Sony Computer Entertainment and now creator and tutor of the centre’s Games courses. “But there’s a real demarcation of roles. In film, you could just be a character modeller. In games, until recently a senior artist would do character, environment, assets, everything. Now those roles are starting to separate.”

Equipped with a Fine Art degree in Painting & Printmaking, Simon might not seem like the archetypal gamer – although it was the printmaking process that first got him interested in mechanical reproduction, not so far away from rendering thousands of frames to produce an animation sequence.

“That was 15 years ago, when silicon graphics machines were the price of a house,” he recalls fondly. “The only way to get access to the software was as a runner at a post-production house. So that’s what I did. I taught myself Alias and Softimage in the evenings: I was actually sleeping in the studio to get access to the machines.”

At a similar time, Lee Danskin was starting his career at Alias Research, putting the wheels in motion for the first ever version of Maya. With a visual effects background – he went on to co-found Smoke & Mirrors 3D, before becoming Deputy Head of 3D at influential London post-house MPC – he speaks with a helicopter view.

“Yes, the finished products are converging, but the way you apply tools in the pipeline is very different,” he reasons: clearly the language of a man who’s dealt with budgets and workflows as well as the creative coalface. “You’ll never have to master camera tracking in games, or compositing – they talk about tri-stripping, and how many texels you have.”

Creatively, an understanding of film is useful: “The language of cinematography will come into gaming,” Lee admits. “They’re starting to apply the process of a real-world camera to a virtual camera, so you’re not always bumping into walls jerkily. But you’ll never have to reverse-engineer a virtual camera as you do in the effects industry.”

Particularly with the growth of hi-def consoles, there’s never been higher demand for stunning 3D game graphics – and Simon asserts that the volume of work has quadrupled in recent years. “Studios are outsourcing to India and China to meet the volume, but this can be an unhappy experience if the quality isn’t up to scratch,” he goes on. “As a junior artist in the UK you have to hit the ground running, specialise, and raise your game to make it worth paying you more.”

Win £10,000 of animation training >

Last year we ran a competition to design us a sting.

The winner is Conor Breen, a 3D animator with a day job in commercial effects, and a surreal sense of dark humour in his personal work. His original entry depicted a vinyl Klu Klux Klan toy wobbling across a kitchen workshop towards what appears to be a flaming cross - later revealed to be a neon 4Talent logo, shimmering in the light of the gas hob. Tails of its robes flashing red as if on fire, it trundles against a coffee cup and meekly tips over.

Working with 4Talent and 4Creative to develop a fresh idea, in line with our new marketing campaign - in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king - he came up with this.

Enjoy.

Most of the 50 entrants hailed from the UK, but others from as far afield as Finland, Portugal and the US. It was a rich and broad range of experience levels and approaches, from hand-drawn animation to fully-rendered 3D; from students to small design agencies, freelance animators and individuals working within larger effects or animation companies.

A panel from 4Talent, 4Creative, MPC and 3D World and Computer Arts whittled a shortlist down to 5… the other four runners up comprised:

YIW Design: A glowing 4-shaped meteor crashes to earth and bursts into life as a vibrant illustrated tree, which then sprouts mini-TVs that smash into people’s living rooms

Dariusz Sebastian Burdon: Stamped with the 4Talent logo, the tube becomes a rollercoaster that rides around London’s landmarks

Rosa Maria Tell Velez: A young designer works on a project, and drops of dye fall from his hand to the paper. He examines his palm in surprise and creative ‘life lines’ burst forth, inking out the 4Talent logo

Richard DeDominici: A man walks down the street dressed as a ‘4′ made from cardboard boxes

Pretty eclectic, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Congratulations to the lucky competition winners from TEN4 issue 8:

First Cut Software & Training Course
Jamie Hooper

Pure Animation
Sarah Dickie

Peep Show DVDs
Liz Biggs
Yuri Melo
Janie Lake
Sandi Rai

Watch out for more competitions coming soon.