Archive for the ‘General’ Category

While stumbling around on the internet, I found a press release from Intel about a “Mass Animation” project being sponsored by Face Book, Reel FX, and Aniboom.  The concept seems interesting enough.  Animators will be able to use Maya to animate shots for a short.  The director Yair Landau will (I’m assuming) select the best versions of each shot to be used in the final piece.  Reel FX will take the work and (again, I’m assuming) do the lighting, rendering, compositing, and editing.

Interesting concept.  Might be worth keeping an eye on.  You can read more here.

Carl is a character in the upcoming Pixar film “Up”. It appears that someone at Pixar saw my short and copied my character Harold for their movie! Right down to the bowtie!! Where’s my lawyer?

Just kidding of course. Carl is a great looking character, I love the short little guy and his angular face and huge glasses. My original plan was to have Harold wearing a suit like Carl, but I didn’t have the patience to work out some sort of clothing dynamics or deformations for something that complicated. Funny how some of the original character designs of Harold were more angular, but somewhere along the line they smoothed out and became rounded. I really like that look. Pixar’s char designers did a good job.

I don’t know what to expect from this movie, but it looks promising. And I only say that because of the character designs that I’ve seen so far. That isn’t exactly the best measuring stick, but it is something to grasp onto until I see more.

I’ve been asked to create a CG character and make it look like stop motion. It is quite a unique challenge. Something I’ve never done before, but very interested to successfully pull off!

Pepper Films asked me to come up with a story, supervise the modeling, do the rigging, and finally perform the layout and animation. The story, modeling and rigging has been finished. I’m currently doing layout and the first pass of animation. So far I’ve been ignoring the idea that it has to look like stopmo and working exactly how I would on any other CG project. It is really starting to come together.

As usual, my workflow is to not only do the layout/animation in Maya, but also the editing. All the shots are timed and edited in this software using various mel scripts. Once the short is determined, the individual shots will be broken out and animated in separate scene files. Then, from that point on, the assembly of the short will be very straightforward in the editing package.

Making the animation look like stopmo, with all its quirky problems will either be the easiest thing I’ve ever done, or the most difficult. I’ll have to get back to you on that!

Boy, if you don’t keep on top of things, these spammers will ruin your virtual life.  It seems that one or more were able to hack into my blog and upload html pages advertising their crap.  I didn’t even notice what was going on until I did a Google search on my own site.

I’ve since deleted the material and upgraded to the newest version of WordPress.  I’ve taken a vow to stay up to date on these things and hopefully this won’t be a problem in the future.

As a by product, Google has removed most mention of my name and website from their search engine.  How great is that?  I’ve sent them a letter asking them to “reconsider” and explained what happened.  Let’s only hope that they allow me back into their searches.

Fun Fun

On Mark Mayerson’s great blog, he points us towards an interview of Brad Bird (use the username of “pjs@mailinator.net” and password of “142″).  Now, this isn’t your standard interview about animation, but it contains a ton of juicy information.  Especially for those of us interested in more of how various people/companies approach management and how their directorial philosophies fit within.

I’ve never worked with Mr. Bird, but after reading this, I can appreciate how he pushes his teams and is open to comments from everyone.  Being confident enough to be able to listen to others and implement their ideas when they’re better is a clear indication of a good leader.  I’ve worked with a lot of various directors in my years and clearly the better ones are those who like Brad listen to those around them.

Another interesting portion of the read centered around The Incredibles, and how they settled on camera angles early on the process.  This provided the team the ability to build for the camera.  Meaning, if something wasn’t seen, it didn’t need to be made.  On many CG productions, so much work goes into modeling/shading objects and environments that will never be seen.  It is simply done in case the director decides to swing the camera around in a direction that wasn’t initially planned for.  These are the type of things that can lower budgets and something that could be more widely implemented.

I suggest anyone and everyone to read this interview, it is not only interesting, but could potentially help you in your job, whatever that may be.