While browsing Variety.com, I came across an article on Illumination Entertainment and their first CG film, “Despicable Me”.  For those of you not familiar, Illumination Entertainment is the CG animation division of Universal.  Almost two years ago, Universal convinced Chris Melandri, former head of 20th Century Fox’ animation division, to run this new company.

The logline for Despicable Me goes something like this:  Groo, a deplorable man who masterminds the mother of all heists when he plots to steal the moon. Egged on by an evil mother, Groo finds one obstacle in his way: a trio of orphan girls who temporarily come under his care and won’t leave.

Chris was at least partially responsible for turning Blue Sky into the company it is today.  He is more than qualified to do the same for Universal.  What isn’t quite clear to me, is whether Illumination Entertainment will develop the projects and outsource the production, or form a new animation studio in LA.  Hopefully someone can enlighten us shortly.

If you’d like to read the Variety article, you can find it here.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are already aware that Universal has jumped into the CG feature game with a co-production with Framestore to make “Tale of Despereaux”.  I’m not sure what the deal is between these companies, but I wonder if Universal will continue to hook up with other companies like this, now that Illumination Ent seems to be rolling.

UPDATE: I did a little digging and it appears that IE will have a core team in LA and most likely outsource the bulk of the production work.

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.

For quite a while now I haven’t been submitting Till Death Do Us Part to festivals.  As unfortunate as it is, I’ve been so busy that I can’t find the time to deal with the somewhat tedious process.   I won’t go so far as to say that I won’t submit it to anymore festivals ever.  It just won’t be happening very often.

What now?  I’m not exactly sure.  I always had thoughts of putting it on DVD and selling it ultra cheap, but honestly, I’m not sure if I can find the time for that.  There is a lot involved and I certainly don’t have the time to market it as needed.  Another possibility is to find a distributor.  That may not be a bad idea if I can get accepted.  And lastly, I could just put it on the net for everyone to see.  I’ll be making some decisions soon.

I learned quite a bit through this experience.  I’ll share probably the most important piece of info with all of you making your own shorts.  Make them short!  Twelve minutes is too long.  I talked with quite a few programmers from various festivals that really liked TDDUP, but it was too long to fit in their show.  If you embark on the journey of making your own film (and I can’t recommend it enough), please do yourself a favor and make it under 5 minutes.  Not only will it be less work, but you’re more likely to get it into festivals.

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!