Disney recently did a traditional piece of animation. YAY! This short is titled "The Little Match Girl". It is beautiful both visually, musically and well...I don't wanna ruin it so I'll leave it at that.Today's world isn't very far removed from the one represented and it does us good to remember that every now and then.
...I was fixing to post a link to it, but it looks like Disney told YouTube.com to pull it. If it pops up again, I'll post it. But if you get a chance to see it, do.
Update - You can find the short on The Little Mermaid DVD (most recent release)
So, I'm going to be teaching Advanced Animation at an art college in town starting next week. I've been working on prep for a while now and one of those things I'm doing is looking for good free rigs I can glean through to point my students to. Here's my current list, if you've got more, please send em my way. Thanks!
A bunch of guys from work and I went to Colombia university downtown last night for a little screening of a short from a certain company we all know and love. It's the Chicago film festival this weekend and will be screened on Saturday there.
The seed of the story is alien's driver's ed and Pixar quality hilarity ensues.
The director of the short was there for a Q&A, short talk and to screen it. The director was really funny and showed us a lot of stuff. The shaders they used for the "gel" bodies are deceptively amazing. You don't even notice how sweet it is while you're watching it, but seeing a turn around on the characters made the complexity amazing. Another sweet tech thing was the jiggle factor. They've got some sort of tech for pretty much impacting a character and seeing how the jiggle cascades through the body.
HOLY CRAP I loved this short. I think it is my favorite short to come from the studio. It was absolutely hysterical, the timing was perfect, the design was beautiful...I can't wait to see it again when it screens with Ratatoulie next June. If you can find a way to see it before then...
First, the sigh - My freelance gig is completely rendered, composited and template setup for the client. All I have to do now is a few promotional things for the DVD cover, advertising, behind the scenes, etc. Holy moly am I ready to be done.
Now for the movie. Earlier this week, one of the guys invited us to see The Ant Bully at the IMAX. His girlfriend had a lead on getting premiere passes through her work. Very little arm twisting was necessary to get me on board. So, Tuesday after work we headed to the Navy Pier and got a bite to eat at healthy and wholesome McDonald's. A 10 pack of chicken nuggets, fries and a diet coke later I was lethargically rarin' to go. I don't eat fast food very often at all anymore. Something in my system decided a few years ago to punish me every time I surrendered to the greasy caloric gluttony.
Punish me it does.
We then headed to the movie and received our swank 3d shades...
Jae, me, Randy
Jae's girlfriend likes to take pics and was kind enough to share. The movie was a lot better than I thought it would be. The animation was very good - a lot higher quality than Jimmy Neutron and was a pleasant surprise. The lighting, sets and art direction were nice takes on themes that had been done before. Two other ant movies done before covered a lot of ground but this film was able to stay out of their wakes for the most part. The 3d effect was very cool as they actually rendered the shots twice (one for each eye). When I saw Chicken Little in 3d last fall I was a bit disappointed by their implementation. It felt more like a children's story book pop up book in motion then true 3d perspective. Another nice surprise was that the director of the film was at the premiere and the kids and parents asked some funny questions. There were one or two more technical questions but for the most part it was just fun stuff.
Someone did some pretty cool little comparison of animation reuse in Disney films. I didn't notice any but maybe one of these but had just chopped it up to perhaps to some Deja Vu'. This is prolly pretty uninteresting to any but a fellow animation nut. Reusing work seems to make pretty good sense to me. Good animation is good animation.
Wow, things have been a little crazy round here, I've got a lot of catching up to do. A couple weeks back I went and saw Andrew Peterson in concert up in Rockford. It was excellent. However, I have to take issue with the state of Illinois having FIVE tolls over a span of 80 some odd miles. However, I then ended up sitting with a nice young couple from up north who had driven about five hours to be there. This put my measly toll paying in perspective.
This past weekend, my cousin Jon and his girlfriend Tabitha came in to town and stayed with me till Thursday. They're moving up here in a few months with some friends to take a shot at Second City. Speaking of which, on Tuesday, Jon got us some tickets to go to the show. So, they picked me up after work and we headed downtown and had a great time looking for a parking spot for thirty minutes. Our wait was rewarded with a broken meter spot 50 yards from Second City.
Score.
When we got to the door, there was a sign on the door that said there was a panel discussion on "Censorship" going on with Dino Stamatopoulos and some guy from Cartoon Network who's name I can't recall. I remember Dino's name because Tabitha and Jon both were about as excited at seeing his name as I'd be to see Glen Keane giving a paneled discussion on character animation.
We had some time to kill before Second City started, so we went to it. They started off by showing an episode of Moral Orel - Starmatopoulos' creation. This one hadn't made it to TV yet because they needed to ease the audience into ever increasing, what could be called, sacrilege. I could understand why they needed to wait. Jon and Tab had showed me an episode the night before which I tolerated rather than enjoyed so you may understand why I wasn't exactly excited about the discussion. However, I enjoyed it very much. I wish we could have stayed longer. After listening to Dino speak, I wasn't so much offended as sad at some of the honest commentaries buried (though rather deeply) in his extreme satire of the Christian faith - or more poinently, Americanized Christianity. One of the things he said was that Jesus would be appalled at the"f@#%$d up mess" Christians had turned Christianity into. On that point, I can't honestly disagree though I would probably phrase it a little differently:) Through all of Dino's gruffness, deep down I saw a frustrated guy who desperately wants to believe in God. I maybe wrong, but that was my impression. Sadly, about forty five minutes into it, we had to leave. All that being said, I wouldn't want any kids I was raising watching it. Definitely a satire for adults (though not this one).
Second City was a sketch based 2 hour comedy show that was a fun ride. The humor was a little more blue state heavy then balanced, but this is Chicago. I'm looking forward to going back and seeing Jon and Tabitha up there one day soon.
Things have been moving along slower than I'd like on my current freelance gig so I'm hoping to make up some time this weekend. Work has been a lot of fun this past week. Scott and I are developing our own facial rig and it's challenging work that is a lot of fun as well. It's a heck of a lot more enjoyable than cleaning up motion capture data:)