Interview with Brad Bird AND Ratatouille clips!

Check it out!

Great behind the scenes stuff and dailies stuff. Sweetness!

Disney's Rapunzel Unbraided Footage!

Been dying to see this in motion for some time. Thanks to Ray for the find.

Final(ish) design...

Thanks for the comments. I've gotten some feedback from some other friends too. So without further ado- two very slight variations of a theme...

#6

#7

The header image will rotate randomly much like my current site. Also, for those of you looking for cool tools for sites, I think I'm going to use this flash portfolio thingy which I learned of from my very talented friend's portfolio.

Now, to just find some time to actaully make a site...

Great Cg Look and Fun Animation:)

This guy (Manu Jarvinen) has some talent. Check out his work.

Need to waste some time?

Lots of fun opportunities here from the gang at Aardman:) Click the vid to go to youTube to see googles more.

...pun intended.

Ratatouille Clip

Take a look before it gets yanked offline!

Weekends Rock...

It's been a good week and weekend for the most part...

• Moms are awesome - It usually goes without saying that when I go home, I end up forgetting something. This time it was my extra camera battery and charger. So, she sent it in the mail and happened to pack some Reeses Peanut Butter Cups in there with a little note. My mom is awesome.

My awesome mom and I

• Finished my Syllabus - I finally got a good handle on my syllabus for this semester. There wasn't quite enough animation exercises in it initially for my liking so I added a few more exercises. My goal is to get the students doing as much animation as possible. I don't remember what animator it was who said, "You've got 10,000 bad drawings in you, so you might was well get through them as fast as you can." It applies in 3d as well, we learn by making mistakes and the more work we do, the more we'll grow. I'm gonna do my darndest to do all the exercises with my students cause, frankly, I don't get to do a whole lot of full body keyframe animation at work and I miss it. It'll be a good reason to finish Olaf as well (I'm trying Cory!)
  
• "The Brothers Karamazov" - The beast is completed. I started this behemoth of a book about six months ago and have been struggling through it since. It was an absolutely fantastic read though a bit verbose. You could easily split it into a trilogy and still have three complete books. The book follows a very screwed up family of a dysfunctional hedonistic father and his three sons. There's a murder, and fantastic trial and more insanity than one would think could be crammed into a novel...yet crammed it is.
  
• My Cousin's Improv Show - Thursday night, I went to an improv show's opening night that my cousin is spearheading with another improv friend of his. There were four improv troupes for two hours of comedy for the low low price of $5. It was a lot of fun. If you live in Chitown and want good comedy for not a lot of money, check it out. It meets in a little arts center at Western and North, but you can check the site for more info. There going to have different groups each week so it won't be the same show if you wanna try it a couple of times.
  
• "The Office" is Back - There was a new episode of The Office this week and....wow...just wow...no show makes me cringe one moment and then roll over laughing the next like this one.
  
• New Year Resolutions - So, I need to make some resolutions, so here they are:
• Visit the following:
• My best friend Ryan in Oregon to do some fly fishing
• My uncle in Colorado for some horseback riding, hiking and, frankly, cause I don't see him enough
• My brother and ragamuffinephews cause I don't see them nearly enough
• Come up with another Short film and get it AT LEAST through the story board phase
• To finish Olaf
• To do at least 30 seconds of reel worthy full body hand key animation
• To get more involved in volunteering somewhere
• To kick the snot out of my student loans

That is all.

Free Rig Call!

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!

Rigs

• Ollie
  
• Lowman
  
• LowDog and LowBall
  
• Generi
  
• Mikey
• PackageMan
  
• IK Joe
  
• Basic Guy and Flour Sack
  
• Elvis and Monkey
  
• Super Theo
  
• Alfred
  

AutoRiggers

• Final Rig
• The Setup Machine

Where the Wild Things Are Animation Test!

I've been looking for this animation test for a long long time. Many thanks to Kushal Ruia for finding it.

Portland Studios T-Shirts...

My friends over at Portland Studios opened their T-Shirt Store. Check em out and buy this little one above for one of your hairy friends.

Portland Studios Blog

My friends over at Portland Studios have started a blog. They're a great bunch of phenomenally talented artists that I love to work with any chance I can. In fact, my next personal project is a collaboration with Cory to take one of his great characters into the THIRD DIMENSION MWAAA HAA HAAA...

...err...something like that;)

Sorry for stealing the pic Cory;)

Sweet Interview with Pixar's Ralph Eggleston

Check it!

Delays in posting...

I have been under the weather for a few days and in and out of town with guests the last few weeks AND trying to get my gig rendered (should be done in the next week and a half or so!). I will try to get caught up soon:)

In the meantime, here is a sweet little link with production art from one of the best animated shows currently on television.

One Heck of a Rainbow...

This is a quickie. I had a great week last week and wanna jot down a bit about it when I get some time, but right now I'm a bit short on that commodity. However, I saw this pic and thought it was pretty darn sweet so wanted to pass it a long. Check the article!

Up for air...

Here's a little test render for the final lighting of one of the shots from my freelance gig. It's almost done! Another week and animation will be done!

Couple of things:

• Keith Lango is moving to Brazil! He's gonna set up shop so he can animate and help people too. I think that's just pretty awesome.
  
• God has been kind enough to give me some small windows of rainless time to run outside as He knows my disdain for treadmills....thanks, God:)
• I'm heading to Oklahoma City next week to see my mom and some of my fam AND my aspiring comedian cousin is moving to Chicago in two weeks so it'll be great having some family local as well. He's a very talented guy and I'm sure he'll do great.
  
• Stranglehold (my main project at work now) showed very well at E3 and is looking pretty amazing. I think it's gonna be a pretty sweet game when it's done.

That's all she wrote...or he wrote...I wrote? Back to work, I might not surface again till animation is done on my gig, so...lata!

Disney efficiency?

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.

Of Jackalopes and Apple's Brilliance

I had the great pleasure this week of enlighting a special someone to the amazing world of the Jackalope. Growing up in the midwest, I am, of course, aware of one of the great treasures of fly-over-country-America. Drive I-40 or I-35, and you're sure to find countless novelty shops and gas stations selling stuffed Jackalopes. Though I'm sad to see the little critters there and not bounding across the fruited plains like some miniature balls of antlered energy. They must be plentiful for them to be so readily available for purchase. Some people might claim that it's just a rabbit with antelope horns glued to it's head, but those folk just don't have a clue...I've not seen any zoological studies on the natural habitat of this imaginative little critter, but I'm sure it'll be published soon. Next time you're driving across the great plains, sure you might see some buffalo, antelope, prairie dogs and other such average creatures, but you make sure you keep an eye out for our beloved little Jackalopes...

...seriously, you'll puncture a tire on those horns if you're not paying attention.

So it's been another week of fun at work and I've been spending a good deal of time on the phone talking to the great state of Pennsylvania. So much so that I picked up a Vonage this weekend. I'll post some thoughts when I've used it a bit.

One of the coolest bits of news from the week is that Apple is making it so the new intel macs can dual boot to Apple's OS (a thing of simple elegance that I am coming more and more around to) and Windows XP (brute force that works...most of the time). My next computer purchase may just have to be....*gasp*....a mac workstation.

My brother will be proud - he's a machead.

An absolutely gorgeous day....

Song of the day - "This World" - Caedmon's Call - Self Titled Album
Today was amazing outside and I was out most of the day to enjoy it. I headed downtown this morning to meet a friend to go to the St. Patrick's Day parade and spent almost the whole day out in the glorious weather. The parade was a little lack luster, however we did see them dye the river green which was pretty cool. It was a green as lime koolaid which is pretty impressive. It was a bit of a let down to see that they just dyed it with what looked like little cups of dye. I had hoped for giant leprauchan cauldrons spilling green goo into the water...but perhaps there were no cauldrons around:)

It was a fun day.

So I've decided that I'm not drawing enough, so I'm instituting a new rule - No blog entries without a pic or a sketch (we'll see how long it lasts - and hopefully they're better than this one).

One of the guys at work was able to get together enough people to pay for a figure drawing class at work. That's gonna start this Tuesday. That should provide some opportunity to stretch the drawing muscles.

Technology is a fickle mistress. I can't seem to get my ipod reformatted on my home machine. I keep getting these weird errors. My options are 1) see if it does the same thing on my work pc and or 2) take it in to be serviced. None of the stuff I've found googling the problem have worked. Ug... In general, I'm on a antitech bent right now (so you've been warned).

Also, something appears to be very wrong with my computer. I can't seem to access the disk management utilities via the administrative tools and other such weirdness. I'd like to reformat and start from scratch but I think waiting till my current freelance gig is done is a better route to go.

Photography has always interested me to some degree. I think a lot of it has to do with good photography's dependence on lighting. I'm something of a lighting nut (if that's not obvious in my cg work). Getting a good render out of the computer is a lot like painting with light. I'm thinking about splurging and getting a good digital SLR to pick up a new hobby and hopefully expand my understanding of composition, light, and quite possibly - candid shots of friends:)

This week I discovered a few cool places on the net:

• My buddy Scott Spencer wrote a review over at highend3d. Holy moly, I want one of those. Want being the operative word there.
  
• Thanks to Cory, I discovered another friends blog.

That lobster needs a haircut!

I love it when I find stories about new animal species being discovered (I've been a bit of an animal nut since I was a kid). However, this one was especially cool.

Check it out.

Business Cards and Animation

Song of the Day: "Leaving It Up To You" - Jill Phillips - Writing on the Wall
Well, I thought I was gonna go to bed, but I just got my second wind. Funny how that works. I've been working a bit on animation this evening and talking to some friends via IM. I also decided I'd best get some more business cards for my trip to LA. My last batch seems to have been lost in the move from Savannah. So I updated my design a little and sent em off to the online press. I used these guys for the last batch and was very pleased. 500 cards - Full color both sides, glossy finish and rounded corners shipped for under $75. That's hard to beat. Last batch I got was a little more purple than blue on the front, but I changed the color a little so hopefully that'll fix it. If not, blue violet (while not my color of choice) isn't as bad as it could be;). Color space issues are not one that I'm nearly as versed in as I should be. If you don't know what I'm talking about, believe it or not, but the colors you see on your monitor may not actually be the colors that images actually are. Isn't that fun to know?

Here's the designs:

Front



Back
Since my second wind shows no sign of slowing, might as well get back to it...

Greasy Virtual Pencils...

My buddies told me about this script for Maya a while back and I'd forget. However, I saw a link for a video of the creator (Jason Schleifer) demoing and now I'm sold. Now, why is it called a Grease pencil script you might ask? Well, a lot of animators would draw their arcs and timing data on their crt monitors, then erase it and do it again shot by shot. I'm not sure what folk do with LCD's as I imagine they don't respond so well to heavy rubbing. Either way, Jason has solved that. VERY cool.

Here's the vid.

Why did I leave my Wacom at work!?

Nice little comic how-to...

And a nice strip as well. Check it out.