Blender's Open Movie: Elephant's Dream

It premiered late last month, and the DVD should be landing soon. This looks stunning! Can't wait to order mine. I should have paid up front and sponsored part of the movie, but now I'll just have to settle for a post-release fun fest... Check it out at the Blender 3d site.

"House of Cosbys" is pure genius

I haven't seen something this funny since I don't know when. If you like South Park, you'll love it. If you don't like South Park, you'll love it. Unfortunately, Bill Cosby is trying to shut the whole thing down. Last time I checked, parody was protected under the constitution. Sad thing is, Cosby's lawyers can force a brilliant, but modestly solvent, young man to stop making great comedy because Cosby can outspend him.

And I'm a big Cosby fan.



Be sure to read more about this tale at Waxy.org.

Happy Birthday Animation!

Yes, animation is 100 years old. March 1st. Which only makes me about a month behind...

Here's the link from the design blog at Weblogs Inc.

Now I need to get on this animation thing before everyone else figures out it is cool...

Animation Festival (sort of) in Knoxville

These happen on a semi-regular basis. It isn't really a festival, but a screening of animation from SIGGRAPH. Here's what I got in the old email:
COMPUTER GRAPHICS Special Interest Group (SIGGRAPH) of
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)


-- COMPUTER ANIMATION FESTIVAL --


Thursday, February 23, Room 206 Claxton, on the UT
Campus, 7:00pm.

We will be viewing the 2005 SIGGRAPH Computer
Animation Festival, Part II. These reels were juried
from international submissions, and they were first
seen at the 2005 SIGGRAPH Conference this past summer.
If you weren't at the Conference, this is your chance
to see it.

Free admission. DOOR PRIZES.

For thumbnails, see
http://www.siggraph.org/publications/video-review/sig2005/152.shtml

There is no Full Metal Alchemist porn here

I noticed a lot of traffic is coming from MSN searches for FMA porn. Hey, guess what? There's none here. I mentioned the show a while ago because I thought it was cool. Do they even show it on adult swim any more?

Anyway, more later I hope...

Steve Jobs has a posse wall mural

I created a poster based on the Andre the Giant meme, but CafePress wouldn't let me use it. Apparently being on the cover of Time a couple of times each year doesn't make someone a public figure. Anyway, I turned it into a wall mural using Rasterbator and posted up at TUAW. Enjoy!

read more | digg story

Spike and Mike lives on!

The Animation Show is Mike Judge's moving carnival of moving images. That is, it's an animation festival that travels around. It's coming up in Philly. So Joe Jack Talcum, if you remember me, go be there. If you still live in Philly anyhow.

Cool.


Via Good Grief

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. So many cool celebrations around the world on this strange little religious holiday. I think it's important to fully explore all our emotions, and one of those would be fright. Why not?

Anyway, check out this old site for some anime suggestions on Halloween (costume links at the bottom):
Anime Tourist's Anime Chills and Thrills

Empress Chung

I found out about this from the Design Weblog at my sugardaddy blognetwork, WIN...

But Empress Chung is more than just a lush, traditionally animated movie. It's a project that has managed to bridge some worlds. A collaborative project between South AND North Koreans, it even opened in both countries last month.

The power of animation is more than we imagined...

Wallace and Gromit

I feel terribly bad for Nick Park, creator of Wallace and Gromit. I've always been a fan of stop-motion, and claymation, and particularly the British humor blend Nick brought to the game.

The good news is, he's not quitting. Those were memories, but only material things. He's going to keep slogging away.

The better news for Nick is that the first really promoted W&G movie, "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" hit #1 at the B.O. this past weekend.

Sorry Nick, and congrats.

Blessing the child

Interview with Miyazaki the "god" of anime. Creator of most popular stuff like "Howl's Moving Castle" and "Spirited Away."

This is the first interview he has agreed to in 10 years. You gotta love those Jedi man.

12 Animation Principles

Anyone in animation should be able to rattle off Frank & Ollie's 12 Principles of Animation. Google it.

However, what most folks might not realize is John Lasseter presented "Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation" at SIGGRAPH way back in 1987! He sought to bring humanity and artfulness into the emerging art form known as digital animation.

That is why John is THE MAN.

read the paper here

Robots on Sept. 27

I took my daughter to see the movie Robots when it came out. We loved it. Yeah, it's maybe not the greatest... But it was far above anything Disney has done lately. Robots is from Blue Sky Studios, the same folks who did Ice Age, and soon Ice Age 2. Now the original Ice Age DVD had some killer animation extras. Detailed accounts of character design, some good pr0n on how they animated stuff, etc. These are the things an educator like myself longs to see on a DVD. Not crap like on Finding Nemo, where some damn child farts around the office. That's a joke people. Can you please give the adults something to watch? Bury it five levels deep, I don't care, just put it on there!

Anyway, I was rather disappointed to see Robots will probably NOT have the depth of info Ice Age had. That's a shame. Robots had some intricate setups (like flying through the city on the "mass transit" system), which are great opportunities to show my students just what it takes to animate. The character rigs in Robots are probably pretty cool and accessible as well. Sadly, we'll never know.

Again, this is why I love Project Orange. When they release the models with rigs, I can finally learn HOW to do that in Blender. Of course, Blue Sky doesn't want their "secrets" to get out... Whatever. Information yearns to be free man! Oh well, check Robots out on Sept. 27 on DVD. I'll have the Amazon link when it's available.

Great 3d site!

Normally I'm somewhat underwhelmed by 3d sites. Turbosquid is really only useful to people with pockets of money, 3dkingdom is often down for the count, and 3dcafe has tutorials older than DOS.

But I saw on Digg.com (which I highly recommend) this great site:
3dbuzz.com

There are a bunch of training videos, which I really enjoy (fastest way to learn IMO). And there's a podcast... Nifty!

Blender people, just use Blender

It ain't easy. Nobody said it would be. But if you're strapped for cash and must create your animated masterpiece, use Blender3d. It's a free app for modeling, animation, rendering, texturing, IK, character animation, and video game production. And some folks are actually doing something with it!

Check out Project Orange, an open source movie project. I love the idea, and had talked about doing something similar years ago. As James Brown would say, "saying it and doing it ain't the same thing, there's just as much difference as night and day." Or something like that...

Go pre-buy the DVD for Project Orange. Check out the demos on Blender's homepage. When you're ready to get going with Blender, check out the "official" manual in the Amazon links to the right. Support me and the Blender Foundation-- how can you lose?

Wanna learn animation?

From time to time I'll be posting little "how to" animate links or articles... So here's one I dug out of my bookmarks:

Larry's Toon Institute

A nice overview for character animation.

Unity is awesome for game development

I blogged this up on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), so you can read my spin on it there, but MacMegasite has a cool wording read more.

BTW, that was my first post for TUAW-- wooohooooo!

Anyhow, I think Unity is the bees knees. I've played with the demo, and it's amazing. Unity is a fully formed game dev platform. Physics, particles, rag dolls, animation and scripting, all in a great workflow and GUI. The weird thing is that it's Mac-only, but will now export Windows games.

Since I'll be learning Maya soon I probably won't have time to tinker with Unity (for now). Anyone want to team up and work on a killer toy? Notice I didn't say game. What I have in mind is more like a Power Toy. Appealing to the idea of "personal media" and targeting animation enthusiasts, filmmakers, bloggers, anyone interested in making cool stuff...

Let me know at davincifeedback AT mac DOT com...

[ FULL METAL ALCHEMIST - HAGANE NO RENKINJUTSUSHI ] Synposis - Character Bios, Reviews, Summary, Rank System

Getting up to speed on Full Metal Alchemist

Well another anime show has sucked me in! Good stuff. Very inventive, and I love the story line. Recommended for folks who have never seen anime, or think it is porn or something...

There is even a video game that was released here in the states.

Disney, dumber than dirt

Oh man. I don't mean Walt Disney was dumb. I mean the management AT Disney, for the past 15 or so years, hasn't been all that bright. Here's why:

1. Celebrity voices don't matter
2. It's about the story
3. It's not about eye candy

They don't understand any of those rules. The same could be said about Hollywood in general, but the reason Disney has been spectacularly crappy of late is primarily because they just don't get the whole "story" thing.

Case in point: "Valiant." It was a cute movie. But the main character, Valiant, is just a simpering sod the whole time. He "does what's right" from beginning to end, and never really sees any character development. See, no story! Just a bunch of stuff that happens. Great for documentaries, not so good for narrative film.

I always show my students the "making of" doc on the Incredibles DVD. It has Brad Bird explaining why he did a movie with Pixar. "They protect stories here," he says. He goes on to explain how movies are like gambling, and that scares the business suits in the industry. You don't get any suit-ee-er than the current Disney Poobah, Eisner. Megalomania aside, he really wants to churn out formulaic schlock because he figures it's good for the stock. Well, guess who's laughing all the way to the trading floor?

And if all this wasn't enough, I found this on digg.com:
Pixar tells story behind 'Toy Story'... Basically the gist is that 10 years ago Disney execs canned Toy Story because all their well-meaning corporate-meddling notes had turned it into another formulaic schlockfest. Once Lasseter begged for more time to fix (and he removed all their asinine suggestions), they screened the movie proper and the execs liked it. Ugh. I feel bad that John, Steve, and the rest of them had to go through all that. I can't imagine the stress. Vindication today, but what a pain.

Here's to Woody, Buzz, and the entire crew in Emeryville, CA. If'n y'all didn't live in such a nasty spot I'd love to join you...

Turn 3d into Real-D

OK, I posted this up over at Download Squad but thought I should mention it here too...

Pepakura Designer is a really boss but bizarre little app that takes 3DS or OBJ files (among others) and turns them into printable templates. Cut them out, glue them, bingo, you have your paper model of whatever you were doing on the computer. Neat-O.

Be prepared for a learning curve. Even the simple objects I tried turned out needlessly complex using the automatic settings. Problem is, it tends to split your meshes along the faces, not the polygons. Those of you working on 3ds max know what I mean, right? Thus, ragged edges where you could've had square ones. Oh well. I need to play with it some more...