Ramblings and more goodies

Wow. Time flies. Been quite busy the past month doing Jason Ryan tuts, 11 sec club and working away at HuHus, which by the way is still awesome. Learning tons on every shot and feel that I'm slowly moving forward. We're on our way into the winter here in New Zealand, but guess what, no snow! Woohoo. Can't really say I miss it. It's about 10-12 degrees celcius, which is kinda okayish for a winter :)

The big event lately has been the Jason Ryan site going live. And he's not letting us down. It's pure awesomeness. Doing the 2D Flipbook stuff really makes me feel like an animator and the most important thing that I get out of it at this stage, is that doing 2d forces me to think about the spacing at every frame. He's also big on opposite actions to get more entertainment into the animation. Great stuff! In addition to that, just peeking over his shoulder, getting into his mindset of how he animates, what he's thinking about and when, is invaluable.

Bobby Beck has posted a couple of really cool posts on his blog lately. Check out this squash and stretch video. Crazy stuff! He also shared some personal thoughts about your potential a few weeks back that I thought was spot on and super inspirational. He also have a follow up post, Positivity in the Workplace (scroll down a little) about how people found it hard to deal with his positive energy, which is just sad. Thank god he didn't manage to change. His energy is an inspiration which helped me a lot through Animation Mentor! To get a portion of the Boom-energy, check out the replay of the Webinar he did recently.

Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda is on its way. June 6! This movie looks awesome! There's a 2 min preview out and also a cool behind the scene clip just released. Tons of more Kung Fu Panda stuff here.

Carlos also keeps his blog going with lots of cool tips and thoughts. Check out his tips and tricks site! He also talked about 6 word stories a while back. "For Sale: Baby Shoes, never worn" (Hamingway). That's efficient storytelling and puts "less is more" in perspective. More 6 word stories here.

Kevin Koch has a very good post about the talk by James Baxter, Pete Docter, Andreas Deja and Eric Goldberg about mentor ship in animation. Interesting thoughts. He also got a post about the importance of physics and how it can throw the audience off without really knowing why, but just feel that something is wrong. Newton rocks!