Congratulations to Team Grojf for winning the FJORG competition at Siggraph. Their winning test, The Red Truck, is a stunning piece of emotional storytelling and animation, created under extreme conditions in 32 hours. Awesome!
There's a couple of really good quotes from this lecture that really stood out to me. "Brick walls are there to let us prove how badly we want to achieve something" and "'Luck' is where preparation and opportunity meets". Pretty cool stuff to keep in mind.
I always find it very inspiring and useful to read about other animators workflows. At AM they showed us a bunch of different workflows and my current workflow is a mix of those. I think there's always something that can be picked up from seeing how others do things. Here's some workflows that I found on the net. If you read this and know about links to others that have posted their workflow, please shoot me an email :)
Animation is such a huge topic, so getting inputs and looking over the shoulder of different experienced animators are really valuable.
Check out the site. Looks pretty cool with (among other cool stuff) a video interview with the one and only Ray Harryhausen. Also, one of the animation tutorials are available free of charge :)
I was so pleased when I saw the trailer for this movie. I've only heard great things about it, but watching the trailer made me think that maybe it's a good idea to stick around in Europe after all :) It looks awesome. It'll be Christmas for sure this year.
Well, I did pay $15 to see Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda yesterday, but it can be considered no charge for what we got in return. The movie will make you go blind from overexposure to pure awesomeness. Fantastic!
I've done all of the basics Jason Ryan tutorials and here's the Flipbook result of it :) Working in 2d is a lot of fun and it's amazing how much I feel that I've learned already from looking over his shoulder. I totally recommend it!
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.
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!
Finally! Jason Ryan's tutorial site goes live Sunday May 11. This has been one of the big waits for me this year.
His Ramp Up tutorials has been awesome and with Flipbook purchased, I'm ready and set for getting an in-depth look at how he animate.
My current work flow is heavily based on one of his earlier lectures at Animation Mentor and I'm really looking forward to get more of his knowledge and to use it to hopefully take my own animation to a higher level.
Exactly 1 year ago today, I planted my feet on German soil and started my first day as an animator. Woohooo!
