yoyoyoyoyoyoyo

January 10, 2012 •

Q

Hey, I'm an animation student in montreal and was browsing through calarts (as always, and daydream about going) and came across your "When the time is ripe" film. I'm absolutely in love with it, (I'm also jewish so I found it hilarious), but I also got super inspired by it. our next project here at Concordia U is a "whatever-you-want" animation, but the theme is Food. so, thinking back to your film, I would love to actually animate food, but how did you do it? and draw the eyes and lip-sync?

eurotails

A

Hi! Thank you! I’m really glad you liked it (and weren’t offended by it). That warms my heart.

Speaking of warm, to the matter at hand: animating with food. I discovered early on that if you use real food, the hot lights that have to be on your set all day tend to do smelly things to your characters. So what I did was I got replica steaks made from resin, which I ordered from a theater prop company. If you do a google search for “replica food” you’ll be surprised to see how much weird stuff is out there.

The reason it’s essential to use fake food (other than the lights) is that you want to be able to have several identical models in order to fulfill your needs for different types of shots. For example, most of the time the puppet for Miles the pear had a handle sticking out the bottom for control. But in the one shot where he runs out of the dining room, I had a separate puppet that had different manipulation points.

I don’t know if you plan to animate via stop-motion technique, or what the requirements are for your program, but the character bodies were actually just puppeted by hand and shot on 24fps HD. There were holes in the bottom of the sets and the characters were being puppeted from below. So that is also a consideration, and why I chose to restrict the setting to a family dinner where the table can hide a bunch of stuff.

What I actually shot was the steaks and pear with no faces on them, but a mark for where they would go. I used a sharpie to get a high contrast, just one small dot does fine. You may want to use two (I’ll explain why).

The animation was done in flash, to lipsync. The same audio track was playing during the puppeting of the “bodies” in order to get the desired acting. There’s no need to animate anything but the facial expressions and lipsync for the “face” animation. I composited that using PNGs with transparency, and brought the footage and the animated floating faces into Adobe AfterEffects.

In AfterEffects, I used to motion tracker tool to create keyframes from tracking the dots I’d drawn on the bodies, and I parented the faces to those track points. And then you’re (half) done! The puppets should have animated faces on their bodies. The arms were a less precise effort. I kind of used the same principle, kind of had to go back and forth in Flash and fudge it a bit more.

I hope that helps, good luck on your film! Send it to me when it’s done!

It’s kind of hard to see but here’s the setup, and the puppets without the faces, versus the final product.

set

http://vimeo.com/11790948

January 1, 2012 •

sleepy sunshine dog. (January 1, 2012) (Taken with instagram)

December 4, 2011 • 1,881 notes • • thedailywhat

Sad!

caseydonahue:

THIS IS TERRIBLE NEWS! King Kong, Ghostbusters, Back To The Future and now Jaws are all going to not exist. Next up is E.T. for sure, then there will be no reason for me to go to this park at all.

I’m a Disney World man anyway, we all know this.

thedailywhat:

End Of An Era of the Day: Universal Studios Florida announced yesterday on its Facebook page that it will be shuttering its iconic Jaws-themed attraction to make room for something else.

Jaws: The Ride was one of the park’s first attractions upon opening in 1990. The entire Amity set will be removed as well as part of the renovation.

“Jaws has been an amazing attraction and an important part of our history,” said Universal spokesman Tom Schroder. “We know that Jaws holds a special place in the hearts of our guests, but we always have to look to the future and dedicate ourselves to providing new, innovative entertainment experiences for our guests.”

Universal Studio’s track record is less than stellar when it comes to “modernizing” iconic attractions.

In 2002, it did away with its “King Kong Kongfrontation” to make room for a Revenge of the Mummy-themed roller coaster. In 1996, it installed a Twister “experience” over a Ghostbusters stage show.

However, word on the street is Universal Studios has something magical in store for Jaws’ old watering hole. It’s no secret that Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park has been doing significantly better since it opened the Wizarding World of Harry Potter last year.

[sentinel.]

November 16, 2011 •

On set with James McAndrew (November 15, 2011)

November 14, 2011 •

Shooting a western.

Principle photography of Sweetpea begins tomorrow. The crew is all assembled, the cameras are here, the weather looks good. Now, nothing left to do but get a good night’s sleep.

The town. (Barstow, CA.)

the bus station.

the motel.

the director.

the props.

the gun.

October 25, 2011 • 2,101 notes • • iwdrm

iwdrm:

“The Precogs are never wrong. But occasionally, they do disagree.”

Minority Report (2002)

if we don’t, remember me is a blog of “living movie stills” from the history of cinema.

September 23, 2011 • 2 notes •

A comic I gave up on.

Much of the time, being a good artist is about having the stamina and perseverance to follow through on an idea. If you put it into perspective, it doesn’t matter if you have the best idea in the world if no one is going to see it.

Almost a year ago when I was not as busy as I am today, I toyed with learning how to do comics. It’s a different discipline from storyboarding, and the fresh way of thinking was appealing. So I set out to start one, to learn how it all worked. It was fun at first, a good learning experience. But as I started to figure out a process I could use, I had to face the fact that the idea that I had invested time in, put hours into learning how to execute, was just not a very good one.

Moral of the story: I went wrong twice here. It’s an empty exercise to make drawings just to make drawings. There should always be a core idea that you’re trying to communicate, so that everything you do has intention. AND! I didn’t even finish the damn thing! Yeesh. But I did spend that time. So here’s my comics-shrug to the world.

May 28, 2011 • 6 notes •

Here’s a piece I did for a Japan Benefit Auction yesterday at the California Art Institute in Santa Monica, along with fellow Pixar artists Chris Sasaki and Scott Morse. I still have to figure out what I’m doing for our own art show. Deadlines sure do sneak up on you!

May 17, 2011 • 1 note •

the sweet smell of success

I recently finished reading “On Filmmaking” by Alexander Mackendrick. Not only is the book filled with really great information about every process involved in making films, it’s written in a really concise, simple way that is easy to understand. It doesn’t fuss over analysis by breaking everything down into weird archetypes like STORY by McKee, but distills the necessary information down to a point. Plus, Mackendrick’s statements are given added weight by the fact that he actually directed many well-respected films. Sorry, McKee.

I got The Sweet Smell of Success from criterion as a result, and boy can he back his sh*t up! Great film. Sometimes I’m sad that films don’t get made in black-and-white anymore, because they look great in the hands of the right people. Props also to James Wong Howe. The criterion Blu-ray is packed with interviews and docs on Mackendrick and even a cinematography tutorial by Howe. The most striking thing is that Mackendrick is as perfectly concise and articulate in his speech as he is in his writing.

Anyway here are a few studies from the film. Damn delicious black-and-white.

May 16, 2011 •

Sketch, pen and ink.

Borderlands Cafe, SF.