Blogs of note

Just want to point out a few blogs. I found out about the blog illustrated above thanks to referral clicks registered at sitemeter. A character animator located in Savannah, GA named John Paul Rhinemiller has started a very nice blog for animators who are interested in valuable resources. I've already found some interesting links that are new to me. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the collector of links to online resources. He has very nicely pointed me in the right direction regarding his blog which I unfortunately credited to someone else by mistake. So, thanks JP. 

After I responded to JP's recent request for animated shorts worth knowing about he was nice enough to post Sean Coleman's Scratch, Sean's portfolio website, and Sean's blog. Sean graduated from The Art Center Design College, where I teach and chair the Animation Department at our Tucson, AZ campus. He participated in FJORG! 2008 on a team with two animators from Animation Mentor, sharing a second place position with one other team. These days Sean animates for Insomniac Games in Burbank, CA. Sean's film Scratch has made the festival circuit winning awards including a Gold ADDY award for Student Best of Show here in Tucson and has moved on to the regional ADDY Awards with the collaborative Siggy intro completed with Mike Munoz and Brad Wright.

Mike Munoz is another recent graduate from The Art Center and is an extremely multi-faceted artist with numerous strengths. He has been working at a modeler for a colleague of mine named Gav Gnatovich, who teaches here at The Art Center. In addition to his 3D modeling abilities Mike is an highly skilled character setup artist. He came to The Art Center with an engineering background, developed a strong art and animation portfolio, and then fused the two areas of art and engineering together. Since graduation Mike created a very sophisticated and almost entirely automated character setup toolkit for Maya using Python. Check out Mike's blog to get a hint of the number and quality of tools he has created so far.

Brad Wright worked with Sean and Mike on the animated Siggy intro we currently use for The Art Center's animation demo reel. Brad has focused his portfolio on organic modeling while continuing to develop his Character Animation skills in 2D and 3D. He is still taking classes but already has professional modeling and animation work to his credit.

Last but not least is the Art Center Animation Club blog just created by Auston Kleczka and Eva Alcazar, two animation students here in Tucson who have taken the reigns of this club and seem to have a very clear and positive goal of creating a community of animators supporting other animators... not unlike what JP Rhinemiller is doing. I think this completes a nice circle for this post.