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.

Dry Erase Power

The pen is mightier that what? Oh.

Whatever.

I'm just having too much fun watching this playful stream of consciousness go to work. Thought others might too.

Thanks goes out to David Walden for having this You Tube link hanging around on his blog.

I like to find out about the people who create things that I enjoy, so I found it a little frustrating when trying track down the source of this work. The artwork was created by someone who's other cool works are to be found at the vaguely identified blog of ljudbilden & piloten. I guess thats first initial followed by last name. Who knows? No profile is available as far as I can tell. Don't ask me why some artists want to stay semi-anonymous by positioning themselves behind handles, cryptic ids, and/or pseudonyms.

Whatever.

The animation was created as a music video for minilogue. That would be Sebastian Mullaert and Marcus Henriksson.

Follow the links for ljudbilden & piloten if you like the visuals. Follow the links to minilogue if you like the sounds. Enjoy.

-e

Neglect

image "borrowed" from this photo log created by someone named Jeff.

It's only been since Friday that I posted most recently and yet I feel as though I have neglected this blog. Strange.

I've been spending way too much time hanging out on other people's blogs, making a complete and utter nuisance of myself... opinionatedness all over the place. Soon there will be installment two of Beautiful Silhouettes and I have several other posts in the works.

In the meantime for you fellow history lovers check out:

Beautiful Silhouettes, part 1 regarding the early work of Lotte Reiniger.

Or check out the small but fascinating online archive of Ken Harris' work.

Or take a trip in the way-back-machine to watch a cool sample of Buster Keaton's work and read some thoughts on learning from this master of movement and performance.

For those of you curious about my work:

We have glacial movement in my acting performance work.

Some performance improvement through a good critique that forces the issue of timing and spacing.

Some animation tests geared towards what I teach.

And completion of my second animation test for the same.

Or just some life drawing examples from this spring.


And definitely check out this awesome "video" tutorial on the meaning of COPYRIGHT and fair use put together by Eric Faden.


All of my commenting on other peoples blogs seems to be driving more people to this location. I'm getting hits from places like Brazil, England, Germany, France, India, Romania, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Japan just to name a few. Thank you to everyone who bothers to stop by and check out this spot. Very flattering to think in what distant locations my musing are traveling. Stay tuned. I have plenty more to come including more samples of my own work current and past.

-e

Ken Harris: Master Animator

I just found this very aptly named website dedicated to the career and work of Ken Harris. The URL 'masteranimator' pretty much says it all. Best known for his work with Chuck Jones while at Warner Bros., Ken also worked on various projects for Hannah Barbera, MGM, and later worked with Chuck Jones again on the classic animated production of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! after Jones "left" Warner Bros.

In the middle there somewhere is time that Ken Harris spent working for Richard Williams on such projects as the title sequences for Return of the Pink Panther, Williams' animated production of Scrooge, and the mysterious and storied Williams feature production The Thief and the Cobbler. There are lots of little goodies to be found including cycles from Thief animated by Harris, and models sheets from various productions including some for the characters Pussyfoot and Marc Antony from the 1951 classic Feed the Kitty.













click to enlarge

I find his time working with Williams particularly meaningful since some of the the tutelage that Harris offered Williams and others at Williams' animation studio ended up inside the Williams' animation how-to The Animator's Survival Kit.

While the layout of the site is bare-bones and very basic, there are a lot of wonderful nuggets of animation greatness to be found. Special thanks to Animation Mentor student Jeff Weidner for having the link included on his blog. Also, while googling stuff for this post I came across Kevin Lanley's blog Cartoons, Models Sheets, & Stuff which has many, many samples of great stuff from the past, so check it out.

Wow this post is turning into a real link-o-rama so I'll just rap it up on a good, solid note...




























The quote found on the front page of www.masteranimator.com much sums it up:

"He was a master animator, a virtuoso... Ken Harris did it all."
- Chuck Jones

And we are all the richer for his contribution.

-e

Cool? Yes. But, will it blend?

Sure, the iPhone is sleek, beautiful, a cool to play with... but:



Who knew that the iPhone had such remarkable additional qualities. Wow, those boys and girls at Apple must think of every contingency. I have to say that blender is definitely up to the task. Frighteningly so. For those interested in seeing what else 'blends' there is an entire website devoted to the subject:

Will It Blend?

I was surfing through blogs by way of Halcyon Realms when I came across the above YouTube link. It took a little surfing but I found Zero had a link to the geeky IT mag GameAxis. Yeah, that's how I found it. I need to get a life, or just start acting like I have one.

Halcyon Realms is a beautiful blog by-the-way. Vong Yungchow is quite the talented and accomplished artist who seems to attract attention from a lot of other interesting people. Here is a photographer I found thanks to posts and comments at Halcyon Realms:

Laurie Jackson:
Parallel Universe and Capture This

Enjoy.

-e

I/O brush

Get a load of this.



Just load it up and go.

Watching this video I find it just as fun seeing how the various sources for the "paint" program react to being sampled.

A special thanks goes to Marx Myth for the YouTube link.

-e

Punch, Steal, Death

According to the website Mingle2, this rating was determined based on the presence of the following words found sprinkled throughout my blog:

• punch (4x)
• steal (3x)
• death (1x)

While the rating seems about right the words that were found make me wonder what is up with me.

BTW: I found this thanks to Jean-Denis Haas at swench.blogspot.com Click on the image above if you would like to get one of your own.

-e

Tinker, tinker

Well, seems like this blog stuff has some apeal for me. I keep tinkering with the visual appearance of this blog as if anyone is reading it.

Yah, right!

Okay, my one, true reader... looks like I'm officially in the blogosphere. Damn you Marx Myth! Okay, now update your blog Mr. Fancy-Pants:

http://marxmyth-2dornot2d.blogspot.com/

-e