Animation Mentor Student Work!

If you haven't checked this out yet go to AnimationMentor.com and look at the new student showcase reel! There's some very impressive stuff on there and is very entertaining to watch.

More Ralph Eggleston

There's an interview done here with Ralph Eggleston for MoMA. Boy do these kids look excited about it.

Speaking of Character Design

Here's a pretty sweet blog on it! It just so happens to be named Character Design. Definitely something to check out! Quite a large list of interviews with various character designers! That's actually where I found the Chen Yi Chang images posted in the previous post. They've interviewed him themselves. Here's a link to that as well.
Chen Yi Chang interview.
And yes, there are more images of his artwork there than just the few I have in my previous post.

Chen Yi Chang video

I know this is an old video that a lot of you may have seen and already know about, but just in case anyone hasn't seen it or need a link to it I figured I'd do that. He is a Disney character designer and discusses some of his thoughts about working on Mulan, Tarzan, and a bit about the Batman cartoon series.

Chen Yi Chang Video

A few Pixarian Signatures

This one is from Pixar animator, Angus Maclane-



Storyboard artist, Mark Andrews


And finally one of the head honchos, Andrew Stanton


I found them on this blog post, the person that owns the actual signatures on paper. There's a nice little story about when he got them too!

Splinecasts!

The Spline Doctors have been doing some great podcasts with various artists from Pixar so I figured I'd have a link station to all of them in this post. If you've never been there before be sure to check out their other posts. They have some useful and interesting information there.


Spinecast 1:

To Spline or Not to Spline


Splinecast 2,3, and 4: Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton part1
Andrew Stanton part2
Andrew Stanton part3

Splinecast 5: Ralph Eggleston

Ralph Eggleston

Splinecast 6: Nate Stanton

Nate Stanton

Animation Timer

Can you think of the beats you want for you animation in your head and click the mouse at the time the beat happens? Then this nifty little tool just might be for you! I found this a while back while surfing the web so I thought I'd link you to it. It's an animation timer application put together by Paul Van Gaans. Thanks Paul!

Animation Timer

(PC only at this time)

A small car show

Well, it was fairly small but there were some clean cars there.

Hand Sketches

Here are a few hand sketches I did of my own hands. The open hand I did more recently roughing it in with General's pastel chalk, wanna be Conte. It was a bit larger than my scanner so there were a lot of dark areas that I had to clean up. I left the forearm uncleaned though. :/ The other hand I did a while back and it was smaller on newsprint.

New Blog

Well, atleast for me it is! A blog that I've recently been checking out quite a bit with some inspirational stuff is a current student at CalArts. Lots of traditional work to check out since he posts quite often. His name is Steven Macleod and the name of his blog is Clockroom. He has a large list of links to other blogs that contain a lot of personal artwork of other artists. Just some stuff that has definitely been getting me back into the drawing mode. Hope to post some stuff up soon! Again, here's the link to his blog:

http://clockroom.blogspot.com/

CONGRATS!!

I've recently heard some great news about my former mentor, Scott Lemmer. He was working at DNA studios on The Ant Bully and the studio is closing after that so he was going to be out of a job but he got into Pixar! WOOO! Congrats man! Awesome to hear. Get this, on the Jimmy Neutron tv series he was doing anywhere between 800 and 1,000 frames a week!! Sometimes more, and the quality of the stuff was pretty darn good for that kind of a timeframe! Lots of entertaining stuff there. Anyways, just wanted to say congratulations Scott! You deserve it!

WHOA, WHOA, WHOA!!! Hold everything!!

Ok, so I was just looking over my blog and realised something! I haven't given proper introductions for my past 2 mentors and my current one!! WOW, I can't believe I let that one slide! Well, for term 3 I had Scott Lemmer from DNA studios! It was an awesome term and my breakthrough into acting, where I started the Robin piece that is shown below. Term 4 I had Dave Vallone from Blur Studios! Man, this guy can talk! And most of it had to do with animation! lol I had a great time working on facial animation for the Robin piece with him and doing a complete 2 person dialogue shot. He gave some very great and detailed crits. Now, drumroll please!

The mentor I currently have for term 5 and 6 and for undertaking a short film is!:

Doug Sheppeck!

Here's a list of his stats-

Cars (2006)

The Incredibles (2004)

Finding Nemo (2003)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - senior Animator

Toy Story 2 (1999)

A Bug's Life (1998)

Toy Story (1995)


I'm in week 4 right now and so far Doug has been great. I'm really excited about these final two terms at AM and know that he'll really push me to and beyond my limits!

Dialogue

Well, here's my first dialogue test. Still could use tweaking here and there but it's time for me to move on! No final quality render on it just yet. Just a plain old playblast. Thanks to a friend supplying me with bandwidth I'm able to put this up here! Thanks again man! Always good to get comments and critiques!

Over the Hedge

I haven't seen it yet but I've only heard good things about the new release, Over the Hedge, from Dreamworks. Some of the things I've heard was that it was the funniest animated film that they've seen and the animation on the animals was phenominal. I heard that the movie is up to par with the Incredibles! Definitely a movie to catch in the theaters! So I'm hoping to see it this weekend and enjoy it as much as everyone else have been.

Trailer

Listen to a Movie

So have you ever been searching for dialogue out of a movie and just gone through countless dvd's, taking them out of the case, putting them in the dvd player, letting them play through and so on? Well there's a site that actually allows you to listen to a movie from start to finish. They have quite a selection to go through too. The site is listentoamovie.com. Now the audio quality isn't the best but just create yourself a user name and it's free to listen. They even have a few tv shows up there.