“Spare Parts” came out last week and despite a lot of praise for the fancy graphics and ANIMATION the game didn’t get very good reviews among the hardcore game critics who weren’t too pleased to see a game renewing with the tradition with simple and fun action adventure games.
If you haven’t got an internet enabled Xbox360 or PS3 and didn’t get a chance to check out Spare Parts démo on PSN or XBLA, here is a “Gamespot Daily demo” where you will be able to get a glimpse of the actual game play, in-game music AND, for once, what EA normally hides for screenshot purposes, the fancy frontend graphics Kim created for the game.
This chart is even more interesting as it shows that Despicable Me, at $541Millions, generated a bit more money than WallE and a bit less than Ratatouille.
Would this mean that we could finally see a european competitor to Dreamworks, Pixar, Blue Sky and Sony?
I meant to write a very long post on that brilliant shortfilm by Studio Soi but never found the time to start working on it. The release of a making of for “the Gruffalo” will be a new opportunity to feature Soi, one of my favourite animation studio since I discovered “Ernst Im Herbst”, a CG shortfilm using watercolour looking background, “Strasse Der Spezialisten”, “Olis chance” and “Tom and Lily”. I hope one day Soi will make a compilation of all their work.
Here is a great post by Keith Lango that should reassure fresh animation graduates who think they will never make it into feature animation or just in the animation professional world.
As a summary, companies can’t afford to have a staff of 100% senior animation ninjas and those are not needed for all the shots. Less experienced animators can cut their teeth on those background characters, props animation, reaction shots and “helicopter shots” before becoming a more expensive seasoned professional.
Thanks to several great posters and a wealth of passionate animators, the 11 seconds club is establishing itself as one of the best website for animation related discussion I am finding.
Neil Parkinson, my lead from EA just posted a short animation piece he has been working on for a bit during his rare spare time. Check it out it is really cool.
Neil didn’t just animate the shots, he also came up with the designs, rigged the characters and rendered the shots…. pretty impressive if you ask me!
I am also posting his 2010 showreel where you will be able to see some of the great projects he worked on at EA: a longer version of the shot he animated for the Spare Parts trailer I posted a while back, some Zubo animation and some other really funny Western inspired personal animation.
Rize of the Zombians
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCiRNlplbkA[/youtube]
Neil Parkinson 2010 showreel
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG9pxDLDA9E[/youtube]
What a way to start the new year, Dice Tsutsumi picking up the Sketchtravel book from Frederic Back’s home in Montreal
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/17042129[/vimeo]
Happy new year from Paris!
Ignore the naysayers , be passionate about what you do!
As a side note I will be using Dice’s work for a post on painting, lighting and reflected light very soon.
