Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Author: Olivier Ladeuix

great Disney links 0

Animation / Character design

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great Disney links

I was busy collecting some references for my shortfilm today and found some really good Disney links.

Animation Background. As the name implies, you will find a large collection of old classic Disney shorts/features and also more recent backgrounds. It is so cool to finally be able to take a close look at those beautiful watercolours.
http://animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com

The Art of Disney Animation
http://artofdisney.canalblog.com
That one is mainly in french but you will find a lot of artwork from the house of the mouse, among them a larger collection of colour scripts from Toy Story 3 than was had been available in the past.

and 2 more links that have been around for a while but a lot of people don’t know about.

The Pixar blog
http://pixarblog.blogspot.com/

Upcoming Pixar
http://pixarplanet.com/blog/

oops I was about to forget a great resources if you intend to do some research on old Disney short films
The encyclopedia of Disney Animation shorts. A great website if you want to track a Disney director or artist.
http://www.disneyshorts.org/sitemap.html

By the way, does anyone know who was the main character designer on Jungle Book, Sword in the stone, 101 dalmatians, Robin Hood and other features sharing the same angular look? With my colleague Karim we are not able to agree on this. I am aware Milt Kahl reluctantly became character designer but I am pretty sure he was only drawing in that very characteristicstyle. For some reason Ken Anderson keeps coming back to me but I can’t find any information about it. Any idea?

Related post:
Dice Tsutsumi on the Chiustream

How much do they earn? 3

Business of animation

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How much do they earn?

Ever wondered how much other people in the industry earn?

VFX Soldier collected wage information at various VFX, animation and games companies in the USA and organised the data in a very informative spreadsheet.

VFX soldier wages spreadsheet

Bobby Beck posted an interesting article on his blog regarding a new trend in the industry, despite the growing success of animated features.

http://bobbyboom.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html

Related post:
TAG wage survey

Edinburgh Fringe festival 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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Edinburgh Fringe festival

For my coworker and environment artist extraordinaire John’s birthday, we went to the Edinburgh Fringe festival this week end. The town is soo pretty that I will have to come back and do more architectural drawing.

MunQi 0

Animation

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MunQi

My friend and now Pixar animator Jude Brownbill was one of the two animators who animated that really wacky and fun pilot for London based animation studio BlueZoo.

Looking at the recent success of “Despicable Me”, investors should get really excited by that trailer!

Check it out!
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14088312[/vimeo]

Dice Tsutsumi on the Chiustream 2

Painting

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Dice Tsutsumi on the Chiustream

If you lost track of what is happening on the Chiustream, here is something you shouldn’t miss!

“Sketchtravel” co-creator, Totoro forest project co-initiator, Toy Story visual development artist Daisuke Tsutsumi (Dice) was very recently interviewed by Bobby Chiu on the Chiustream.

Dice is an incredible artist and I was amazed to hear that he also spend a lot of his free time painting and drawing from life. This makes a lot of sense as there is no other way to keep improving.

With Sharon Calahan, Bill Cone and the other “Early bird painters” they usually wake up around 5am to meet around 7 and go painting in the country side for a couple of hours before going to work.

Just as a reminder, Bobby Chiu also spend 2 to 4 hours every morning on very specific exercises in order to develop his skills.

As a bit of trivia, we learn that Dice is married to Ohayo Miyazaki’s niece which he met when they were 6 years old.

You might need to register to watch the video but you will also have access to Peter deSeve, Aaron Hartline and other top artist’s interviews.

By the way, I just came back from the Edinburgh Fringe festival in Scotland and did a bunch of sketches which I will post very soon. I still haven’t had time to learn watercolour so don’t expect anything too fancy yet.

Related post:
Light and colours

BAFTA Young game designers 1

EA / Video Games

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BAFTA Young game designers

My buddies game designer Gary Napper and concept artist Burt Ross got recently interviewed about the game industry and their role in the game development process. Check that out, you will see some of the earlier concept from “Spare parts” and Ross  look really sexy in that familiar Tshirt 😉

Back from California 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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Back from California

With my hero Mike

I just came back from California and I am completely jet-lagged 😉

This is the second time I visit San Francisco and Los Angeles but having been invited to visit some of my favourite animation studios made the trip much more special.

I had decided to focus mainly on my sketching skills this time and try to apply what I learnt during the past seven month. My knowledge in anatomy and proportion combined to 7  month of intense life drawing practice helped me to make the most of those very long journey on bus and subway. The Santa Monica/Downtown LA journey was probably the most fruitful since people tend to quickly fall asleep and not pay attention to that one guy with dark glasses and hat screwed on his head, frenetically moving a pen on a tiny notepad, in a corner, at the back of the bus 😉

If I lived in LA, I think I would take the bus everyday, the passenger always presented amazing features to capture and every ethnicity and age range was on display.

Here are some drawings and pictures from my trip. I had brought some watercolours but eventually decided against using them. I didn’t want to ruin the sketches with poorly chosen colours. I need more experience with those however….. the reason why some of the sketches don’t have any shading,  is because  I still intend to colour them at some stage 🙂 I just found a great video tutorial with Jason Seiler that could prove useful. Jason Seiler/Schoolism

Forgive the poor line work, I was using a cheap Bic cristal and those don’t allow much thick and thinness. I had in mind to buy Glen Villpu’s favourite Namiki Falcon fountain pen but at $180 a pop at Flax, I eventually decided against it. It is only $120 online. Still very expensive for a fountain pen but the nib is really really flexible.

Here we go, that’s it. Enjoy

[ps] if you don’t know Matt Jones, check out his work, he has some really nice sketches on his blog
http://mattjonezanimation.blogspot.com/

Related post:
Sketchcrawl material

Pixar motion blur 1

Animation / Education

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Pixar motion blur

Historically there are only two types of motion blur, 2d and 3d. The 2d one is post processed and the  3d one is done at rendertime. 3d motion blur is much more accurate but takes a lot of time to render.

Two years ago, Doug Sweetland gave a talk at Annecy where he explained how much effort it took to achieve a good looking motion blur and I would like to share with you some screenshots I took a while ago.