After few days of struggle with Media Temple, I finally managed to update my blog to WordPress 2.6.

For the past few month my blog suffered from invisible HTML injections advertising Viagra and other stuff and I couldn't upload any pictures anymore.

The update went fairly smoothly. My category names were gone but luckily they were still existent with an invisible name in the database. I had an old page still open and I could give update the names.

I am not too excited about the way the pictures are handled and I haven't been able to upload any so far.

Anyway everything seems to be find and I should be able to embed videos now. 

Sorry for the lack of posts those days. I am still alive but I have decided to dedicate all my free time to my short film for the next 7 weeks. Kevin is a great mentor and it would be a shame to screw up this term again and not make the most of his dedication to help us make great short films.
You can still catch me in London this Week End or Annecy next month.

Olive

Here is a funny clip a friend found on Youtube. I remember an AM student using it for his class 4 assignment and I am a bit disapointed as the acting was very similar. This is why I would recommend people to get audio clips where the acting can be interpreted in different ways

a lot of people at work have toys on their desks here is a pictures of mine! Carla has probably the best ones but I don’t have a picture yet. Mine are all sorts of toys collected over the years. They all keep me inspired for different reasons.

The Pixar pot is a freebie from the Annecy festival last year, there is an african sculpture at the back which comes …. from Africa 😉 The muppet show and Aardman characters are coming from Forbidden Planet in London, Shadow is a designer toy from Nathan Jurevinius’s “Scary girl”, it comes from Playground in Soho, the Zombie robot is from a comics shop in Annecy, the Smurfs are a new addition I just bought in a comic shop in Bayonne. I just got Wario from a collegue at work who has an online shop (I can’t remember the url…) and there are few more toys which I bought from Forbidden Planet just for the proportions, or because the anatomy is well defined or the way they have sculputed the hair or the creases on the clothing.

Not related to animation today.

After my experience with Animation Mentor this is something I have been thinking about for a while and is being relayed here by financial reporter James Altucher on an interesting interview with Farnoosh Torabi for TheStreet.com

I love this new Verizon advert featuring Transformers Director Michael Bay.
It’s like a cartoon, incredible timing, pacing, staging, composition, acting. I could loop it for hours !!!

Awesome 😉

Lately the topic came back few time. Which movie should we see this week. Well if you are interested in acting, go and watch “American gangster”. I don’t think there is anything else worth mentioning at the moment 😉

I might come back to this post and elaborate a bit in the next few days but I was reading some stats on Boxofficemojo.com the other day and started to think that we might be on our way to a down market in the Feature Animation industry.

Let me give you some figures:
Sony “Surf’s Up” – Domestic total $59million, Foreign $59m
Disney “Ratatouille” – Domestic total $205m, Foreign $272m
Dreamworks “Shrek” – Domestic total $321m, Foreign $793m
Clear winner Dreamworks!

Everytime I hear Brad Bird screaming “Story, story, story!” I believe he knows what he is talking about but without the heavy Disney marketing and the all time low dollar I am sure the movie would have tanked! Despite the critics unanimously calling Ratatouille, the best Pixar, I must admit that I got bored watching it and that s probably what the word of mouth was, boring. Just like me I think that people care more about entertainment than Story or how else do you explain Shrek3 results?

Surf’s UP… Has anyone seen the movie? okay the story was a bit predictable but I still found it very entertaining. Animation was great, rendering was great, character design was great so how do you explain the $120m? The penguins? People didn’t want to see an other penguin story? I don’t think so. “Surf’s UP”, according to Rotten Tomatoes is this week’s number one rental at $8 million.

If it wasn’t for Shrek endless success could we call this the end of Feature animation and the rise of the DVD market?

just a quick post to say that I am still alive. I am getting used to my new life in the country side. I still haven’t found a proper gym and started to put on weight….. nooooo gooooodddd 😉 Working at Rare is awesome and everyone is fantastic. I haven’t done any personal work for the past few weeks but once my computer is setup I hope to be polishing my showreel and do some new animation.

By the way I applied to the new training setup by Stephen Gregory from the Splinedoctors but didn’t make this term. http://splinedoctors.com/drstepheng/Tutor/home.html he also posted his Pixar showreel here http://drstepheng.splinedoctors.com/animation.html

Today was my last day at my current job which meant moving house too.

It would have been much better if I started recording it from the begining but I only thought about doing this at 5am. Too bad you would have been able to see the bed and furnitures flying around and alos notice a terrible slow down around 10 am 😉

Memorable moments are when my girlfriend took pity and decided to get some breakfast from Mac Donald but a manager interrupted me in the middle asking why half of the Internet Café was closed? I started laughing since I wasn’t in duty anymore for the past 9 hours. She wasn’t very happy 😉 An other one is when I decided to get changed but the best is probably when I found a fully equipped mother board, a computer case and decided to build a PC 😉 what was I thinking!!!!