Italian in 10 minutes, the power of gestures

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 2 Comments
Filed under Acting

According to NLP, 55% of communication is made by gesture and body language. Watch this video and you will be amazed by how easily you understand Italian without any previous knowledge 😉

Great reference for gestures or give personality to your characters.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHZwYObN264[/youtube]

Alfredo Cassano posted a nice series of illustrations on his blog. Make sure you see the three of them and maybe buy his book!

Related post:
Desmond Morris “The human animal”

Aurélien Prédal “Monstre à Paris”

Posted on December 18, 2011 | 1 Comment
Filed under Painting

Aurélien Prédal is a Gobelins graduate whose work you might have come across in 2006 as he took part in one of my all time Gobelins favorite shortfilms : “Burning Safari”. (“Le building”) is also a top favorite Gobelins short)

Aurélien was involved in the never ending production of french animated feature “A monster in Paris” and he just posted some unbelievable colour keys he made for the movie.

If you are interested in painting or lighting you should definitely have a look at his blog, his work is exceptional. To me he is just as good as people with 5+ years of experience and he probably made those colour keys, two to three years after graduating.

If you didn’t know, Aurélien was also a contributor to the Sketchtravel project.

Aurélien Prédal “Monstre à Paris” colour keys

As a side note, with 1.7 millions tickets sold, the movie did very well in France but so far it hasn’t covered the 27 millions euros the movie cost, making it a loss for the production company, Europa Corp.

A US release would be really expensive for Luc Besson’s company but they could probably do a UK release first. The British market is usually the second biggest territory in term of sales, ahead of Japan.

Snowman walk

Posted on December 17, 2011 | 11 Comments
Filed under Animation, Drawings, Painting, Portfolio

Few people wanted to see this guy animated so here it is. Believe it or not this was animated in Maya. I placed the walk cycle on a nurbs plane and animated the UV 🙂 I have been told I could have just used Photoshop. I will give it a try next time or maybe use Plastic Animation Paper since it is free.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33138769[/vimeo]

and while I am at it, here is a little teaser I made with my new camera using some footage I shot during my last Animation Collaborative character design class with Albert Lozano and Chris Sasaki.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33213216[/vimeo]

Related posts:
Scarecrow model packet

Animschool Tom Bancroft interview

Posted on December 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

Hurry up, Animschool just posted an special interview with Disney veteran Tom Bancroft. The interview will only be available to the public for few more days so make sure you don’t miss that exceptional interview.

I have only seen the beginning so far but Tom animated one of my favourite characters on Mulan, the crazy talking dragon Mushu. People too often forget that there is no one Disney animation style, it all depends on the story and the character of the character. Mushu is a great example of the exaggerated Disney animation style.

Feature animation Box office grosses

Posted on December 15, 2011 | 1 Comment
Filed under Business of animation

As I very often check the box offices grosses of my favorite animated features, I decided to finally organize those information in a centralized/easy to read table and share it with you. I will post the updated table on my blog every few month and maybe add older features.

As of December 15th 2011 and by release date.(source: BoxofficeMojo.com)

You will find a ranking of the different movies by lifetime grosses at the following address, unfortunately it only for domestic revenues :
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=computeranimation.htm

Dr. Seuss’ Lorax trailer 2

Posted on December 7, 2011 | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation

Ahah! Just when you thought you had seen enough trailers for Lorax, a new one pops out! Trailer 2, technically speaking is actually the third one but I am guessing they finally considered the first one a screw up since it was a bit confusing regarding who those male characters were.

Trailer 2 is not giving away a lot more and making things a lot clearer. The trees we thought were populating the streets of Thneedville are actually made of plastic!! Makes sense!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QVCIDVeelA[/youtube]

Related post:
Dr Seuss “Lorax” trailer 1 is out

First Wacom Inkling review

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA6KQ-eIPLA[/youtube]

My buddy Ross Burt also wrote a review on his blog

http://rossburt.blogspot.com/2011/12/wacom-inkling-review.html

Aardman’s “Pirates” behind the scenes

Posted on December 5, 2011 | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation, Character design

I think we need to thank Sony for backing up Aardman on their next stop motion feature and allowing them to come up with such a great looking movie! The environment, the props, the character design, THE BOAT!!! Man this must have cost a fortune!!! I hope the quirky British humour gets a good response from the broader audience and not only animation fans. “Napoleon Blownapart” 😉

Pirates movies, who doesn’t like them anyway??

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzC9O7WtELY[/youtube]

Related post:
Aardman “The Pirates” trailers

“John Carter of Mars” December trailer

Posted on December 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Miscellaneous

A new trailer for Edgard Rice Burrough’s “Princess of Mars” screen adaptation just came out. The movie is a mix of live action and CG directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton.

I read the 1911 original story few month ago so it is really nice to see how the words have been translated to the screen> This is looking pretty exciting! The CG and compositing look a little bit to CGey in places but overall this should be a great movie!

Reading the comments on Youtube is so funny, most people are comparing it to Star Wars and Avatar when Edgard Rice Burrough actually published the Barsoom’s novels something like 70 years prior to those movies so if someone copied anyone, that would probably be George Lucas or James Cameron. If you read the books you will be blown away by the stuff Burrough came up with, this guy was a real genius.

With nine novels in the series, if the movie does well, Disney will have found a really profitable I.P.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvYKl1fjBI[/youtube]

Scarecrow model packet

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 5 Comments
Filed under Character design, Drawings, Education, Painting, Portfolio

Today we had one more amazing Animation Collaborative Character Design class.

This time, Albert and Chris brought Jason Deamer to give us a talk on Model Packeting. According to Al and Chris, Jason is the best artist for that kind of work at Pixar. Jason shared with us some of his Model sheets from Finding Nemo and we also saw some more from Up and the character Muntz in particular.

Here was the assignment I turned.

This is a rough “model packet” for one of the characters from my take on the “Wizard of Oz”. A “Wizard of Oz” that would take place in Siberia.

A model packet is a document that gets handed to the 3d modelers so they can take a design and turn it into a full 3d model. It can range from 5 to 18 pages depending on the complexity of the character or how much direction the modelers need.

There is nothing too complicated for that one but that was still pretty challenging. It is still very rough for the time being, I will post a cleaned up version very soon. Right now the arms and nose are not detailed enough for the modelers to do their job. The eyes also need to be worked out as they wouldn’t communicate eye direction. I will probably go for cartoony eyes like the last drawing.

I hope you like it!