Animation with a moustache

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

Animation with a moustache Blog

Animschool Tom Bancroft interview 0

Animation

 by 

Animschool Tom Bancroft interview

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.

Related posts:
Animschool Free Malcolm rig
Jeff Gabor webcast recording

Feature animation Box office grosses 1

Business of animation

 by 

Feature animation Box office grosses

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 1

Animation

 by 

Dr. Seuss’ Lorax trailer 2

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

Aardman’s “Pirates” behind the scenes 1

Animation / Character design

 by 

Aardman’s “Pirates” behind the scenes

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 0

Miscellaneous

 by 

“John Carter of Mars” December trailer

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 5

Character design / Drawings / Education / Painting / Portfolio

 by 

Scarecrow model packet

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!

Related posts:
Snowman walk

“This is what you need” v541 0

Animation

 by 

“This is what you need” v541

This is where I am as of tonight, I refined some areas, constraints and other fun business are still untouched for now. Four days left before the next crit. I just added a background for some people so they can understand the story a bit better, hopefully 😉

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/32772007[/vimeo]

Eye darts – video reference 0

Acting / Animation / Education

 by 

Eye darts – video reference

I was watching a documentary on the Sherman brothers and found that really good eye dart video reference with two actors only few inches away from each others. It is striking how much the actress’s eyes move around when she is looking successively at the left and right eyes then at the mouth. Also pay attention to the timing of the darts, it is between one and two frames and the eye lid seems to be delayed by one frame at time.

Related posts:
Kids take – video reference
Take – video reference

“This is what you need” v.460 0

Animation / Education

 by 

“This is what you need” v.460

After Aaron Hartline ripped my shot last week I wasn’t too sure what to think anymore. It is very refreshing to hear someone showing you a very different perspective on your shot but it can also be a traumatizing experience if it is summed up by “you have some nice motion here but the story makes no sense“. Aaron suggested that I would change the story entirely as Palapatine “doesn’t have that voice” and Anakin “is blond and not a delivery boy“.

I guess it is like contemporary art, some people are more receptive than others. Some people prefer Picasso’s more figurative paintings when others prefer his cubist period. Some people prefer Jim Carrey’s humour to Larry David’s, I guess it is a question of taste.

Victor Navone didn’t have a problem with it so I will keep pushing and finish the shot with the original idea. Once I have the cloth simulation and the rest of the environment, it should make more sense for the wider audience.

So, here is where I am. A mess! 😉 The rig I am using (very old but really fast Bishop rig) doesn’t have FK/IK Snap or any fancy IK hands space switching so I am supposed to set up a lot of constraints and I am not to willing to go into that Victor is completely happy with the body animation. I was hoping to finish that shot WAY earlier than that but with only one review per week, changes can impact the completion of the shots in a dramatic manner and this is without counting the changes that were finally reverted to the original blocking and video reference and I have had several like this. Lesson learnt, show your video reference at every review! I am actually thinking of putting my video ref on a Nurbs plane actually. This way we can compare immediately the two instead of having to switch all the time which is not very easy with the shot review software we are using at AnimC.

Here is what I have today, it is not really at a presentable state but since I haven’t posted anything for the past 4 or 5 weeks, I felt it was necessary to finally post something. I am not going to pretend I have a feature animation workflow completely nailed, especially with that kind of rig. Also, let’s remember that this is a 17 seconds sequence with one long full body shot, two characters interacting and plenty of constraints. A lot of fun 😉

As you will notice, I have also done a lip sync pass as it is pretty unlikely Victor will ask for dramatic changes and it makes the shot a bit more presentable. Also… I love lip sync and close ups.

I am posting a Youtube version as it was quicker than Vimeo Vimeo version posted but the sound seems to be slightly offset despite uploading a huge uncompressed version.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/32694320[/vimeo]

Related posts:
This is what you need video ref 02 and blocking
“This is what you need”, planning
“This is what you need’, gathering references
Lip sync observations