Aardman “The Pirates” trailers
Posted on July 14, 2011 |
1 Comment
Filed under Animation
Great! Aardman finally released the trailer we saw at Annecy last month. Ah the Brits, don’t you love their wacky sense of humour! I can’t wait to see this in cinemas!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnYpfvbmGGo[/youtube]
Hold on, there is a second trailer!!
Make it extra gruesome!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw[/youtube]
French comic artist Boulet at work
Posted on July 8, 2011 |
5 Comments
Filed under Miscellaneous
Timelapse video of Boulet working on Formicapunk, a story were the future is based on the evolution of mid-1970s technologies. Really funny AND impressive straight-ahead work. If you want to follow is work, check out his blog http://www.bouletcorp.com/blog/
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-3jrkqJ8c[/youtube]
The history of 3d Computer Graphics
Posted on July 7, 2011 |
Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation
If you wanted to learn the history of 3d Computer Graphic, I would suggest you to start with that great series of interviews with the creators of 3dstudio (the DOS version of 3dstudio max) and José Maria De Espona, one of the first 3dstudio artist to make the switch from Silicon Graphics based solutions to Intel based desktops.

“It was not however an easy task to convince my partners to adopt 3DStudio, and even harder for my clients to accept the fact that something could be produced with household PCs. We had additional problems, such as the need to keep PC boxes always open and put small fans over the CPUs, because we had literally melted some 486 PCs. Every time clients walked into our office, they would stand there with their mouths wide open looking at the atrocious spectacle of all the disassembled PCs, with their chassis and metal guts in open air, accompanied by the loud noise of the fans. I have to say we lost some clients due to this, and also because rumor spread among the competition that we used home PCs for producing TV ads”.
Tom Hudson interview
Gary Yost interview
José Maria de Espona on the Max Temple image
The Gary Yost interview contains a little gem that Character Studio and Chuck Jones fans will love. I let you read how this came about.

I should also add that great video to this post: Pixar – A human Story of computer animation, a panel with Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjSExqtiIyg[/youtube]
Related posts:
Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of animation
La Seine
Posted on July 1, 2011 |
1 Comment
Filed under Animation
I am such a fan boy 😉
Here is a music video clip from French animated feature “Un monstre à Paris” and performed by Vanessa Paradis and composer M, who are respectively voicing Lucile and Francoeur (the creature). La Seine is the river that flows through Paris and also the french for stage. The lip sync is not very accurate but the video is gorgeous.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z-NbQvhzKM[/youtube]
I love that track…
Related posts:
Monstre à Paris
Brave concept art and teaser
Posted on June 29, 2011 |
11 Comments
Filed under Animation, Character design, Modeling
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYg0VgPy6Uk[/youtube]
Pixar just released a teaser for next years feature Brave (previously titled The Bear and the Bow) along with some character designs.

Those designs have definitely a Pixar feel to them as they immediately remind us of The Incredibles or Up. Some commentators compared Lord Macintosh to Muntz and the Wise Woman to a Carl Fredericksen in drag 🙂
My favourite are actually Lord Macintosh and the Wise Woman as they are much more graphic than the other character. As a matter of fact I have decided to model those two in order to better understand the Pixar style and improve my modeling skills.
I modelled Lord Macintosh in Maya starting from a plane and using the edge extrusion technique in order to quickly create some edge loops then refined the base shape by cutting faces, merging and moving vertices around. Nothing too fancy. I have some experience with that type of modelling but I think I will try the Zbrush approach for the Wise Woman. My friend Richie just showed me the work of Tom Parker, an incredible Zbrush modeler that can knock out a piece in less than two hours.
Here is the timelapse, I only recorded the first few hours as the final “vertex cleaning/edge rerouting” pass is too tedious to watch. I hope you will find this interesting, the video is a sequence of automated screenshots hence the choppiness.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25620952[/vimeo]
via http://www.cartoonbrew.com/pixar/brave-characters.html
Related posts:
Lord Macintosh update
Modeling blog category
animSchool new trailer
Posted on June 24, 2011 |
3 Comments
Filed under Animation
Still wondering if you should be attending Ianimate or Animation Mentor? Wait, you are forgetting Animschool! 😉
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDN1qZPzasw[/youtube]
I really want to like that school and the rigs seem like a lot of fun but I am finding the concept difficult to understand at the moment, is it an animation, modeling, rigging or a generalist school? As a graduate from Animation Mentor I might be interested to join some of the animation classes but the website is making it pretty difficult to understand whether this is possible. Also having two separate domain names 3dappeal and AnimSchool is not helping.
One thing for sure is that the guys are uber talented though and those following videos they recorded are very interesting.
http://www.3dappealblog.com/
AnimSchool, animating Appeal and Entertainment
Pocoyo creator interview
Posted on June 23, 2011 |
1 Comment
Filed under Animation
Christian Dan, one of the crazy talented animators who worked on Planet 51, just made me aware of a great video interview Arte y Animacion recorded with Pocoyo creator, Alfonso Rodriguez.
Check it out it is very interesting
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/23975439[/vimeo]
Related posts:
Pocoyo not on Youtube this time
Pako Bagur showreel and blog
Eduardo Martin Julve showreel
Ken Fountain basic acting shot
Posted on June 18, 2011 |
Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

Hehe, Jason Ryan Webinar animation already announced a new Video tutorial with my fellow Animation Mentor student Ken Fountain. During Animation Mentor, Ken always shown a great understanding of performance and entertainment so it wasn’t a surprise when he landed his first character animation job at Dreamworks in 2008.
For those who can’t afford Animation Mentor or Ianimate, here is one new video you should and I should be saving for!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObP6064QjGo[/youtube]
Related posts:
Jamaal Bradley acting shot walk-through
Mike Walling …. avec une moustache
Mike Walling Walkthrough
Ianimate new promo video
Monstre à Paris french trailer!
Posted on June 15, 2011 |
4 Comments
Filed under Animation

via Monstre à Paris Facebook page
That’s it! There won’t be any more delays, the movie is coming out at the end of the year and Europa corp finally released a trailer in french. I feel that “Monstre à Paris”, a movie that was first started in 2007, is showing a bit of age compared to animated blockbusters like Kung Fu Panda 2 but hopefully the very stylised art style and european flair will make the movie stand out from the competition.
I wrote several posts related to the movie in the past, you should be able to find them all by doing a search on my blog . I am really liking that trailer and the music is very catchy. CG animation lovers are really being spoilt those days!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et1T4c-BNUk[/youtube]
Some more videos on Catsuka.
Related posts:
Monstre à Paris
Monstre à Paris short clip
CTN Animator tools of the trade
Posted on June 14, 2011 |
3 Comments
Filed under Animation
Still don’t know what CTN is? Check out the CTN Vimeo channel.
http://vimeo.com/ctnanimationexpo
and here are several talks I really liked. I haven’t watched them all yet but the line up is pretty amazing. I just came back from Annecy where we were really spoilt but this is seriously impressive. A discussion between Victor Navone, Michal Makarewicz, Carlos Baena, Aaron Hartline, and a candid Andreas Deja, Peter de Séve, Sergio Pablos, Don Bluth…
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/23651406[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/13835601[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/12745284[/vimeo]
I couldn’t make it last year, this year might be my first.
Andreas Deja just started a blog by the way and he is posting some never seen artwork from Disney legends. Deja View. The Ward Kimball sketches he posted are really sweet, too bad the final Three Caballeros shortfilm looked a bit different.
Related posts:
Harald Siepermann interview






