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Full Sail showreel

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

At the beginning of Animation Mentor, AAU was kicking butt. It seems that other traditional brick and mortar schools, helped by the release of Norman to the public, have now upped their game. More and more great showreels are coming out of Florida based Full Sail university. I would be curious to know how high are the tuition fees though, French Gobelin’s nearly free tuition is long gone but we are still really far from north american’s costs.

If some of you are following Andrew Gordon’s website, you probably remember Drew Winey’s Pirate entry from the last Spline Doctors contest. I thought is other schoolmate should have won the competition but after watching Drew’s latest showreel I have to admit that the guy is really talented and I am not surprised he got hired by ReelFX.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11900014[/vimeo]

I would also encourage people to check out his blog and see for yourself how he might have gotten where he is. Many animators are concentrating on long acting shots where Drew seems to be favouring quick 1 to 2 days shots that have a lot of entertainment value.

Drew Winey’s blog

Related posts:
AAU graduate showreel
What is AAU

Mike Walling … avec une moustache!

Posted on April 14, 2011  | 9 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/22386291[/vimeo]

Mike and I have been working on a French version of his great animation tutorial videos for the past few weeks and they are now available on the JRWebinar store page.

It is not very often that you see a video tutorial with a top feature animator working in a commercial package so you must recommend the videos to all your french speaking friends!

Mike Walling … avec des moustaches!

Mike Walling et moi avons travaillé pendant quelques semaines sur une version francaise de ses vidéo tutoriel de mécanique corporelle. Les vidéos sont à présent disponible sur le magasin virtuel (store) du site de Jason Ryan.

Mike Walling a commencé sa carriére d’animateur en 2001 et a joint Dreamworks en 2010 aprés avoir travaillé sur des films aussi prestigieux que L’Age de glace, Horton, ou Surf’s Up.

Ce n’est pas tous les jours que l’on peut voir un animateur de trés haut niveau travailler sur un logiciel commercial, aussi cette vidéo doit étre recommandée à tous les débutants et les animateurs plus aguerris qui rêvent un jour de travailler dans un studio de cinéma d’animation. Rappellons que les studios Dreamworks et Pixar utilisent des logiciels d’animation propriétaire aussi, rare sont les animateurs de ces deux studios qui connaissent Maya sur le bout des doigts.

Pour la traduction, j’ai repris la terminologie utilisée par Richard Williams dans son ouvrage Techniques d’animation. Les termes Key poses, breakdown, inbetween et spacing ont été respectivement traduits par Pose clefs, intervalle principal/breakdown, intervalle et espacement.
Les termes Ease in, drag, overlap, overshoot ont quant à eux été traduits par amorti, retard, chevauchement et dépassement.

Jason Ryan webinar website

Related posts:
Mike Walling walkthrough
Maya, mel scripts for animation

Ianimate new promo video

Posted on April 10, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Education

I am surprised not everyone knows about Ianimate yet. Good thing Jason Ryan just released a new promotional video explaining how the school works and showing the work of the first batch of students. You can also see the rigs they are providing to the students and some of them are really really appealing.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/21879011[/vimeo]

Ianimate is not as big as Animation Mentor yet so you might not be able to build up a huge network of animators friends as quickly as with the Berkeley based online school but all the Ianimate mentors are top Dreamworks animators which is perfect for someone wanting to work specifically in feature animation.

Ianimate.net

Related post:
Who is Jason Ryan
Mike Walling walkthrough
iAnimate Jason Ryan interview

‘Reel’y Inspiring!

Posted on April 2, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Education

one more quick post to feature that awesome Vimeo Channel, a huge collection of animation showreels:

‘Reel’y Inspiring!

Vimeo used to have a TV function that would be ideal to watch that channel but I am not sure where to find it anymore.

And also a very cool collection of Progression Reels and other behind the scenes of your favourite animation:

Animation Progression Reels

TODOR & PETRU

Posted on March 29, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

I don’t have much time those days to keep this blog updated or even do any animation work so in the meantime, here is a video some Gobelins students did during an internship last year. I am finding this very refreshing. I shall be back with more educational material in three weeks.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16051959[/vimeo]

Mike Walling walkthrough…. with a moustache

Posted on March 23, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Education

Mike Walling sent me an email a while back but I forgot to post it 🙁 Here it is

“Hey Olivier, can you do me a favor and post a comment saying a big thank you from me to everybody who left comments or may have purchased the walk through? I can’t stress how thank full I am that people are getting something out of what I did. For me the walk through was a trial run for some bigger stuff I am working on and in fact I have a new walk through in progress that will cover advanced body mechanics, thought process, basic acting choices, constraints, graph editor work flow, better explanation on how I polish and camera cuts. I think this will be a really fun walk through and since nobody bought just part one or part two I’m going to make it just one purchase but two downloads to keep the file sizes a bit smaller. Anyway I wanted to give you a shout out for the support, it means a lot and I love seeing people out there that are passionate about what it is well do. So keep at it”

My french speaking readers might have a pleasant surprise in few weeks but I don’t want to say more for the moment 😉
Et je vais avoir une petite surprise pour mes lecteurs francais dans quelques semaines mais je ne veux pas en dire plus pour l’instant 😉

Related post:
Mike Walling walkthrough

Kung Fu Panda 2, trailer 2

Posted on March 5, 2011  | 3 Comments
Filed under Animation, Character design, Modeling

I CAN’T WAIT!!!!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opJDglqiQ6k[/youtube]

and something I just found. A top french modeler took one of Nico Marlet undone designs and modeled a nasty croco. Actually, judging by the colour scheme, it could be a good guy.

I have a fascination for cartoony crocos I have to say. We have a pretty cool one in the show I am working on (sorry can’t show) but his facial rig doesn’t allow for broad expressions. I will have to investigate how to rig cartoony beaks and long jaw one of those days. Ah for the story, Michel Guillemain is now at Dreamworks LA on … Kung Fu Panda 2 😉

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/12269548[/vimeo]

ah some interesting links. Yes I have the bad feeling they only took the first story and put a 2 at the end, in the line of the Die Hard series, hopefully it is not just the overcoming of a new enemy.
on writing for Kung Fu Panda
Nicolas Marlet interview

Madagascar carnet de voyage

Posted on March 3, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Friends

If you still haven’t seen any images from my buddy’s Babass Oscar nominated short film “Madagascar, carnet de voyage”, here is an extract I just found on Vimeo

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/10142724[/vimeo]

The shortfilm is a very nice mix of water colours and camera mapped 3d effects.

I am sad he didn’t win the Oscar but the competition was just too strong. Not bad for a second short film though.

Drawing Inspiration short film

Posted on February 28, 2011  | 5 Comments
Filed under Animation, Friends

Tim McCourt and Wesley Louis, two fellow animators I met during a Central Saint Martins end of year show, just finished a really nice short film I encourage you to see.

‘A wino, resigned and stuck in his ways, finds mysterious sketches on the park bench that he visits every day. As these pictures stir his thoughts, he begins to notice the world around him and to reflect upon his own place within it. He meets a young boy whose innocent encouragement helps to release him from his self destructive social withdrawal and unlocks a part of his character that had been long forgotten.’

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20344220[/vimeo]

And here is the production blog, I am in love with the main character’s sculpture!

http://drawinginspirationproduction.blogspot.com/

Quicktime pro gamma shift bug no fix

Posted on February 24, 2011  | 7 Comments
Filed under Education

[update] NONE OF THE TRICKS ARE WORKING but as I said it in the comments, there is nothing to worry about, it is only a problem with Quicktime when playing videos locally. If you watch them with a webbrowser like Google Chrome, the gamma doesn’t shift.

Some of you might have noticed a realllly annoying bug with Quicktime pro when outputting to H264. No matter what compression, the video looks “washed out” or covered by a white layer.

This problem seems to be due to the latest version of Quicktime pro that would assume the video you are importing has a Mac gamma (1.8) instead of the PC one (2.2).

A trick has been running around consisting in tweaking the Blend and Straight alpha settings but the most picky of us realized that the blacks still weren’t as black as they should be.

I found what seems to be the solution in the looooong series of comment following Andrew Krammer’s original post with the above trick.
http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2008/06/fix-quicktime-gamma-shift/

One of commentator is suggesting to fool Quicktime pro by first opening a Tiff picture then importing the video. This way Quicktime doesn’t apply that screwed up gamma.

1) Create a small (32×32 pixels or so) tiff or bitmap – doesn’t matter what color, just make it 8bit and RGB
2) Open a new player and ‘Open image sequence’ and select the tiff/bitmap. set the frame rate to whatever you’re going to be working in
3) Open your desired quicktime in another player, ’select-all’ and ‘copy’ the clip
4) Back in you ‘tiff/bitmap’ movie hit ‘add to movie’ – this will add the video over the top of the tiff/bitmap on a second video layer
5) Export using your desired codec
All going well the gamma will match your original video very closely

Thanks Andrew Stewart and Andrew Krammer

As a side note, I have a conspiracy theory on this but let’s not get into that 🙂

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1027614

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