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

‘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

Spare Parts Cutscene 02b progress reel

Posted on February 22, 2011 | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation, EA, Portfolio

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20234441[/vimeo]

And an other progress reel for Spare Parts Cutscene 02b. That sequence followed Cutscene 02a during the game. The lighting is “In Game” and the shadows are baked or faked.

For that sequence I used the famous shot from Tim Burton’s “Mars Attack” and an other one from Dreamworks “Monsters vs Aliens”. (click on the thumbnail for an edited animation)

For the layout, I reused a run cycle I had done for in-game animation and quickly tweaked it so the character could come to a stop and restart. As you can see there is no offset in the cycle yet.

The idea at that stage was to convey that an entire army was getting ready for the fight and a long queue of enemy would go throught the suit-up machine. This eventually got ditched as I didn’t have time to animate all those guys reacting to what was happening in front of them. The rigs were also really really slow and I couldn’t get more than 2 of those guys in Maya at the same time.

After pitching the idea to the executive producer, he suggested that one of the characters would get his helmet the other way round to give a more comical effect. I was delighted as it meant I could have a bit more time and went a bit further by having the guy getting stuck to the machine.

The chair is missing here as Ross our concept artist was working on the final environment and I changed the colour of the tube to match the colour of the LCD screen in the previous shot. At that stage I had establish that the good guy would use a variation of blue colours and the bad guys a variation of greens, ultimately we went for purples in final.

If you pay close attention to the end of the shot, you will notice that the arms on the poor fellow have been inverted when he has his helmet the other way round. As the helmet and the arms were constrained to the same control, this was the only way I could achieve that effect. Talking about constraints, while in the air, I parented the upper body of the character to the transparent box you can see at the top to allow for the flailling legs and rotation of the main control without affecting the upper body. Originally the tube was supposed to be transparent and show that but when in game, we ran out of time to make it work.

I hope you found this interesting!