The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
Being mostly interested in Animated Features and Animated TV series, I don’t visit FX Guide much but I just found a series of interesting interview I will be posting in the next few days.
Here is a very interesting one with Disney “Feast” director Patrick Osborne where he goes into a bit more details about the unique visuals of his short film.
Via : FX Guide
Once in a while in your career or just even at the start of your studies you will meet some unique individuals that will feed your self-doubts.
Whilst studying at Animation Mentor back in 2006, I was marveling at the work of several students that eventually became CG animation superstars, then later during my animation career, I came across few profiles that could animate three times better and three times faster than I could, so I just kept at it, with the belief that it might take me longer, before eventually succeeding.
If it is not just procrastination stirring us away from our goals, some of us just need to work harder to succeed.
Do you think Nik Ranieri gave up animation when he first came across 21 years old James Baxter while working on Roger Rabbit?
Pretty close but Nik Ranieri kept pushing and like Baxter, he ended up also, writing his name on Disney’s history books!
Listen to this fun Nik Ranieri’s recollection of that encounter in the third part of an other memorable Animation Podcast interview.
I am posting a direct link to the interview as the libsyn link in the interview page is now broken, the main page works though or click below.
Direct link to the podcast:
http://animationpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/AP_2005_09_05.mp3
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Disney just announced a Disney+ exclusive feature and I know exactly what I would like it to look like! 😉
Wouldn’t you want to see Zootopia’s Nick Wilde taking on the lead of the 1973’s “Robin Hood” remake? I do!
Back in 2008, I was privileged to attend Ed Catmull’s keynote at Siggraph as a Microsoft/Rare representative.
During his talk, Ed Catmull looked back at the mistakes Pixar did in its early years and the secrecy surrounding their technologies was one of them.
Instead he explained, everyone would benefit if studios became more open about their projects and technologies.
Fast forward to 2020, Ed Catmull stayed true to his words and everyone is now fully acquainted with Disney’s Ptex and other Pixar’s USD but did you know that Blue Sky and Dreamworks have also embraced the idea of sharing their ideas?
Few days ago, I shared an old article from the Blue Sky’s tech blog on Linkedin and I was astonished by the success it received. In the space of few days, my post, received a little bit less than 3.5k views on a blog post I had assumed everyone had already read and no, the article became viral.
Most animation related websites are too mainstream those days and not technology focused enough so it is easy to fall out of the loop. When using a 3d software, yes you can pretend you are working like a 2d animator but realistically, you are more like the pilot of a fighter plane and need to keep an eye on your memory use, processes and autosaves.
For anyone wanting to stay up to date for at least what the main Feature animation studios are doing, I would highly recommend to bookmark the following links and keep an eye on what is being discussed.
The Blue Sky tech blog is a fairly new one and I read some really interesting articles there, one of them regarding the gamification of Quality Checks (Introducing achievements into QC).
This is the historical animated feature tech website that goes all the way back to 2009.
Last year’s “Optimizing rig manipulation with GPU and parallel evaluation” Siggraph paper doesn’t appear though. It will eventually I am sure so use the link just above to read an abstract and watch the accompanying video.
Dreamworks research and development:
This is the Dreamworks treasure cove. Loads of information about their proprietary software and other tech.
Where it all started!
I hope this is useful to you. Don’t hesitate to share.
March 1909 came to life my favorite Disney animator. It has been a really long time since I last spoke about Disney legend Milt Kahl on this blog and at a time of political correctness where people are afraid to ruffle feathers, I think it would be a good time to make March 2020, Milt Kahl’s appreciation month!
Milt Kahl was one of Disney’s Nine old men. A vocal animator, well known for his razor sharp comments and stunning performances on characters like Rescuers’ Medusa, Jungle Books’ Shere Khan, Merlin, Aristocat’s Edgar, or even Bambi and Alice.
Let’s start Milt Kahl’s appreciation month softly, with his Disney Family Album portrait and then we will quickly move to a series of interview with his sharp criticism on the industry … and on his colleagues, and to finish with the excellent CalArt tapes!
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I don’t know where I got this from but here are some notes I had buried in my hard drive. I am guessing this is an answer to a Q&A with Disney animators who worked on Tangled.
Having attended Animsquad, I am aware about the importance of eyelashes and I had been told a while back that eyelashes could be animated on a show like Tangled.
Without further ado, here are the notes :
As far as eyes are concerned, for Tangled, We Payed HUGE attention to eye lids. every frame was tuned to Glen’s drawings for the max appeal. Another HUGE things we really spent time on were the eye lashes, Mainly Rapunzel and Mother Gothel. Glen stressed the importance of the lid shape, the tension in the lower lids, the shape of the lower lids, and where the eye lashes were pointing. In Alot of cases we would point the lashes where the character was looking, to help guide the viewer’s eye and boost the appeal of the character. I think the eye lashes and lid shapes are something really overlooked alot of the time, But these are HUGE tools that can be used to gain appeal and to show what the character is feeling.
Also some people think its the rigging. The rigs for these characters were very simple when it came to mouth and eye shapes. For the eye lids we only had three controls for the edge of the top and bottom lids, two corner controls, and open and close rotation controls. sometimes Less is more with controls, It makes it harder to get lost in the rig.
Hope that helps!!! On behalf of the crew, Thanks for the great comments!
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Few month ago I was joining Dwarf animation in sunny Montpellier to work on the Monsters Inc TV series and today, Disney finally announced “Monsters at work, the TV series based on the Monsters inc universe.
The project is looking stunning and obviously I can’t say more than what was made public so if you are eager to know more about it, head off to the Pixar Pod where T.J. and Julie did a brilliant detective work! 😉
https://www.pixarpost.com/2019/06/monsters-at-work-logo.html
If you have liked my old Toy Story lip sync article, you will love this little video where I am studying the lip sync of a shot from Pixar’s forthcoming movie “Onward”.
Ideally, you want to download the video and play it frame by frame with a media player like KMPlayer, Keyframe MP or RV for the lucky ones.
It is also possible to play the videos frame by frame in Youtube and Vimeo after pausing the video. Use Shift + Left or Right arrow in Vimeo, coma (,) or dot (.) in Youtube.
Related post:
I just found one of those rare Joe Moshier interviews. It is in French but Google Translate should do the job.
Joe Moshier is one of the greatest character designer but similarly to Paul Felix, his life is pretty secretive. If it wasn’t for his credits on some of the most visually interesting Disney movies like “Emperor’s new groove” or “Home on the range”, you wouldn’t know about him.
Joe joined Dreamworks few years ago to work on several projects. Here is the French article followed by a quick video interview. Sorry the new version of WordPress breaks the layout of my blog 🙁
http://www.effets-speciaux.info/article?id=175
Related post:
The Sweat box
Many red moons ago, Disney partnered with Double Negative to bring to the screen Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel “John Carter of Mars” and more specifically the character animation of the Tharks under the helm of Pixar brain trustee/ “Finding Nemo’s” director Andrew Stanton.
Here are few behind the scenes videos and a great animation process walkthrough by Patrick Giusiano followed by a series of related articles.
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/a-world-away-john-carter/
https://digitalmediaworld.tv/in-depth/467-john-carter-and-the-creatures-of-mars
