When the Hollywood Reporter recently organized a round table on "Avoiding Ethnic Stereotypes and How to "Break the Mold" of Princesses", it caused a bit of controversy as all the panelists were white males.
Elle magazine nicely countered this by adding the voices of female animators: "We Asked 4 Female Animators About Diversity and Women in the Industry?"
Latonia Davis is taking part in the final December Senior Show in the Ice House Gallery. Be sure to check out the exhibition. Photos from last nights opening can be found on Flickr
Here is your Monday morning wake up call. Fair warning: the lyrics contain expletives. Not any I have not heard in class but still, in the old days the would get a "Parental Advisory" sticker.
It won a award or nine. Floris Kaayk, the animator, you may remember, also created The Origin of Creatures.
The next screening of Animation Nights New York will take place on Wednesday, December 14 at 8PM.
The application process to become a student volunteer at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles has just opened up.
RenderMan 21 Non Commercial is finally out, so I tested it with Maya 2017. The image below took almost 8 minutes to render - that is not promising. RenderMan comes with many great material presents, setting up this scene for rendering was a breeze. Saved as openEXR and adjusted in Photoshop.
I rendered the same scene with the now default Arnold Renderer. It does not come with many materials and those have no presets. I used Batch render, which does work but places a watermark in the image. That is barely visible in this image, which was also rendered to openEXR and adjusted in Photoshop. Was a bit more involved to set up and took at least as long render
Catoonbrew published a list of the record number of films that are competing for next years best animated short category of the Academy Awards: Contenders: A Record Number of Films Are Competing
One of the Animation Freshman is a member of Hawk TV and they are currently "looking for student animation majors to create an animated promo for Hawk TV. There are some students in our club who would be interested in collaborating ideas with the animation students to make an animated promo." Any students who may be interest in this opportunity please contact me.
Our local SIGGRAPH chapter organized an event called "From Visual Effects to Virtual Reality" - "This evening will feature presentations from a number of NYC-area production houses that have long been known for their visual effects and CG work but are now producing VR content as well." - Well worth checking out if you are into VR. Which should be if you are into animation!
Come to FIT's Great Hall, 27th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues) on Thursday, November 3, 2016, at 7:00PM
These fascinating images depict animals in motion is a different way, frozen in time.
Original article on The Guardian: Xavi Bou's photographs reveal flight paths of birds
From Bryan I. Larco, Municipal Campaign Director for the Monmouth County Democrats and Monmouth University Alum ('13 BA 16' MPP), we received this:
We're currently looking for interns who are interested in working creatively on video and graphic design projects.
Student artists will have relative autonomy in regards to creativity and projects will be included in paid advertisements radio, social media, and potentially even television. If any of your students are interested, please have them email a resume to info [at] MonmouthDems.org.
So... did you guys get the title for your upcoming short from Dead Poets Society?
To balance the sincerity of this post, here is the SNL version:
If you happen to be in New York, for instance because you are taking next weekend's bus trip, you may want to check out this: an art show tribute to the animated FOX television series Bob’s Burgers
The MetroCAF 2016 show is on Firday, September 23, at the NYIT Auditorium on Broadway
We watched this student animation in class today:
Escargore from Media Design School on Vimeo.
The group was slightly larger than what we are used to (22 students). Here is a making of:
This announcement on Animation World Network alerted me to a new freely available rig. I have not yet tried it out, but it looks promising: Artella | Free Character.
Artella | Free Character from Artella on Vimeo.
It does require a special plugin which makes me worry about protability: that plug-in may or may not work for Maya 2017. Which is not out yet, but will be soon I assume.
I did not credit them properly in the reel for lack of space but here is the complete group animation:
Gary's Log from Monmouth University Animation on Vimeo.
Google honored one of the pioneers of animation, the first to ever create a feature. And all by cutting out silhouettes by hand: Lotte Reiniger.
Here is a behind the scenes look: the doodle was created using the techniques pioneered by Lotte Reiniger.
The 3D print I showed in class separated and recorded as replacement animation.
The following request came in and this can be an opportunity to gain some exposure. It is not an internship, you would be working directly with the not-for-profit client. Lunchbreak's Kate McMahon writes:
"We are in the final stages of an online virtual food drive in partnership with TechBridge formerly AidMatrix to raise funds for Lunch Break.
Please see below. We are hoping to customize the site changing the shopper (there are 2) one being a cartoon animation of our Executive Director, and the other being our Head Chef Tyrone. It is my understanding that we need to have their characters animated, in cartoon style, frame by frame. Here is the link
Game Drive: http://vad.aidmatrix.org/vadxml.cfm?driveid=5174
We are hoping a student or professional animator may consider donating their expertise for this project. If a student, over the summer, they would receive volunteer hours. We are hoping to launch the site in September."
You can contact me if you are interested.
This may be an opportunity coming soon...
UPDATE: Details have been posted. Application deadline is June 15, 2016.
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend a masterclass by animator Bill Plympton (I posted the event last week)
It was an inspiring event, with some great drawing: he showed how many of his characters are made from really basic shapes, and drew a tiny sketch on a postcard for each attendee (I choose Guard Dog) And how does he survive as an independent animator? He is not beholden to any corporation he said, and then showed the following commercial, as he does do commercials:
His Dogma explains how you can make money creating independent animation: keep it short, cheap and funny!
Tested OpenToonz on my PC today and got quite a bit further than my first test on my MacBook
Next Wednesday, April 6, 2016 at 7:00PM NYC ACM SIGGRAPH is holding its annual Industry Spotlight which is a great opportunity for networking. So if you can come into the city then, do!
You would need to go into the city for it, but Animation Nights New York organized, as part of Out to See Festival, a Master Class with Bill Plymton on April 2. Tickets are available through Eventbrite. For free.
It seems we may have to wait a while before we can see "The Little Prince" I blogged about earlier; the distributor has dropped the film. We can enjoy this trailer though
UPDATE: Netflix picked up the film
At last year's SIGGRAPH I had the pleasure of meeting Shuzo John Shiota, president of Polygon Pictures. This week I found this interesting talk he gave, that reveals some of the inner workings of an animation studio. He is Japanese, but his English should be easy to follow for you - he studied in the US, hence the "John" part of his name.
Got this through Nerdbot on Facbook, they did not post who created it. It is a fun bit of stop motion animation.
Stop Motion Clothes VideoThis stop motion video blew me away!
Posted by Nerdbot on Monday, February 22, 2016
An while we are on the subject of stop motion:
Van Gogh's paintings brought to life using 3D animation and visual mapping by Luca Agnani Studio
Posted by Bright Side on Saturday, February 20, 2016
Yes, it seems my posts lately have a bit of a stop motion theme to it. Here is one created by Aardman:
Found a great article on the animated version of "The Little Prince", which contains this video with some great details on both character development and the stop motion part of the movie:
A marriage of old and new techniques: Claymation stop motion combined with projection mapping.
Via the Experimental Animation FB group
The Art Garage in East Orange is holding another 48 Hour Animation Jam:
You can view the results from last year, a rather mixed bag I must say:
Oh joy: demonstrating how to parent a squash deformer to a ball, the darn thing refused to move with the already animated ball. A bug? Maybe. Annoying? Yeah!
What seems to fix it is putting the whole shebang (sphere and handle) in a group, animate the group and take the objects out of the group again. Why that works? Beats me, but it did a couple of times.
Nickelodeon has an April 1st deadline for their summer internship program. Their animation studio is located in Burbank, CA, so they are not quite local.
http://nickanimationstudio.com/nickelodeon-internship-program
Now his is an opportunity that is almost out of this world: working on animations for NASA! You have to act quickly though, the deadline to apply is January 22…
blueskystudios.com/working-here/internship-2016
Update: Ryan correctly alerted me that Feb. 12 is the deadline for technical internships and that is states: "The Artist/Production internship information will be posted in early 2016." So stay tuned!
I was looking for an animation angle as an excuse to post about the passing of David Robert Jones, but Cartoon Brew already did that. Too bad though they end that post with one of his worst songs. But it has animation in it.
This video was created by Raymond McCarthy Bergeron, a MFA student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Seem like an attempt to use zoetrope techniques to tell a story.
re÷belief from Raymond McCarthy Bergeron on Vimeo.
