Anime Rock Opera

This one got a pretty good review in The Guarian (four stars): Inu-oh review – medieval anime rock opera rips Noh theatre a new one

Actual Glass Animation

Through BoingBoing, who incorreectly daated this as from 1984, I came across Inspirace (Inspiration) by Karel Zeman, from 1948. Somehow I had never heard of him, Wikipedia describes him as a Czech film director, artist, production designer and animator, best known for directing fantasy films combining live-action footage with animation.Because of his creative use of special effects and animation in his films, he has often been called the "Czech Méliès".

Foxy Printing

It took a total of 18 Hours on my Anet 8 printer, but it finished without (obvious) errors. Clean Up time!

Model by Dárika Lara-Rodriquez

2D Animation for Cinephiles

Gkids distribution, which brough the hit "Belle" to cinemas last year, has released a trailer for their upcoming 2D animated movie "Pompo the Cinephile"

Once again via BoingBoing

#StandWithUkraine

«the hearts of the living will always ache for the thousands of innocent #souls killed»

Volunteer animation artists of #Ukraine conveyed all the pain that they feel over these 42 days of war.

Disney goes to Mars

A bit of Disney tekevision history, an ABC presentation on NBC

While fascinating the whole time, the various marttian creature at seven minutes are, well, out of this world, and there is a kind of animated short included at 13 minutes.

Paint on Walls Animation

And nt just the walls, all srufaces in the room are fair game. I had seen this one before, but enjoyed it again when it was redently posted to Boing Boing
 

 
Now you might think that was a lot of work. There is more where that came from: blublu.org. The above is actually just a small part of this much longer animation:
 

Hamster Christmas!

Dutch commercial for a grocery store. I think you can get the message even if you have no idea what the people are saying.

A completely different take on the Holiday Season was created at Buck:

Playing With Krita

Can we wrap our heads around why man can be so attached to their cars?

Animation Reels!

 Heyya, everyone, Alyssa here to bring you a couple of demo reels that I personally found interesting to look at. I found these all from an animation subreddit of people ranging from students to professionals sharing their works through demo reels and other methods. Here they are:

Owen Smith - First Person Animation Reel 2020

This one is from Owen Smith, and this one primarily focuses on his capabilities with first-person animation. I have plenty of nice things to say about it, especially in the presentation. A lot of times with these styles of animations, it can get monotonous real fast when you're just watching various guns being shot over and over again. However, he keeps it dynamic by changing up the background by making it animated and changing color per gun as well (a demo reel I decided not to show here had the problem of having a monotonous background in these demonstrations). The main critique I have, however, is the use of copyrighted material. Although he credits it all at the end, he uses a Rolling Stones song and various sound effects from other video games for the gun sounds. I also do not know what those projects were for initially. It would have also been nice to indicate which of the model credits go where, and it can be done in the description of the video. Overall, way to make what could be a monotonous specialty to display more interesting!

Sarah Abbott Demo Reel Fall 2020

This next one is from Sarah Abbott, a 2D animator. She really does a good job with music choice, prioritizing her best work in the front, and giving a brief variety with her projects. There is a perfect amount of time spent on each animation, and they each have a purpose and reason for fitting on the reel. My critiques for this one I'll keep brief: in the section with the dialogue, one of the character's lines get awkwardly cut off mid-speech and it's a little jarring on an editing standpoint. She could have cut it off before that character started the line. In addition, I cannot tell what role she had in these animations, whether she did some aspects of it or all of it. Those can be recorded in the description as well, so it can be easier to tell from someone looking at this in an internship standpoint what she did. Either way, I found this animation to be relatively smooth (with the exception of that one editing mistake) and displays the variety of what she can do.

David Han - Character Animation Reel

Time for a professional one to end it off. This is David Han, a professional character animator who has worked on numerous studio films, and won an Annie for his character animation work on Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. I thought it would be intriguing to include an accomplished professional on this list to see how a professional does a character reel. It's clear that he has a specific style in his character animations, with a lot of the scenes in display being action-heavy scenes with a few more toned down scenes in the mix (such as the segments with dialogue from Storks and Into the Spiderverse). I also found it interesting that he included play-blasts as well to demonstrate an aspect of his process un-rendered. In the description, he says that this is a "for funsies" version of a demo reel, but the way that the content is included and the fun framing device for the reel can serve as inspiration. Again, music is from a video game so we need to make sure to avoid those styles of music for our personal projects. Either way, this is definitely one to look at. 

That's all I have for now, and I'm looking forward to putting together mine for what's to come!

Alyssa out!

The Horror of Gekimation

For all of you who love Japanese animation, or who enjoy painstakingly painted cutout animation, the first ever Gekimation feature length movie has been released. On Blu-Ray.

Read more in today's The Guardian: 'Gekimation': Japan takes a post-Ghibli leap into another dimension

Substance News Livestream: this Wednesday at 1 PM

If you are bored from sitting at home, you could learn something about texturing.

This Wednesday, the Substance team will livestream news on all current and upcoming developments in the 3D and Substance world at Adobe.

As student you can get a free personal license and give it a try!

Oscar Worthy Animations

Looking for something to watch while confined to home? How about this, reported by OpenCulture.org: Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

This includes the full version of Chris Landreth's Ryan:

You can of course also go straight to the source, the YouTube playlist by the National Film Board of Canada, which contains both animation and live action actually, or their website

Here is a stop motion animation (with some real eyes) favorite of mine that is a bit on the long side to show in class: Madame Tutli-Putli, directed by Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski, from 2007:

Motion Fairy

Bit all over the place but contains several gems:

The Making of ‘Purl’ with Director Kristen Lester

Join Women in Animation New York Chapter and NYC ACM SIGGRAPH in a presentation by the director of the PIXAR SparkShort PURL. Tomorrow (Tuesday), 7PM at the NYIT Auditorium on Broadway (1871 Broadway, at 62nd Street)

Reserve free tickets here

Keith Lango Video Library

Via Facebook I was notified of this:

"Incredible news! Keith Lango an absolute legend in the animation industry has released his entire animation masterclass library! These were hot property back in the days when computer animation was still relatively new. There's over hundreds of hours of content here, I would highly recommend every student check out this wonderful material"

They are indeed worth checking out, many of his pages are already linked from my instruction pages. You can find the video collections at https://www.youtube.com/user/keithlango/videos

Spider-Verse Animation

A great and lyrical analysis of the animation in Into the Spider-Verse:

An Animation Analysis Of ‘Spider-Verse’ By Animator Jean-Denis Haas

Another Sparkshort: Kitbull

Pixar released another Sparkshort:

More info about this series

SIGGRAPH 2018 ET in NYC

On Wednesday, November 14, NYC ACM SIGGRAPH will be hosting a very special screening of the SIGGRAPH 2018 Computer Animation Festival Traveling Show, presented by Mikki Rose, the SIGGRAPH 2019 Conference Chair!

The screening will start at 7:00PM at FIT's Haft Auditorium.

More info: http://nyc.siggraph.org/events/S2018-CAF-Screening

2018 Monmouth Animation Reel

To post this on Vimeo we need to upgrade that to a "Plus" account, so I posted this on YouTube: