Splinetastic Tutorial...

Victor Navone (an animator at Pixar and creator of the sweet animated short "Alien Song" ) just released a very nice little tutorial on splines in animation.

Interview with Brad Bird AND Ratatouille clips!

Check it out! Great behind the scenes stuff and dailies stuff. Sweetness!

IT CAME FROM THE PANTRY!

No, it's not some 60's B horror flick (though that could work as the title of one of those). Maybe like some Frosted Mini Wheats come alive with really bad stop motion to get their revenge and frost the right sides of people! But I digress... I was perusing the news sites today on arriving home from hanging out with my comedic cousin and came across a little tidbit that I had heard in passing on the radio the other day and forgotten about. Apparently there is some contaminated peanut butter going around with salmonellosis. Being one who regularly "licks the bowl clean" when making muffins, cake, even sometimes cornbread mix (man..I'm weird), I've been ignoring warnings for food safety for sometime. I'm not saying that's a good thing necessarily, just stating the facts. However, peanut butter is near and dear to my heart - I sometimes just grab a spoon and scoop a whopping pile of the stuff and snack away. I think I got off a little there (again)... Back to the news story. There's this bad batch of peanut butter and one of the brands is my fav (Peter Pan), so I went to check my pantry for the contaminated batch number on my jar and... Egads! Even more disturbing is the warning that all Peter Pan peanut butter bought since May 2006 should be discarded...I've probably gone through 3 or 4 jars since then. Crazy. Maybe I should really check into my mac battery recall number...

Disney's Rapunzel Unbraided Footage!

Been dying to see this in motion for some time. Thanks to Ray for the find.

15 minutes to doodle...

Final(ish) design...

Thanks for the comments. I've gotten some feedback from some other friends too. So without further ado- two very slight variations of a theme...

#6

#7

The header image will rotate randomly much like my current site. Also, for those of you looking for cool tools for sites, I think I'm going to use this flash portfolio thingy which I learned of from my very talented friend's portfolio. Now, to just find some time to actaully make a site...

Great Cg Look and Fun Animation:)

This guy (Manu Jarvinen) has some talent. Check out his work.

Need to waste some time?

Lots of fun opportunities here from the gang at Aardman:) Click the vid to go to youTube to see googles more. ...pun intended.

Website design drafts...

So, when my hard drive died last fall, I lost all of my source files for...well, most of the past 5 years (sans 3d work). That included my site which is why I've not updated anything but the blog in some time.

This weekend I decided to start playing with some new designs (more a variation on a theme than a radical departure of what I got now). Oh yeah, my logo will be in there, I gotta rebuild it...lost that too...dangit..any thoughts?

Number 3

Number 4

Number 5 - On a buddy's suggestion

The blue looks completely different on two of my monitors (yay color calibration!)...which is one reason I've gone with gray for a few years now. Toodles.

Energizer Bunny...

Wonder what he’s thinking bout'...carrots...ski bunny?

Ratatouille Clip

Take a look before it gets yanked offline!

Icontastic!

A sampling from the year...

So one of my favorite little tasks at work is making icons for the mel scripts we use and create. Scottie is the brains behind our little mel factory here (check his site, he has some goodies up there) and I..well...I make the picturesque little buttons. But I'm learning. I did complete my first major mel script last week that makes captures a thumbnail of a character's face, adds custom text in to label it and render it off to an input location which then became a very small part of Scott's current opus mel project which is gonna be very sweet when finished. One of my goals for the year was learning more mel and I'm slowly chipping away at it. Next on the list is UI Mel creation which my compatriot tells me is "lots of fun." Giddyap.

Tax time

Trying to follow Jesus' advice...Matthew 17:27

I did the annual limbo with the 1040's, w2s, 1099MISC's and itemization of deductible expenses this weekend. Tax time is a good annual test of integrity. I imagine that cheating on taxes is a fairly common practice. I know for a fact that, even wanting to be honest, it can be nigh to impossible to know beyond a shadow of doubt that you've done everything correctly when, as a call to the IRS last year illustrated, even the IRS doesn't necessarily certify their own advice. I think the government does an abysmal job for the most part making good use of our tax dollars. When businesses can be held accountable to their stock holders for being negligent in properly running a company, why is it the citizens of a nation get so little traction in holding their their leaders to account? Throwing money at every issue that raises it's head doesn't necessarily ring with the sound of wisdom - there are such things in life as money pits. I really don't wanna go on a political rant at present, so I'll stop while I'm ahead. Even believing the government grossly incompetent in much of it's spending expenditures, much less being honest what the actual ledger is, I'll do my part, pay my 15-20% (whatever it ends up being) and keep looking for people I can actually vote for. After all taxes do a lot. In the words of the great Ned Flanders of Simpson's renown:

Taxes pay for everything! Policemen, trees, sunshine. And let's not forget the folks who just don't feel like workin', God bless 'em!

It could always be worse...:)