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...:)

Lunch Doodles...

Slow day...and I need to practice:)

"Particularly" Blessed...

Had a few minutes, so I sketched up a little self expression. This about sums up how I feel today. And no, it isn't because the new flavor in the company slushy machine is Pina Colada... ...though that is pretty tasty...:)

Another Weekend

Another weekend finds me with a list of things to complete and little desire to do so. I'd rather sit and read a book, work on some animation or be having an engaging conversation with a "particular friend." Could be awhile... High on the priority list was a revision of my syllabus again. There was just still too little animation and I'd rather my students have some nice animation for their reels than a rudimentary rigged character and little animation to show. I'm still gonna teach facial rigging, but a basic leg rig and stretchy spine can be done following any multitude of tutorials to be found online. It also happens to be something I've been able to specialize in, so might as well let them learn from the mistakes I've made and learned from. The course is a "lil" different than the syllabus I was handed, but I'm still hitting all the "core competencies." All I really care about is getting my students to a point of having work that might get them a second look at a studio when they graduate. If deviation is an issue, I've got a day job. I finally got a hold of a buddy yesterday who's been dodging my calls (yeah, I know you've been avoiding me, Keith;). He's a fantastic animator and an instructor at Ringling which consistently puts out excellent story tellers. Anyway, he told me to do another check on Keith Lango who's been doing some pretty honest sharing about the animation industry. He's going on my daily blog stop list. Great tutorials and thoughts there as well. It was a balmy seven degrees this morning as I walked over to hit the elliptical at the clubhouse. Prolly hovering in the negatives with the wind chill. It was kinda nice. Not that I have any pretense of desire to stay for long periods of time out in temperatures like that, but for a brief moment it's nice to have the chill nip at your ears and nose, to feel the wind bite and feel very much alive. If I was having to live in it, I think my tune would change rather quickly. Watch "The Little Match Girl"... I've got some serious thoughts on a couple of books I've been reading but don't have time to delve into them at present. You'd be surprised how much in similarity there is to be found between the insights of a scholar of sociology and the last meditations of a priest who served in India. One of my buddy's websites I was transferring this weekend is down, back to it...

The Little Match Girl...

Disney recently did a traditional piece of animation. YAY! This short is titled "The Little Match Girl". It is beautiful both visually, musically and well...I don't wanna ruin it so I'll leave it at that.Today's world isn't very far removed from the one represented and it does us good to remember that every now and then. ...I was fixing to post a link to it, but it looks like Disney told YouTube.com to pull it. If it pops up again, I'll post it. But if you get a chance to see it, do. Update - You can find the short on The Little Mermaid DVD (most recent release)

What I'm working on at work...

Here's the latest trailer for the game I'm working on - Stranglehold. Shows off some new schtuff.

Disclaimer: The implied policy of solving problems with guns is not necessarily endorsed by the author of this site:)

Shmoo kitty...

Today I had a few minutes between tasks with nothing to do, so I decided to doodle a little. I recently met someone who has a cat named "Shmoo," so...

When Traffic is a Blessing...

This morning I wanted to get into work early because I had some stuff for my class tonight I wanted to take care of. With a typical departure time of 9:00am and an average ETA of 10:00am (+/- 10 minutes), I did a little mathematics in my head...

ntt (normal travel time) = 1 hour 9am + ntt = 10am Nice and easy, so ... 8am + ntt = 9am

So as I rolled into work at 10:00am having left at 8:00am wondering what had happened to my ironclad calculations I realized something - I had forgotten a few hidden variables...

(8am + ntt) * (inclimate weather quotient + the accident caused by the guy drinking coffee, talking on the phone, lighting a cigarrette and checking out the girl in the next car) = you'll get there when you get there

I didn't get in as early as I wanted to but commuting isn't all that bad. I believe the time we're given here is a gift so if my Maker has ordained things that I should be sitting in my little Civic a couple hours a day, might as well make the most of it. It gives you time to stop and think before the day begins, to laugh at the guy next to you going ballistic because someone cut them off while we're doing 2mph and laugh at yourself when "that guy" is you, to step outside of the narcisim of our imediate gratification lives we Americans live so well. By default most of us are insufferably selfish though we don't want to admit it. It's a good thing for us to not always get what we want when we want it - to reminds us that the world doesn't revolve around us. Sometimes it's nice to turn off the music and just let your thoughts wander. This morning was crisp and cold with a light dusting of snow tinting the urban sprawl. The sky was cloudless for the most part save a solid band of purple clouds low on the horizon that towered over the flatlands like mountains. I love the mountains; I miss them. I hope to live near them some day. That got me thinking back to a trip to Montana with my grandparents I took as a kid where my grandfather taught me to fish for salmon with corn, how a good place for finding worms is in cow paddies, and countless other things that grandfathers teach their grandsons. It was a glorious summer. I'm glad I was able to slow down enough today to remember. Traffic can be a good thing when it slows us down. Not our cars, mind you, but we who sit behind the wheel. ...however, I could stand to shave a few miles off my commute:)