Housekeeping: Feedburner RSS Subscription Link Fixed

Those of you who may have tried to RSS subscribe to this blog using Feedburner link I have over on the right hand sidebar have found that clicking on that little button didn’t really work properly. That’s a bit of a problem since the whole point of that thing was to let folks easily subscribe to this blog. Hmmm. (the little orange RSS chicklet up there in the address bar of the site has always worked, though)
But happy day- all that is fixed now. So if you want to RSS subscribe to my blog you can now easily (and successfully) do so using the Feedburner button over there on the right. It will make keeping track of this blog a lot easier. Not that it’s been active around here the last year or so, but I’m expecting things to pick back up in the coming months.

Housekeeping: Animation links updated

The links on my animation gallery and short film pages have been broken for a bit. I had the movies on another server which I cancelled some time ago. I’ve since updated the links to the new server and so the animation & short film links should work now.

I hope to have some new clips of my work on the animation gallery page later this year. I’ve got stuff piled up from the last few years of work that I haven’t bothered to put online yet. After I get settled back in the US I’ll be taking some time to update the animation page so that it better reflects what I’ve been doing.

9 Keys to Innovation: Brad Bird

I found this neat little interview/article linked from 3dTotal.com. I haven’t seen it linked in the usual animation related blogs I check now and then, so I thought I’d throw out a link. It’s a really great (and quick) read on how to keep innovation growing. An excerpt to whet your appetite….

Lesson Two: Perfect is the Enemy of Innovation

Brad Bird: I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen… I’d say, “Look, I don’t have to do the water through a computer simulation program… I’m perfectly content to film a splash in a swimming pool and just composite the water in.” I never did film the pool splash [but] talking this way helped everyone understand that we didn’t have to make something that would work from every angle. Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.

More cool stuff like this in the article. Take 10 minutes and check it out.