spring cleaning

The old site design was starting to feel creaky. HD video is becoming more common online and I wanted a new template that allowed me to post HD from YouTube and Vimeo without needing to sample them down to fit the column width. So thus the new look. I tinkered with the design some, but I'm still not 100% settled. Heck, I'm not even 80% settled. Still I probably won't spend a ton of time customizing it. I figure at this point the blog is what it is and most folks probably come to the blog via a feeder of some sort, so the layout and graphics are not as big an issue as they once were.
In other house cleaning news, I've taken down some of my older obsolete links. The link to my animation examples has been removed since every bit of animation in that gallery was at least 5 years old, most of it much older. I will probably utilize YouTube or Vimeo more for stuff like that. We'll see. Short film links are removed as well because not a one of those is less than 10 years old and it's kinda pathetic to keep the links up I think. I seriously need to actually finish one of these 4 or 5 shorts I have in various stages of development. Maybe this year? Again, we'll see. Also I took down the FAQ's regarding my VTS subscription and APT training programs since those are pretty much in retirement now. Folks can still get older VTS videos from my AnimationClinic.com store (at a pretty good price, too), but I stopped making new VTS videos in summer of 2009. As for the APT, I have put that into retirement as well. With work and family it was just too hard to put in the proper time to teach the students the way they deserved to be taught. Another factor is that online animation schools have launched and it feels like that market is getting a bit saturated. Rather than expand the APT to remain relevant in the space I decided that it was time to move on. So with those facts in mind I figured I ought to take down the FAQ pages related to them. I may start up training efforts again in the future, but if I do I'd like it to be done differently than what's been done the last 6 years or so online. No idea what that would be, though. Not really worried about it, either.
OK, enough useless rambling.

Portal 2 - Co-op Trailer

Valve finally got around to releasing our latest Portal 2 trailer on their YouTube channel. I've been neck deep in this project since last Christmas. This trailer features some really sterling work by some amazingly talented folks. The bots were designed, modeled & textured by Tristan Reidford, rigged (mostly) by yours truly, animated by Andrew Burke, Noel McGinn, Matthew Russel, Mike Belzer and (again) yours truly. Andrew also acted as a kind of director/editor for the trailer- well, as much as anybody I suppose. Things like this are very much a collaborative creative effort at Valve. Mike Morasky composed the music, Gautam Babbar did a bunch of environment development as well as the killer final test-chamber in the trailer. Others contributed as well- too many to list here- since the trailer leverages a ton of in-game assets. The entire thing was rendered in our Source game engine using our Source Film Maker tool, previously used on the Meet the Team shorts for TF2 and the Left4Dead trailers. Not too shabby for a game engine render, huh? The trailer was shown at our theater style booth during the recent Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) game convention here in Seattle.

The game is an absolute blast to play (both single player and co-op), and so far it's been a ton of fun working on it. It's scheduled for release on Feb 9th 2011. The trailer is linked here, but go check it out in full HD glory on YouTube.

The Impending Death of Complexity?

Very interesting read from Clay Shirky. He explores how the systemic complexity in how current visual media is made may end up being a huge roadblock that will prevent old-guard media systems from adapting to new formats and audiences. For additional commentary, read the TechDirt summary, too.

The take away for us animators? Our pre-conceived idea about what constitutes "good animation" may need to seriously shift if we want to be nimble enough to find a niche for ourselves in the coming media landscape. As horrible and unfathomable as it sounds, "good" animation production values are not a pre-requisite for successfully finding an audience. Being entertaining and appealing are. All that said, if you can still afford to make "good" animation, then I think you owe it to yourself (and your audience) to try and do so.

UPDATE:  Mark Mayerson just posted some thoughts on the same article. His insightful analysis is always a favorite of mine to read. Check it out, too.

Madame Tutli Putli

Madame Tutli-Putli is a visually striking stop-mo short film. Very moody. I love the eye work in this. They used an interesting technique of compositing photographed human actor eyes onto the puppets. But it's not  just a straight up projection of filmed eyes. The film is loaded with very solid choices about what to use and what not to use. The attention to the important details they have is amazing. A lot is made of attention to details in animation these days- mainly because the advent of CG allows us the bandwidth to explore such high frequency detail data where before we were limited by the medium of choice. But it's attention to important details that is key. If you don't differentiate between important and unimportant details you end up with a lot of useless, technical fluff. Like empty calories, empty detail in an animated film drags things down. Anyhow, this was nominated for an Oscar in 2007, I believe.

What is content and what is its value? -- Part 2

First, a big thumbs up thanks to my friend, the brilliant Hamish McKenzie (if you're a Maya animator/rigger and you're not using Hamish's fantastic ZooTools then you are living a life of needless pain and woe) for sending me some links to TechDirt, a blog that covers a lot of things about content, copyright, new age and social media based business models, etc. 

In my last post I noted that I have drawn the conclusion that content (music, photographs, art, film, video, stories, etc.) is of no direct economic value outside of it's physical storage/delivery mechanism or the exclusive group experience of it (concerts, cinema, plays, etc.). This is a conclusion that a brief inspection of history itself seems to support. And as if that weren't enough, now in the digital internet age that limited value has become even less valuable- the point of direct economic worthlessness. The reason is simple- in the digital era there is no scarcity of digital files. The copy of a file does not diminish the existence of the source file. It is, literally, an infinite element. And anything that is (practically) infinite in availability is by nature economically worthless in a direct sense. Fair value for labor and all other "moral" constructs have no bearing. It's not a moral issue, it's a simple gravitational one. Let go of something, it falls. Whether that's right or wrong is irrelevant. Make an infinite supply of something, its value drops to zero. Scarcity is what creates value. Any efforts to impose scarcity on digital content in today's world is a Quixotic quest, doomed to only increase the sales of Maalox to those who tip at these infinite windmills. Kids, the genie's out of the bottle and we cannot put it back in. Reality dictates we learn to function in this new paradigm. (for a much more thorough dissertation on the impact of infinite supply on the economic value of a work of content, read this excellent TechDirt post. Read the linked posts that preceded it as well. For some this will be old hat, but many of us are still arriving at this dinner party.)

Commenter Ian asked a good question on my previous post: Is this depressing or liberating? (and by "this" he means the understanding that digital content is without inherent direct economic value)

The answer, I suppose, lies in how you see the world. I've been in both camps- depressed and liberated. For the last 4+ years I've been fortunate enough to be able to make a living as an independent content creator with my VTS animation tutorial videos. There have been good times, but for the last 2 years or so there's been a steady erosion as unauthorized copies of my videos have become more available on the internet. I won't lie:  unauthorized file sharing has put a sizable dent in my business, forcing me to consider alternative ways to feed la familia. However this is NOT a post whining about how people are stealing from my kids, etc. etc. etc. I knew 4 years ago when I started the VTS that file sharing would ultimately result. It's why I never bothered with copy protection or any of that stuff from the very start. I knew it was a waste of my most precious & limited resource- my time.  While I'd certainly prefer that people pay for the valuable (I think) info on how to be a better animator contained in my VTS videos, I won't waste energy complaining about those who don't. Nor will I waste energy trying to stop them, either. Instead I'd rather focus my energy on adapting and moving forward.

In the spirit of embracing things as they are and not as I wish them to be, I've begun to make some new animation tutorial videos and putting them up on my YouTube channel for free. (some direct links here, here, here and here). A few folks have stumbled across them, but I haven't promoted or mentioned them here on my blog yet. I figured this is a good time to introduce them. I think they offer some good info- and they're free. Share 'em as you see fit. I hope they help folks out. I'm still producing new VTS videos each month for those who want something more (we're currently working on a very complex James Brown inspired dance sequence utilizing video reference). And you can still purchase over four years' worth of back issue VTS videos for even more in depth info on being a better animator. But I'm going to mix in more of these free videos, too. I'll make more as I get the time- but my time is going to become even more scarce in the coming days and weeks.

More on that in a bit.