Painting on real people

Found this via the Lines & Colors blog. This is a real person in a room...

Pretty cool, huh?

This is part of an exhibit done by artist Alexa Meade. Be sure to see her Flickr photoset of this exhibit.

Here's a similar approach by a different artist, Peter Kun Fray. (found via the David's Really Interesting Pages blog- a good blog if you're into NPR rendering. And dinosaurs. Heh)... 

Kinda blows my mind, really- and it certainly opens the door to thinking more about what is possible in CG as a medium, too.

Nick Cross' animation process

Animator/director Nick Cross (The Waif of Persephone, Yellow Cake) outlines his animation process, with lots of little video clips showing things as they progress. He's animating a new film called The Pig Farmer. A great, great blog post- especially for you guys who've never animated in 2d before. Those previous students of mine who adhere to the more 2d-centric way of animating in CG will find a lot of very familiar thinking and approaches.
Be sure to check out his other posts, he has one on his inking process in Flash, too.

On Innovation

Via TechDirt.

Mayerson on pitching TV shows (via David Levy book review)

Mark Mayerson has walked the road, so I value very much his imput on the folloy of pitching an animated TV show to the animation networks these days. His review of David Levy's book on the topic is a good read- as is David's book. They come at the same topic from two sides. Levy takes a more optimistic view of the process. Mayerson, not so much. I have been involved in the pitch process a time or two and I found it bemusingly messed up. I had good talks with the development execs, and they didn't reject my idea but invited me to press on with the development. I never seriously pursued it because early on I could tell the system was rigged to maximize my pain and minimize my remuneration. No thanks.

Facebook is.... profitable??!

This is actually kinda big news. It's been the very (very) rare online social networking site that has actually made money from it's core business (as opposed to getting bought out by a larger firm). Maybe YouTube won't be far behind? I wouldn't hold my breath- the capital infrastructure costs for serving up all that video is orders of magnitude larger than FB's bandwidth needs. Still, if the independent content creator is to have any shot at making a serious go of it they'll need these online communities to actually make money-- for themselves first, then share the love with the content creators.
Baby steps.