You May Now

Fun little short film by Dane Winn and Daniel Keeble. Dane tells me they whipped this out in "a few days". Nice!

Les Metiers

Very charming! I love the simple (but robust) character designs. Animation style isn't overly fluffy, but it doesn't need to be. Nicely done.


LES METIERS : LE BOULANGER from lam le thanh on Vimeo.


Found via 3dTotal.com

Manfred

I liked this little short by Arjen Klaverstijn. Nice style, simple idea, clear characters. Pretty solid for student work.


'Manfred' an animated short by Arjen Klaverstijn from Arjen Klaverstijn on Vimeo.


found via 3dtotal.com

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.

On making a short film...

On the surface, this blog post from Software by Rob on surviving the 'danger points' in running a startup business have absolutely nothing to do with making a personal short film. But if you replace a few key words ("startup" for "film" for example) I think there's a lot of solid advice involved. I say this because from my experience I've found that making a short film is in many respects very much like starting up a new company. Some good excerpts. First, on choosing an idea...

But if you tend to over-think your decisions, then choosing a product idea is going to take months…nay, years. That’s right – odds are high that by the time you figure out what you want to build you could have built and launched multiple products in the same time frame.

I'm definitely guilty of this. The goal is to get something done. I often get bogged down doubting if what I want to do is even worth doing. Classic over-thinking.
And on budgeting your workload...

The first way to combat this [problem] is to have a detailed feature list and an estimate for every task on that list. This list should include marketing tasks and anything else you need to get through your launch date. This list will be large; likely 80-120 lines long. With an estimate for each item you should be looking at 400-600 hourstotal. For everything. If you’re over 600 hours you need to cut something.

Anyhow, check it out. Might be handy.

Skhizein

This was should have been nominated for an Oscar a little while back. And for good reason. It's really just brilliant.
(ht: Bob in the comments on straightening me out on the nom mistake)

Fun films I've seen whilst strolling the intra-nubs

Something refreshingly different from Gobelins



And a Sheridan effort...

GIRAF call for entries

I was asked to pass this along, and I thought "Hey, that sounds interesting..." So here you go. You independent animation filmmaker types, send something in!

Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival (GIRAF)
Wednesday, Nov 3-7, 2010
at Plaza Theatre, Calgary, AB

Call for Submissions

The Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival is the only exclusively independent animation festival in Canada, with a focus on experimental and self-produced animated film. GIRAF plays an essential role in the promotion, education and appreciation of independent animation from around the world, exposing hungry local audiences to the best animated content from at home and abroad.

Important Note: Submission deadline August 2nd, 2010

Visit

http://www.giraffest.ca/

Cours Toujours

This little gem is absurd, but charming and graphically appealing. I like it!


Cours Toujours - animation short film from Cours Toujours Team on Vimeo.

Emery Hawkins interview

This isn't really a new item, but I stumbled across it going through Thad Komorowski's blog the other day. This is a transcript of an interview that John Canemaker had with Emery Hawkins back in the 1970's. Hawkins is an old time animator from back in the 'golden era'. I found his story resonated with me. He never did settle in and become known as a 'great' animator on the strength of his film animation at the big Disney studio, even though he worked there at different times. In fact he never settled down into much. By his own account he'd changed jobs 47 times in his career. He spent time doing all kinds of different types of animation. Mostly shorts and commercials. He never did work on a big feature film (until his work on the Raggedy Anne & Andy movie at R. Williams' studio at the time of the interview- and even that wasn't a smashing box office or critical success), but you don't get the sense that he felt like it diminished his career. He certainly didn't seem bitter about it. Seems he enjoyed his non-standard career rather much, actually. He spent a good number of years at Sutherland's studio doing corporate animation, and other years doing commercials. Basically he is the polar opposite of the 9 Old Men in nearly every way except in his skill. I definitely empathize with his wandering attention span. I too get bored really quickly if all I do is the same thing every day. And repeating a single style or formula of animation is also not something I find terribly interesting or fun. This quote pretty much sums up my feelings about my own career....

In fact the one thing I found that was more rewarding was working for a small insignificant studio because they just didn’t care what you did so you had an opportunity without it being cut out or altered because they had a rigid notion about something. You’d get that chance to do it.

I realized this about myself some years back and I came to see that I'd be a terrible fit at a big studio- so I stopped looking for work in one. Every now and then a person (often a student) asks me why I never worked at one of the big film studios. Like there's something wrong with me (some folks maintain it's because I'm a 'failure'. Whatever narrative works for your worldview is fine with me). But I know myself well enough to understand that it's just not my bag o' bagels, ya know? And if it's not mine, then there's a good chance that there are others out there who feel the same way. The animation biz doesn't do much to validate those outside the big film studio systems, which is kinda sad, but understandable on a base human level. It's for this reason that I find non-conformist stories like Hawkins' to be refreshing and even a little liberating.

Blind Date-- Aardman short

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.

Elk Hair Caddis - fun short film

Lotso, lotso fun stuff. I really like the feel of the real life miniature sets. Animation is a fun ride, too. Love the deforms and the shapes in transition. Definitely see the Meindbender influences (which is a good thing). Enjoy!



And here's a really neat "making of" video that shows some stuff. Fun rigging, too.



Congrats to Peter Smith, Magnus Moller and the whole crew.

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.

Pivot

I've been away, busy with a big cross-country move and the new job at Valve (which is going awesome, by the way!). Thought I'd come back with a post highlighting this really sharp short film. I love so much about this one. Enjoy!




More info at their website... http://pivotthemovie.com/

Look, the Gobelins chase animation meme- now in anime!

I think I've written this before (maybe not), but more than a few of those popular Gobelins short animated student films all seem to share a single element: the crazy, out of control speed chase/run/fall. It's been this way for at least 4 or 5 years now. Go ahead, look 'em up. It's a repetitive trope, but it has certainly been a good one if you want some popularity. One even was nominated for an Oscar. Well, the concept has flown from France to Japan-- somebody has made an anime short employing the same central concept. With panties.



Kinda like the love story angle, though.

Eye Like Pizza- short film in prod

Animator Jeff Robinson is working on a neat looking little short film project titled Eye Like Pizza. He has a production blog here. The image above is one of his main characters. I like the look. Jeff tells me it's gearing to have a "classic-cartoony vibe". I'm all for that. He's got a quick little motion test he put together in this post.  (note: Jeff- make this stuff embedable!)

Looking forward to seeing more soon.

Really cool video

Sent along by Paul Campbell and the crew at Corgan Media Lab. Great mix of CG onto live action.

Pups

Michael Sporn has a nice interview of the creators of a new indy short film, Pups of Liberty. It's a great read for those of you interested in how indy shorts usually get made (one word: slowly. heh). I had a chance to work with one of the creators of the film (Bert Klein) for a short while when I was working on Disney's Mickey Mouse Christmas show. Bert's a real gentleman and super talented. One of the nicest people you'll meet, very positive and encouraging. I'm glad to see this project coming from he and his wife. It looks pretty neat. Here's a trailer.

NHS short film promo

I liked this. Has a neat UPA vibe to it, but it's not hiding the fact that it's CG, either.