Marry Christmas from the Muppets

I'm a huge Muppets fan. I enjoyed this one quite a bit:

Fed Up

Cool, they guy who's been animating those cool Simon's Cat cartoons has created another one. This one is about a dog. You can see the other two here and here. My favorite one is still the first one, where the cat tries to wake up his owner. But still, this one is a lot of fun:

Squirrel's fighting, Awsome Insperation

I found these awesome pictures of squirrel's fighting on the web. I thought I'd share them for inspiration. The photos were taken in Africa by award-winning British photographer David J. Slater.

Check out these great action photos of a couple squirrels fighting. They're really impressive. It's often tough to read a squirrel's face but there's no denying the expression on that first one. I like how the line of action blends in from the one on the bottom to the one on the top. Great composition and silhouette.


You can really feel the impact on that squirrel's face, and it's a great read on the other one bighting it's ass.


Again I love how the line of action flows from one squirrel to the next as this one tries to get away. See how the arms flow though the pose of the squirrel pushing off the ground. The tail up makes it look like he doesn't want to get bitten again, but it still arks back as the force pushes it back. Great stuff.

Orgesticulanismus

Check out this animation. It's unbelievably good, very loose and well animated. It was animated by Mathieu Labaye, it's a tribute to his father who suffered from a multiple sclerosis. What a great idea for a film. I can't wait to see it ripped off to make an iPod commercial.

It starts out slow, skip to 3:40 and you'll understand what I'm talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDHfx9nde14

Still alive, still animating

Hi.

I'm still alive, still animating.

I haven't been doing a very good job of keeping this blog up to date. I was extremely busy for a while, focusing all my time on my animation. Then I took five weeks off. For those five weeks I decided not to touch a computer (except for Animation Mentor and a little email). Mostly I felt like I just needed a break from looking at a computer. I did a little drawing, started a new sketchbook and focused on other things for a bit.

But now I'm back, I'm working at Sony, I'm working on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. We saw a screening of the film the other week, I can't say anything about it except for the fact that I think it's gong to be a lot of fun to animate on.

That's all for now. I will post more often.

Oktapodi

If you haven't seen the new short form the French animation school Gobelins, you really should check it out:




Every bit as good as the short is the making of:
http://www.oktapodi.com/makingof.html

Gobelins, has really turned out some terrific shorts. If you haven't seen Burning Safari you should really check it out. I'd love to talk with someone from this school and find out what it's like to produce these shorts. They're really great stuff.

Look test for "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs"

Thanks Cassidy, yep, it looks like they took it down.

Sony has published a look test for their upcoming feature animated film: Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. You can find it here:

http://www.imageworks.com/

Click on shows, then click on recent. Then click on the picture on the bottom of the screen. It took a long time for it to load up for me, but it is worth the wait.