Monday, June 25, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Surf's Up Directors Speak
Over at Animated Views, there's a cool interview with the directors of Surf's Up, Chris Buck and Ash Brannon. The best part of the interview is where they talk about how the other penguin movies affected their movie, namely March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. Here's an excerpt:
When we started Surf’s Up, we had no idea about the other movies. I know people find that hard to believe. But even though the animation industry is a small thing, we don’t always know what everyone is doing.
Of course, March of the Penguins is live-action and a documentary. Happy Feet – you know, I don’t even know the genesis of that. But it may have started as live-action – sort of a Babe-like thing that George Miller was doing. Of course, George Miller runs in different circles in the animation world. So we didn’t really know about Happy Feet until probably we were a couple of years into our production.
We had already built models, and our story was already set, at least the basics of it. It wasn’t like we could just say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to change the animals, because someone else is doing something with penguins!’ It was a matter of, ‘Well, we’ll just run our course, and hopefully there’ll all very different movies.’ A good thing is that people like penguins!
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Behind the Scenes of Surf's Up
"It's important to understand that, as with most animated films, nothing you see in Surf's Up actually exists. Everything, from vast landscapes to the most minute detail, had to be conceived, designed, and created from scratch: characters, locations, sets, props, weather, lighting and, of course, the waves. It was the job of the visual development department to "design" the film. At any given time, we had a crew of about 10 highly talented artists, working for the better part of three years. Of course, we also worked in tandem with the other production departments (story, look development, vfx, modeling, animation, texturing, matte painting and lighting) to keep up with the huge amount of designs necessary to feed the production pipeline. Once everything was designed, it was up to the Imageworks team lead by digital supervisor Rob Bredow to figure out how to bring it all to life. When embarking on the design for an animated film, one of the first questions we ask ourselves is: What is the "look of the film"? There are a lot of options: cartoony, realistic, stylized, primitive, retro, graphic, cutesy, high tech, wacky, dimensional, flat, etc."
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Shaun the Sheep
First introduced by Aardman Studios in the film "A Close Shave," Shaun the Sheep now stars in his own series of short cartoons!! Absolutely brilliant!
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Where the Magic Happens
Here's a photo of where the magic happens: My desk.
A: Disneyland Fronteirland Pluto
B: Disneyland 50th Mouse Ears
C: Disneyland Pins
D: Captain Jack Sparrow
E: Band Concert Mickey Mouse
F: Back to the Future slot car
G: Indiana Jones hat
H: Pirate coaster
I: Dinosaur's Attack! trading cards
J: Captain EO pin
K: Back to the Future 2 mousepad
L: Lego Bionicle
M: iPod
N: Xbox 360 controller (yup, it works on my pc)
O: He-Man Stratos, got him at a yard sale for $4!