keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Once again, it's industry day. The work of graduating students is screened for people who are looking for talent. Below is a collection of photos from today. Robin King, founder of Sheridan's cgi program and currently a consultant. Students and guests inside the cgi lab. Frank Macchia (left) and Mark Sperber prepare to receive the industry. Left to right: Animator Stephen Barnes, John Mariella of CORE and independent producer Doug Masters. Sheridan alumnus Marceline Gagnon-tanguay, currently at Blue Sky. Two aerial views of the learning commons, where the students met the industry. Three excellent animators I've had the pleasure of teaching. From left to right: Jason Teeuwisson, Brock Gallagher and Kelly Turnbull. Naz Ghodrati-azadi's film is called Gobbled . She'll be moving to Los Angeles this summer, so west coast studios should keep an eye out for this talented animator. Tapan Gandhi's film is called The Ballad of Amelia von Earl . Tracy Qiu's film...

"At the heart of creativity is a willingness to take risks, a willingness to experiment, a willingness to explore avenues that don't go anywhere and a willingness to be wrong. And if you're living in a culture of standardized testing, high-stakes funding, where mistakes are not tolerated and seen as a sign of mental infirmity, then you're breeding a contradiction right at the heart of the system." "The real innovation and creativity always comes from people crossing borders, crossing boundaries, thinking differently and very often through the interaction of disciplines through applying ideas from one field into another field. The real vitality of intelligence and creative thinking is in making connections, not from keeping everything separate." The above quotes come from an interview with Sir Ken Robinson in The Globe and Mail . I first became aware of Sir Ken Robinson from the TED video that is embedded below. The Globe and Mail has a pair of videos...

It's taken me a while to get to Stepping Into the Picture: Cartoon Designer Maurice Noble by Robert J. McKinnon. It is slightly less than one third of a good book and I'll explain what I mean. What's here is a fairly straightforward biography of Maurice Noble, the designer whose most well-known work was for the Chuck Jones unit at Warner Bros. The book is drawn from interviews with Noble and his co-workers and to the extent that it fills in the details of Noble's life, it is mostly good. It covers Noble's childhood, education and professional jobs, including Disney, Warner Bros, John Sutherland Productions and MGM, in addition to providing details about Noble's personal life. The information about the physical set-up of Warner Bros. and the personal dynamics of the Jones unit are the best things in the book. However, the writing sometimes stumbles. There is a story about architectural drawings done by Noble while a student at Chouinard. The drawings vani...

Here's an interesting site that specializes in title sequences for both animated and live action films and TV shows. The animated films include The Incredibles , Kung Fu Panda , Aeon Flux (pictured above), Cowboy Bebop and Tekkonkinkreet . Live films include To Kill a Mockingbird , Casino Royale , Natural Born Killers , Vertigo , Iron Man , etc. There's lots more at the site, so if you have an interest in title design and the various ways titles are used (for backstory, for setting mood, etc.) it's worth a visit. (Link via Leonard Maltin. )

One of the interesting things about the web is that you can track which sites visitors to your site have come from. The majority of visitors here either come from animation sites that I'm familiar with or from Google searches of various types. Occasionally, I discover an animation site that is new to me. Txesco is a Spanish animator who worked on the animation and direction of Pocoyo , a pre-school cgi series that is probably my favorite cgi ever done for television. I didn't know his involvement when I visited Txesco's site, but having seen his work, it makes total sense. What I first saw was this piece of musical animation . There's no word to describe it except charming. In many ways, it is dead simple. The design is spare but elegant. The music is public domain and the musical arrangement is anything but fancy. The movement is not overly complex, but it does everything that good animation is supposed to do. The shapes change. That's one of the most ba...

"The main problem, as I see it, is that over seven years of development, there was a whole lot of money spent. I’d guess somewhere around half a million. In the end, there is just one eleven-minute pilot that is not aired. Consequently, the network is very, very cautious and slow with the production of each pilot. Also, the eleven minute pilot doesn’t really tell much more about the show than, say, an eleven minute animatic with one minute of animation that could be completed for one-tenth the cost." -Fran Krause Amid Amidi of Cartoon Brew has an interview with Will and Fran Krause about their experiences pitching and producing a pilot for the Cartoon Network. As you can see from the above quote, the process went on for a very long time and cost a lot of money. In the end, the pilot didn't become a series. While everyone wants success, whether it's defined as money, popularity or quality, the hard truth is that most things fail. So long as the audience has choices...

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about how Wall Street is afraid that Pixar's next release, Up , will not meet their financial expectations. Disney, to it's credit, is defending the film's prospects. The article contains some interesting material on box office grosses and merchandising revenue. Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers, delivering sales of $224 million and $216 million respectively, according to Box Office Mojo, a tracking service. Attendance for Pixar films has also dropped sharply over the years, suggesting that ticket price inflation helped prop up overall sales for “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille.” Retailers, meanwhile, see slim merchandising possibilities for “Up.” Indeed, the film seems likely to generate less licensing revenue than “Ratatouille,” until now the weakest Pixar entry in this area. (“Cars” wears the merchandising crown, with sales of more than $5 billion.) It appears th...

(Updated with new links at the bottom.) I've been reading a lot of interesting books in the last year, all of them about the economic shift that's resulting from the web. This shift started before the economic downturn, but the downturn is accelerating it in various ways. For the record, the books include Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe , Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky , The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki , Remix by Lawrence Lessig and What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis . All of these books are about aspects of the web that have fundamentally changed how the economy functions. The first three talk about how improved communication allow for people to organize themselves or find information in ways that were not efficient in the past. Remix is about how digital tools allow us to use existing media as raw material for new expressions. What Would Google Do examines Google's business model and seeks to apply it to other industries. Jeff Jarvis feels that we...