A Magical Education

This was a fun job that I did in a couple of weeks. The client, Babbage Net School, wanted a web video to market its educational services. I pitched them this concept and they liked it; it went into production with only minor modifications. The character of 'the Kid' was meant to appeal to both parents and children. He was created in Illustrator and brought into After Effects, where I combined him with a photo-montage style background. We were lucky to get Dylan Sanchez as the voice-over; he has just the right knowledgeable-friend tone for this. The music is library-licensed, but I like it because it reminds me of those Charlie Brown TV special jazz scores that I loved. My favorite part of the spot is, of course, the Rube Goldberg style shed featured in the photo above. Here is the full clip.

Oh, and Merry Xmas to all!

A Teaching Foray

I just finished teaching a 4-week intensive workshop in 3D animation at the New York Film Academy. The students made a short film using Maya, After Effects, and Final Cut Pro. As a first-time teaching experience, it was certainly a jump into the deep-end of the pool. For the first two weeks I was in front of the class from 9AM to 5PM; any waking time spent not teaching was dedicated to prepping for the next day. The last two weeks eased off somewhat, as the students worked on their projects and I provided assistance and counsel, with an occasional review lecture thrown in. It was a demanding but very rewarding experience.

Here's graduation day.

Xmas Cheer (a little early)

Fox and Aniboom are having a competition for holiday animations. The winner gets a development deal with Fox. At least one entry is pitch perfect. Whoever you are, monkeyboy... great comedic writing.

Under the Cleavers' Sink

Leo Vainshtein from Beyond Compare Innovations called me up about a month ago wanting a 3D demo for his new hardware product, but he wanted it warmed up with a little flash character animation. His site has a bit of a retro feel, so we decided to follow up on that.

Perhaps because Ed McMahon had just passed away, it occurred to me that an old Tonight Show-style intro might be in keeping with the retro theme. I had also just seen this very funny rant on Vimeo about fifties-era signage, so I looked up a lot of reference and came up with a style frame for the opening:


Leo already had a (patchy) character design that he wanted to build on. The incomparable Natalie Butler took it and cleaned it up nicely, again taking care to view period reference. You can see the before and after designs here:


Here's the final product. I did the 3D animation and Natalie did the flash animation. C.L. Andrews and Brian Roberts provided the voices. Thanks everyone!

Plato's Retreat

eRepublik is a game website. Imagine if Risk were a massive multi-player online game, or if Second Life had a political-military angle.

I recently produced a tutorial for the site and had quite a bit of fun doing it. Here are the character animation segments. (If you want to see the whole thing, here it is.) I did the motion graphics and compositing, the conspicuously talented Patrick Tuorto did the character adaption and flash animation, and the estimable Nestor Taylor painted the background. Kudos (and thanks) to both.

The new thing I tried was a method of softening the shadows in After Effects. Patrick created the shadow layer, and I created another layer in Flash that told the compound blur filter in After Effects to soften certain edges of the shadows, and keep other edges sharp (the soft edges were painted in white, the hard edges in black.)

Thanks to Erin Ridley at eRepublik for trusting me with this job. Meanwhile, I've been working on an industrial for a new hardware product, while also helping out the good folks at Launch.

Onwards and Upwards

Sponsored films are an exciting new filmmaking opportunity, but sometimes you feel like the brand and the filmmaker are fighting each other. Not here. James Jarvis and Richard Kenworthy have made a film that is both all them, and all Nike. (Click on image to play movie.) James Jarvis has more on his blog.

And Sister Sue Joins In Too

Lately I've been coming upon requests for logo design and animation. Since my sister Susie is an accomplished graphic designer (and truly the talented one in the family) I thought perhaps we should join forces. You can visit her portfolio here. Susie also designed the Homebaked Films logo, which I animated on the site's splash page.

Coming up... Up

Sigh. When are people going to learn that Pixar is infallible and can do no wrong?

Smith and Foulkes

My friend Shirleyann, who was in my film It's About My Brother, appears in this charming commercial that Smith and Foulkes directed for Comcast. It's a good excuse to link to their reel (just click on Smith and Foulkes). I love these guys' work... they use different techniques, but always there's great sense of timing, lovely design and a wry wit. The Coca-Cola spot they made in a video game style is probably my favorite. Also, it's not there, but the MasterCard girl-and-piggy-at-the-hotel spot is theirs too. Smith and Foulkes missed out on the Best Animated Short Oscar this year, but they probably are the premier commercial directors of animation these days. Bravo to them.

Pinnochio On DVD

Pinnochio has recently been released on DVD. It had been the only one of the Disney classics that I hadn't seen as an adult -- the company has an annoying practice of locking away their animated films for years at a time so that the reissue can be an event. I suppose it works... I'm writing a blog post about it, aren't I?

According to Michael Barrier's bio of Walt Disney, Pinnochio was a troubled production from the start. Disney was distracted by other projects, indecisive, and ambivalent about the story: he wanted to warm up the character of Pinnochio, but when he did he made him passive and bland.

Even though I'm not familiar with the source material, I can see that. My own take is that the storytelling isn't as sure-footed as Snow White and the animation is not as good as Jungle Book or other later projects. Yet it's definitely worth watching. The story starts as a small, earthy fable and morphs into something more mythical and strange. I'm more fond of that second half: the scene inside the belly of the whale* is haunting, and the Pleasure Island sequence is really quite scary.

* Lest we forget, one of the chapter headings in Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces was "Inside the Belly of the Whale." The image is sort of a mythological road sign and appears in different variations in many stories of many civilizations.

The Case for Staying in Bed

Here's a lovely stop-motion piece that's making the rounds.