Viewing entries tagged with 'animation'
Nugob on Vimeo
My animations are now also available on Vimeo which has better quality than Youtube and allows downloads of the original Quicktime H264 file. To download you must be logged in to Vimeo. The download link then appears on the bottom right area of the video page.
- All my animations
- The Robbery
- Café IMPERIAL
- Circus
- Amnesty International – Active Against Torture
- Amnesty International – No Children to War
- Amnesty International – All Human Rights for All
Enjoy!
Atama Yama
I just rediscovered a fantastic animation I have seen a couple of years ago at the Melbourne International Film Festival: Atama Yama (Mount Head)
I started to work on a new animation which is in very early development (the first story draft was three days ago). Looking at Atama Yama today I wonder if it may have had some influence on my new idea.
Enjoy the show.
Guano in 3D
A couple of excerpts from a rare interview (MP3 file, 32 minutes) with independent animator Don Hertzfeldt (bitterfilms.com) on Scene Unseen Podcast.
Don Hertzfeldt on progress:
"I feel like I'm constantly learning and I think that's the key to keep making new stuff because I think the moment you think you know everything you kind of turn into an asshole and I would think the process is not as much fun any more."
Don Hertzfeldt on Computer Graphics (CG) and traditional animation:
"First of all I don't want to sound anti CG because I'm not. It's just an amazing set of tools. The cool thing about animation is you can literally do anything. It's technically speaking the purest form of film-making because you are literally working one frame at a time, sometimes working with your hands on every single frame of the picture. So you're free to do anything. Anything you can imagine you can put on film which you can never do in live action. So it's just really stupid and ironic to me that with all this amazing new technology here we can push the boundaries of cinema, we can change the language of cinema – they're trying to just get towards photo realism.
Welcome to the Gun Show
Some of my animations will be broadcast today on the Welcome to the Gun Show, Saturday 27 September, 3pm NZ time, AltTV (Channel 65, Sky TV). Plus a short live interview about my films.
Hello World
I just finished an excellent Blender tutorial: Introduction to Character Animation by Ryan Dale who took a lot of time and effort to publish this very detailed step-by-step guide.
Blender is a free and powerful open source 3d program. The tutorial requires no previous knowledge of 3d software - but it will obviously take you longer to complete if you are absolutely new to modeling and character animation. The tutorial is also a great way to learn Blender if you just want want to give it a try and possibly switch to this free software.
You learn to create a basic model from scratch, add a light, materials and textures, create the armature (skeleton, bones), animate a walkcycle, a gesture, facial expressions, lip syncing, and to render the final product. All in one tutorial. Awesome and very motivating! Highly recommended.
Persepolis
Looks like an awesome film: Persepolis.
Here is the trailer (there is an English version, too).
Today at my local bookshop (small yet the best bookshop around) I also flicked through the original autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her memories of growing up in the Iranian Revolution and later moving to the West. I am sure I will buy the book (but probably after salary day).
Shady Art from a Sunny Place
Gosh, if you are having a great time right now but you would rather be slightly depressed then go and see one of the Van Morsel/Wiseguy Productions animations. It's very interesting animated art with amazing dialogue. It sounds like audio recordings inspired by automatic writing and one wonders from what depths of the writer's unconscious it comes from. Interesting, yet deeply disturbing.
I am lucky enough to know the artist – but I won't blow his cover here. Let me just say that he lives in a town called Nelson, the most sunny place in all of New Zealand. His art can probably be best described as the opposite.
As a start I recommend Rook but there are heaps of other yet unpublished animations by Van Morsel which I hope will be available some time on YouTube or elsewhere.
Blender
I am currently testing Blender (Blender on Wikipedia), an open source 3d program − and I find it amazingly rich in features and quite user-friendly once you did a couple of tutorials. I did a few things in Lightwave and Maya in the past but I think Blender compares quite well to those and other commercial applications − but it's free!
I am definitely no 3d pro (well, not yet that is) and just start (once again) to use a 3d software but I am really excited about Blender. Like every other professional 3d program it takes quite a while to get into it, to understand the workflow and to figure out best practices; and even then there will always be a zillion new things to discover. So don't expect to get your Pixar job offer next Monday.
In general Blender has a good and easy-to-use interface (it is not your standard everyday interface but it makes a lot of sense), it seems to be very stable, has all features you would expect of a professional 3d software, can be used both for high quality rendering and 3d game design and development (with Python scripting, game engine and logic, etc...). It runs on a lot of different operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, Irix, Solaris, etc...
A problem that often appears with open-source projects is poor documentation and tutorials. However, with Blender you don't need to worry. There are heaps of high quality tutorials, a good documentation and a very supportive community. For a start I highly recommend the Wikibook Blender 3D: Noob to Pro.
Open source? Free software? Comparable to commercial software? If you don't quite trust this then it would probably help to see a good example. The open movie project Big Buck Bunny is a quite recent and hillarious short animation and pretty convincing for the capabilities of Blender. See the YouTube video below, watch it on Vimeo in higher definition, download it for free or support future open movie projects and buy the DVD. And for all those geeks out there don't forget to enjoy the story over the technical details. It's entertainment after all.
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