This animated gif (click for larger version) shows the voting results for Presidential elections from 1960 - 2004. The results are color coded, county by county, for the entire continental United States. It was interesting to see the color shifts that happened from year to year, and how voting results seemed to pool together in sections. The graph comes from a Princeton study. It will be interesting to see what this year’s map looks like.
…but not for long. On Sunday, I took a drive (along with Lisa Illowsky) to go visit with Avi Tuchman before he leaves the west coast. We pretty much just bummed around Burbank and the surrounding area. Avi told us all about the joys of his time at Nickelodeon and Film Roman. Avi is leaving for Israel soon, so I wanted to make sure I saw him before he headed off later this summer.
Good luck in your travels, Avi!
This is really interesting. Here are two different projects, both written by Michael Mann, where he uses the same scene with almost identical dialog.
Here is the first clip, from a pilot for NBC called “LA Takedown”, starring Scott Plank and Alex MacArthur:
Now here is pretty much the same scene, from the movie “Heat”, starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro:
It is amazing to me how much better the Pacino DeNiro version of the scene works. This is very relevant to animation, as figuring out how to act your scene can oftenmean the difference between good and great. You can see that for yourself in these clips.
-Floyd Bishop
Remember the writer’s strike? During the strike, and then continuing on after it was resolved, I helped out with a thing called Strike TV. Strike TV is a collection of projects, written by WGA writers, and performed, acted, animated, and filmed by mostly volunteers, myself included. I was a part of three projects for Strike TV: “The Academy” by Michael Tabb, “Sketchtoons” by Charles Horn, and “The Write Environment” by Jeffrey Berman. The projects were a lot of fun, and I got to work with many great people, all the while expanding contacts in and around Hollywood. It was a great experience, and hopefully people tune in and enjoy the programs. Strike TV had its soft launch today, and will fully launch later this month. Keep watching for great programs featuring people from your favorite movies and shows.
Many times when you’re an animator, you’ll get a script or some notes with a very vague description of the action you need to create. In the above clip (which wasn’t scripted), you can see lots of great little moments that could help you out on a shot or scene later on. Observation is very important in animation, so let’s look at this clip a bit to see why it is entertaining.
The description of the clip could have been something like: “Two brothers, one older and one younger, are sitting in a chair. The younger brother bites the older brother.” Many times, it’s up to the animator to make that entertaining.
When I was a kid, one of my earliest animation related memories was of the Disney cartoon “Lonesome Ghosts”. Our family doctor had a toy called the Fisher Price Cartoon Viewer, a toy which had interchangeable cartridges which were sections of cartoons. One of my favorites was “Lonesome Ghosts”.
I used to watch the section with Mickey in the flood and Goofy with the dresser over and over again, forward and backward. It was a great way to see the overlapping action of how things moved and followed the main movement of the characters. I didn’t know this at the time. I was just watching a cartoon.
What are some of your early cartoon influences?
You might remember the Frederator Studios production tag we’re making for Fred. The first version was done before we got any input from Fred. After talking it through and watching it over and over, it’s clear that the robot doesn’t read as well as it could (it’s tiny in the large frame), and the big green “F” on the robot’s chest is hard to read at best.
For inspiration as to how you could handle such a task, we had to look no further than the 1950’s:
The production tag is much shorter than this intro piece, so we’ll have to have a lot happening fast. Keep watching to see what we come up with.
We’ve finished the first version of the Frederator Studios production tag. We render everything in passes to allow us more control over the final image, so I’ll break down what goes into a piece like this.
Let’s look at frame 40.
This is the background we plan on using for the production tag. The purple nebula on the left of the image is the same purple used on the graphic version of the Fredbot you see on the Frederator main page.
Lisa Illowsky created the starfield background using Maya’s PaintFX.
We’ve got the animation pretty much nailed down here. The Fredbot flies in and comes in for a landing and stands on the text. We swapped the text to read “Frederator Studios” instead of “Frederator Incorporated”, as per Fred’s notes.
The effect of the flight trail is in here as well. There are two emitters: one which lays out the trail, and then another “burn out” emitter that gives the puff when the trail stops (right before the Fredbot lands). The effects will be rendered in a separate pass to allow for more control during the composite.
Next up, textures and lighting.
