MIT scientists developing giant, hovering 3-D Animations

Remember the amazing human pixel performances at the Chinese Olympics? I was stunned at the beauty of thousands of people acting as one giant moving picture. Now, scientists at MIT are working on floating displays made up of individual controllable flying robots, each with adjustable colored lights.

I do hope these don't catch on as advertising, however. Can you imagine being accosted by a hovering, glowing face made up of artificial gnats nagging you to shop at Wal Mart or get your oil changed at Jiffy Lube? Greaaat.

French music video tribute to The Muppet Show

This is the second French CG animation homage to Jim Henson's Muppets I've seen so far.  Many elements of the Muppet Show are here -- the red curtain, musician Muppets, audience Muppets, a human performer singing a classic song.   No heckling Statler and Waldorf-like characters though, sadly.  Since these are all key-framed CG characters, these puppets do things no ordinary foam hand-and-rod puppet can do!  Dance with legs showing!  Throw things! 

Unfortunately, the animators focused so much on exaggerating the "puppety-ness" that puppetry basics like lip-synch and eye-focus are less than stellar.  Still, it's great to see a large-scale Muppet Musical Number again. 

Comic Con '09: Highlights

Tricia, her friend Erica and I got back from Comic Con yesterday. We had a blast!

This year was the first for me to stay at the Marriott Marina Hotel, and boy, that sure made it a lot less tiring. The problem with the San Diego convention center is that it separated by a light-rail train and only a couple of walkable crossings over to most of the nearby hotels and restaurants. These passages are overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of sweaty nerds and geeks baking in the hot sun as they head back to hotels to drop their loot or head out to the Gas Lamp district for some food. It is already taxing enough to move through the hordes and stand in mile-long lines within the Con itself, so this extra pain can really add up.

The Marriott, on the other hand, is right next door to the convention center. A quick walk and you're in its comfortable air-conditioned lobby. It seems to be where a lot of the more famous attendees stay. David Fury (producer on Buffy, Angel, Lost, 24, etc.) and his kids, and a writer from Family Guy were in front of me in the Starbucks line Saturday morning. Legendary Marvel writer Stan Lee sat a table down from us in the pub. Adam from Mythbusters was in the elevator with us. Erica's Marriott Rewards card got us a free upgrade to a room on the 19th floor, which was quite nice.

Some highlights of the weekend:

• Participating in the standing ovation for Hirao Miyazaki


• Seeing our friends at booths and walking around (Jeff, Anita, Michele, Eric & Jodi, Tim, Dave & Jenn, Joji, Edwin...)


• Tricia & Erica getting photo ops with Tyrese Gibson


• Me getting an autograph from Leonard Nimoy


• Chatting over drinks with my brother-in-law, Hayden


• Getting some great art prints and a steam punk raygun for our apartment


• Unexpected harbor fireworks right next to our table at Roy's


• The insanely good chocolate dessert at Roy's

Photos coming soon!

What Pixar Looks For...

Randy Nelson, head of Pixar University, talks about the traits and characteristics of people they hire at Pixar Animation Studio. Interestingly (and in contrast to some production companies I've worked for), they look for the ability to collaborate -- specifically, the ability to amplify the expression of others on your team through your unique talents and experiences. They want people are are interested, not necessarily interesting. And of course, they want folks who have mastered some particular discipline (be it animation, photography, design, story-telling, mathematics) but are well-versed in others.

via Cartoon Brew

Animated Short "Love on the Line"

My friend Melissa, graduate animation student at UCLA, has completed her animated short called "Love on the Line," a story about, er... well, cyber-sex -- Victorian style! Melissa made large cut-out articulated puppets and animated them using stop-motion. On top of that she added 2-D computer animation for the ticker effect.

Incidentally, such telegraph romances actually happened according to the book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the 19th Century's Online Pioneers, by Tom Standage.

"Love on the Line" has already won awards and been shown at festivals.

Lovely Student Animated Short

Stand Up 2 Cancer

I'm sitting waiting at the Burbank Airport and on TV, all three American Networks are showing a live fundraiser right now called "Stand Up 2 Cancer." Celebrities of all sorts are answering phones. It's really great that these corporations are focused on a cause, if just for a few hours. Their website will be up for a while, so please donate.

(And the cause I'm focused on this weekend is the Totoro Forest Project, an art auction / fundraiser over at PIXAR to help protect Japan's endangered forests, the ones that inspired the legendary animation master Miyazaki, creator of My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away.)

Animated Short "Oktapodi"

Two cephalopods in love. A kidnapper. Greece. Enjoy!

1980s HBO Title Sequence

This is a charming little behind-the-scenes clip showing how a small New York studio made an elaborate intro sequence for the then=fledgling cable channel, Home Box Office (HBO). I just love the craftsmanship and time it took, the ingenious streaking effects done optically. The 65-piece orchestral theme. Plus, they even wrote a song* (reminds me of the "Coke Is It" jingle of that era) just for the documentary!

via Cartoonbrew
^*Performed by this guy.

My Favorite SuperBowl 42 Ad

I've only been to a few Superbowl parties. The food & beverages & commercials are about the only thing interesting to me usually (although at this party, we also played Nintendo Wii® and Guitar Hero III too to liven things up.) This year, there were maybe two or three good commercials and this Coca Cola ad ("It's Mine!") with Thanksgiving Day parade balloons of Stewie (from Family Guy), Underdog, and Charlie Brown was the best, IMHO. Honorable mentions to the Tide To Go "My Talking Stain" and ETrade's talking baby ads.

Simon & The Land of Chalk Drawings, Made Real!

Ok, maybe not chalk, but can you imagine a Physics class taught this way? Or any other kind of class, with the right software.

Making Fiends: Web Cartoon Becoming a Nicktoon Soon

As I've blogged about before, UCLA MFA student Amy Winfrey created an Adobe™ Flash-based Web cartoon back in 2004 called "Making Fiends". The premise? Vendetta, a school girl with hobbies that include making evil creatures, eating clams, and taunting her neighborhood meets new kid on the block, Charlotte, whose optimistic attitude seems completely resistant to Vendetta's evil habits. Visually, the show has a playful mix of Edward Gorey, early Jim Henson monster drawings with a touch of the 1980s cut-out animated film "Twice Upon a Time."

Two seasons of webisodes and a community of fiendy fans later, Nickelodeon began hosting a few of them on iTunes, and has almost finished developing a TV version to be aired later this year. Hooray!

Sesame Street Clips Online!

Whohoo! Finally! Sesame Workshop (formerly known as Children's Television Workshop) has begun offering classic and newer Sesame Street clips online after seeing so many of them posted by fans on YouTube. It's in Beta and lacks the ability to link to favorites right now, but here are some keywords to type in for my favorite clips so far:

• "painter"
• "monsterpiece theatre" ("upstairs downstairs")
• "news: angry reporter"
• "can remember"
• "kermit calls a plumber"
• "song: subway train"
• "news mother hubbard"
• "question song"
• "disco"
• "daddy dear"
• "lonely n song"

I just love the energy, spontaneity, weirdness, and subversive humor in these sketches. Some of it I'm just getting now, clearly meant for the parent watching with his or her kids.

There are some untagged clips in there, some really rare ones, and all in pristine quality. Enjoy! Let me know if you discover any great ones.

Beauty & The Beast @ the Arclight Tonight

Ah, What a lovely movie poster design.

Disney's B & B was, I think, the last mainstream animated film to use proper voice-actors in its main cast. Ok, there were a few celebrities (Broadway legends) playing Lumiere & Mrs. Potts, but the leads were talented actor/singers and voice-actors not A-List film actors thrown in to attract audiences. After this, Aladdin, Lion King, and pretty much every film of theirs after that casted as many big name non-voice actors as possible. PDI's first film Antz had Woody Allen, Gene Hackman, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, and every CG film after that (Shrek, Shark's Tale, Over the Hedge, etc) focused entirely on big-name actors.

B & B has an amazingly sophisticated score (written by two Broadway composers), which is why it made it later a great Broadway Musical. While Tim Rice (Lion King) has a history of writing musicals, he pales as a lyricist compared to the late Howard Ashman. (Why anyone decided Elton John (Lion King) or Phil Collins (Tarzan) should write animated musicals is beyond me.) Melodically, every song is memorable (despite some self-plagiarism -- "Be Our Guest" is basically "Le Poisson" from Little Mermaid.)

There's just something very romantic about this movie in a way unmatched by any animated film since. I suppose we're more cynical now. We prefer "chemistry" (lust), sarcasm, and South Park-ian humor now, which is fine, but I do miss the naivety, beauty, and timelessness of this film.

Fun Little Animated Music Video

A fun Flash music video.

Behold! Customizable Animated Electronic Greeting Cards

Apparently, the online greeting card business is upwards of $80 million a year so far. There are gazillions of card sites these days. Most I've seen are not so much cards anymore, but animated or live action footage. More like "-grams" as in singing telegrams, candy-grams, etc.

The trend now is to allow user-customizable cut-out faces on prefabricated animations. The first one I saw is called Starring U from the JibJab brothers (who showed me in person. Whohoo!) But they are not alone, and probably not the first either! There is also the oddly-named Mushy Gushy site, which seems to have more prepackaged animations lined up already. The JibJab brothers are a lot more famous though, minor celebrities ever since their Flash-animated parody of Bush & Kerry singing "This Land is Your Land" hit the Net, seen by millions of people and landing them major TV talk shows.

May the best Terry Gilliam-esque cut-out face animated e-greeting card Web 2.0 website win!

Tokyo: Studio Ghibli

My primary reason for going to Tokyo, other than to see the damage from 40 years of Godzilla rampages, was to see the Studio Ghibli museum. Studio Ghibli is the company home of the works of master animator, Hirao Miyazaki. Indeed, his most famous works are portrayed here in exhibits, most obviously My Neighbor Totoro and Castle in the Sky. I probably should have disobeyed all the "Please don't photograph" signs, but it's actually a rather difficult museum to shoot. Lots of fun hidden passageways, stained glass windows, spiral staircases, atriums, patios, grottos, rooms filled with artwork samples & classic literature recreating the sort Miyazaki would have worked in, a giant soft "cat bus" for kids to jump on... Photos of the inside would not do it justice.

When you arrive via Studio Ghibli bus from the Mataka train station & hand in your ticket voucher, they give you a ticket which is actually 3 animation film frames from a Studio Ghibli film. Neat! Use this ticket to watch the film screening, which in my case was a new episode of Totoro. Brilliant!

Here's the unassuming main gate (Look closely, you can see Totoro and his friends):


One of the many caged spiral staircases. This one is the only way up to see the giant robot from Castle in the Sky:


I almost left the museum prematurely looking for this guy. From the photos, it seemed like he'd be out in the park surrounding the museum. But no -- he's part of the rooftop garden! Luckily, the museum guard took pity on me and let me back in for photos. Here he is in a rare moment alone:


And here he is with me, to show scale and my enthusiasm for having made it to one of the meccas of Geekdom:


If you intend to go, make certain you get your ticket before you leave for Japan! There's no way in otherwise. If you live in the United States, you can buy them here for a specific date.

Sesame Street animation: 3 striped Balls & a Polka Dotted Ball

I'm very glad someone found this little stop-motion animated clip from Sesame Street in the 1970s. I've had its synthesizer music in my head since I was a child, and it's greatly influenced my sense of melody and arrangement.

If anyone knows who created this piece, please let me know!

Communicating Emotion in 3-D graphics & Machinima

CartoonBrew posted the original Tootsie Roll Pop commercial from the early 70s (animated by the great Fred Crippen, who did many fine Sesame Street animated shorts over the years) alongside the newly updated CGI version. Check them out here.

I think it would be difficult to argue the new version is better. But why, precisely? What is the visually fancier version lacking that the first has? The answer is found in a blog entry from the Free-Pixel blog: Emotion.

The blogger fiezi attended a presentation by Gilles Monteil, an animation researcher at Ubisoft, called "We All Want Emotions in Games!" He describes how three audience members were given laser pointers to aim at the screen, and to do whatever they wanted. (I've seen this happen spontaneously while waiting for Dailies to start at Sony) The audience reacted to what they perceived as a chase going on, but in reality, there were only moving dots. No textures, no geometry, no perceivable characters in the traditional sense. All that was there was rhythm, a sense of space, and a sense of interaction between entities.

This is basically the core of all visual design, and of performing arts like mime and dance, and it turns out, in computer games as well. The extras, like how characters are dressed, how spectacular the sets look, are secondary to the audiences emotional involvement. Yet, in game engine design (used by Machinima), the focus is on texture, lighting, and making things look spectacular.

That's great, but make certain you can invoke an emotional response, with your character design, posing, and motion first, then your textures and lighting.

Compulsive Knitting Disorder

I'm told by several lady friends that knitting is a compulsive, addictive hobby. This animation by Finnish animator Laura Neuvonen demonstrates the potential consequences of too much knitting.



from CRAFT magazine by way of Spirits Dancing.