"Lights Out" animation clip

Towards the end of the summer this year, I was part of a small animation team whose purpose was creating a short film for the Project 21 Film Festival; a Festival that challenges filmakers to produce a film in 21 days.  A friend of mine, Simon Stahl, was the director on the project, which is how I got involved in the first place.  He's a member of the popular online animation school Animation Mentor, and so most of the team consisted of AM members, with a few outsiders including myself.  I served as an animator, technical director, lighting TD, and render wrangler for the duration of the project.  The story is basically a neurotic guy who has a clap-activated light in his bedroom, and a noisy neighbor whose television is causing complications with his sleeping arrangements.  Below is my shot from the film.



We had about 2 weeks for animation, and an additional week for lighting, rendering, and working out miscellaneous problems.  I'm not completely satisfied with my shot, but I think it turned out allright for the purposes of the film.  Which, by the way, ended up winning Best Animation in the festival, so how about that!  So there you have it, actual new animation to show on my blog!  Goodness!  If I'm not careful I might just actually post new drawings here too!! That would be something!

Meanwhile, on YouTube...

Amidst my random sketching I'm doing (which will be uploaded here soon), I thought I would share a random discovery. So I've been intentionally avoiding posting Jungle Gym to youtube because I was waiting for the festival run to end, and even then was a bit hesitant to share it on the online-video nebula. However, recently I was at a friends apartment and wanted to show them something silly that I had recently saved to my channel favorites. So in order to find this, my sub-intelligent brain thought the best way would be to search for my user account name and maybe it would show up in the listing. Yet instead, when I did this, what came up but my very own film, Jungle Gym, apparently posted 6 months ago now by someone else!!



Almost 100,000 hits, over 100 comments, 300 favorites, ridiculous! All of this happening without my knowledge. I suppose I am happy for the added exposure, but a bit blindsided that this could occur under the radar. I of course realized that in my contract with Aniboom, they reserve the right to re-distribute / re-encode my film in any medium they got their hands on, so theres not much I can do about it, but I suppose this is a cautionary example of what happens when you don't think about what the fine print actually means. Anyhow, I promise more drawings soon.

TIAF07 Booklet

Yesterday I got a package from Taiwan in the mail, from their annual International Animation Festival. As you probably heard me blab about before, I was selected as an international exhibition piece. Anyway, they sent me back my Betacam copy of Herbie-Fun-Time, along with a beautiful 300+ page full-color book that covered the entire scope of the festival, kind of like half-program, half retrospective. The book itself is a gorgeous insight into the festival which apparently covered "Best of" reviews from Ottawa, Annecy, and Platform. The festival also showcased some of the biggest animated features of the year including Ratatouille. Skip to page 168 in the "Personification" section of the book, and here you will find:

There I am! Wonderfully translated into characters I only wish I could understand! This marks probably the biggest festival that Jungle Gym will ever be a part of. So glad to be part of an event that showcased such incredible works! Ok, enough boasting for now. Back to work!!

High Def Exploration

In preparation for some new film festivals I'm submitting to, and also in a continuous exploration for more effective and efficient rendering methods, I've been doing some new high definition renders for Jungle Gym. I chose to tackle scene 26 this time, aka "Determination shot", since it seems to be a popular image for film fests and poster images, and would be a good opportunity to fix some render errors and layer in some grain, lens vignette, ambient occlusion, and of course amp up the resolution considerably. Here you can see a before...

And after... (click to experience high-def goodness)

Taiwan International Animation Festival

So I was recently informed that Jungle Gym has been given the honor of being exhibited as an international piece at the 2007 Taiwan International Animation Festival. It excites me to think of such a large audience having to watch 3 and a half minutes of hippo-mation, I just hope they enjoy it and don't start tomato-ing the screen! So anyway, Godspeed to the first overseas adventure of Herbie the Hippo, may he find many tasty treats to munch on in the world of Taiwan.

Shorttakes 2007

Last night, Jungle Gym grabbed the Best Animation award at the 14th Annual Shorttakes Festival at UCLA. This year's festival felt more like an animation festival than a general film festival, since approximately half of all entries were animation. As mentioned in an earlier post, they were basically all CalArts entries, and then Raul and I. Some really nice CalArts stuff, I particularly enjoyed Jose y Maria by Edward Juan, and Word Fisher's Secret Piano by Wenchung Lu. Of course, it was awesome to see Raul's Fly on the big screen again. His films always have such great character appeal, and seem to always have epic title sequences, which I adore. So anyhow, Jungle Gym wins it. Incredible. I guess there are people out there who still have love for the purple hippo!

P.S. Sorry this is another "informative" post. Stay tuned for artwork.

ShortTakes Ahoy!

The official entries have been announced for the 14th annual UCLA Shorttakes Student Film Festival. The entire animation category for this years competition apparently consists of my film "Jungle Gym", my fellow colleague Raul Cardenas' film "Fly", and then a million entries from our friendly neighbor CalArts. I'm really interested in seeing it this year since I rarely get to see the films from the CalArts kids. I'm sure they're totally awesome, but Raul and I will be rooting of course for the home team underdogs!

Something Rotten in Westwood...

Today the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA released the nominees for the 2007 Directors Spotlight award. There were a lot of brilliant animation pieces submitted this year along with the live action pieces from the production program in our film school. However, for some reason this year, zero animations were accepted.

Normally I wouldn't be bothered by this result because I want to believe in fairness and I think it is possible that there was enough high-quality live-action pieces to drown out the inevitability of an animated nominee. However, two things bother me. One is that I know two of the pieces submitted this year have gone on to compete in the 2008 Student Oscars competition (congrats Michelle), and one of them has even made it to the national finals (congrats Brian and Robyn)! The other of course, is that Spotlight has a category for outstanding animated short!

So, none of this seems to add up. I've seen some of the pieces that win Spotlight, and my feeling is that any short that can make it to national finals for the Student Oscar, can easily get accepted to UCLA Spotlight. Something is fishy. Could tensions have ran high enough between the live action and animation programs that they decided to eliminate us from Spotlight altogether? Are there some new rules in place that the animation department has not been made aware of? Which live-action piece will end up winning the UCLA Spotlight award for animation I wonder? Well, at least there are still non-bias venues such as Slamdance, Austin, and apparently the Oscars for us bruin animators to submit to. I just hope future generations of the UCLA Animation Workshop will not have to suffer this crime.