If you don't have a grip on how long you'll need to produce your animation, you don't have a grip on your animation. This first post on targets shows how easy it is to calculate an animation target, and how important...

What's professional? If you're an instructor, this is likely a tedious discussion. Recently, while renovating yet another apartment (don't ask) a possible discussion-ending metaphor occurred to me:

Being professional means using cheap sheets of plastic.

Ryan Woodward's film "Thought of you" offers a great look at what hand animation has to offer, and what an animator and his audience can expect from the medium.

Time-tracking is often viewed as the one most singularly evil impulse between you and your creative energies.  For good reason? David Maas gives a first-hand impression.

 

 

Mike the paleontologist says: "Anybody can do this. You learn by doing."

David the animator says, "valuable advice."

Occasionally I'm confronted with the following scenario:

an independent or student film is already half-finished, but now the budget's used up and the initiators are running out of steam / taking on jobs / otherwise reducing their future engagement on the production in question. But the film is really looking good and - yeah, it's half-finished!

Here's what I tell them...

The German/French station Arte interviews David O'Reilly, who takes the opportunity to talk candidly about the materiality of 3D graphics, the idiocy of an unnamed American producer, the creative energies of Berlin and many of his films.

Correspondence allows insight into Walt Disney's ideas about the animation and what animators should be capable of.

 

Sports form a window to the soul of.... erm, okay. That's a bit thick. Football is only peripherally relevant to animation and yes - I'm stretching that relavance here. But somebody has to - its the World Cup after all. And it's truly interesting how a sport can reveal a country's mentality - or perhaps form it.

If you’ve inherently suspected that there’s a structural difference between a soccer match, a space odyssey and your favorite porno but never been able to put your finger on it, cinemetrics is for you. It beautifully lays out a film like a flower of pencil shavings, colored according to the film’s palette and oscillated according to amounts of screen movement. Stunning… and informative. Compare genres, director’s oeuvres or remakes… its a beautiful step back from the cinematic experience.