If you've ever wondered if animation has joined the global economy just see, finally, some work returning to the U.S.  Granted it is not a huge windfall of jobs but we should see this new start-up digital company as at the very least, a start.

Blood The Last Vampire

Having just watched the mediocre live-action adaptation, it was fortuitous that Manga Entertainment sent me the Blu-Ray release of the original anime film. Studio execs everywhere should sit down with both copies. It’s a good lesson in why standard Hollywood tactics are not necessarily the best means of translating anime to the silver screen.

Okay, I just received word from Sony Picutres Home Entertainment that they're launching a mobile Voltron game on wireless carriers this month! Boasting characters and plot line from the retro series, we can apparently now get a taste of defending the universe from King Zarkon

Halo Anime

An interview with Frank O’Connor, Halo franchise development director, was included with the press release I received yesterday from the Halo team. Since Frank is such a great guy (I fortunately had the chance to talk with him during Comic-Con), I thought I should post his words.

Halo The Package

Tomorrow, Dec. 5^th, you’ll have your chance to preview the third installment of the Halo Legends anime project. The mental offspring of Casio Entertainment and legendary director Shinji Aramaki, “The Package” follows the iconic Master Chief as he and four select Spartans stealthily penetrate the Covenant fleet to acquire dire intelligence. 

Autodesk University is primarily a training conference.  There are over 500 classes that fill four floors of the convention center for almost a week.  Seeing the list of classes demonstrates just how broad and deep Autodesk’s design software reaches.  Everyone from architects to product designers to engineers to animators had something to attend.  In addition to classes, Autodesk used the show as a way to introduce products and reveal future directions for the company.

As you probably know, The Princess and the Frog is Disney’s first 2D effort in five years. It took John Lasseter, a Pixar guy who now runs all of Disney animation to get the studio to return to its 2D roots. Lasseter and company knew they had to hit a home run to make people care about hand-drawn animation again. They came to the plate swinging for the fence: would they ground into a double play or hit a grand slam? Is P&F 2D’s rebirth or its last gasp?

Hey, it’s a Disney movie – there’s gotta be a happy ending, right?

Damn straight – a happy ending to both the movie and the studio’s mission to show the world 2D’s still got the goods. CGI? We don’ need no steenkin’ CGI!

Marty Murphy

It's often said that you can't appreciate things unitl they're gone but we shouldn't let that happen.  We should all try to remember how fortunate we are to be working with so many wonderfully talented and creative people.  Animation is not only a small industry, although growing larger due to CGI, it is tradionally an intimate business.  We work closely together and often shoulkder to shoulder with one another.  We should all stand back once in-a-while and enjoy the moment.

A short while ago, without a great deal of fuss, Marty passed away.  He was not one of the industry people whose name and work neveryone knew but he was a fine artist and cartoonist who was known and highly respected within the heart of the animation industry.

James Cameron's Avatar

Tuesday night proved to be a big highlight of Autodesk University.  The Media and Entertainment keynote featured the first public screening of footage from James Cameron’s highly anticipated 3D feature “Avatar.”  

Simply put, “Avatar” was as stunning as it was rumored.  The 3D works incredibly well, but what impressed this animator more was the level of realism in the virtual characters.  The facial animation/capture was impeccable, the faces no longer looked like rubber masks as they have in so many movies that use facial capture.  In Avatar, the characters truly came to life and were believable in every way.  The audience identified with the characters and that made the story work on a much deeper lever.  The characters inhabited a world that was just as believable.  Much of it was lush jungle with fantastic creatures.  Some of the little details I noticed were highly realistic water, mud, and other subtle effects that helped to make the world that much more engaging.

Autodesk is taking over Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the week to stage Autodesk University.  The event is mostly dedicated to training Autodesk’s customers in their wide array of products, particularly people interested in AutoCAD, Revit, and Inventor.  In addition, there’s a trade show as well as keynote addresses and other special events that makes this more like a yearly Autodesk conference than just a week of training. 

Over 5500 people found their way to Las Vegas this week for over 500 classes.  An additional 20,000 will attend virtually.  People started arriving on Monday for various related events, such as the developers conference, but the main conference started on Tuesday with the main keynote.  Being Las Vegas, the keynote started with none other than Elvis Presley (or a reasonable facsimile) singing the disclaimers to the tune of “Glory Glory Hallelujah.”  After that, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass took the stage and talked a bit about Autodesk’s future direction.  A lot of this centered on the idea of the computing cloud, centralized high powered banks of servers controlled by remote workstations.  Users would interface to this computing power by Autodesk software running not only on high-end workstations, but also net-enabled devices such as netbooks and iPhones.