Animating Adventures

So what's been up?

2010-01-27T08:00:00.001-08:00

A tad late with my weekly intended blog-post and that is because most of my work lately is a bit outside the spectrum of animation. I’ve decided to cut down on traveling for projects for a wile. It’s gotten a bit hard sometimes to combine with a family-life.

Last year I was away for work in Slovenia when my wife got ill and was taken to the hospital for three weeks. Luckily the producer, director and I were able to work something out so I could go home to take care of my kids, really quick, wile not damaging the deadline and budget. But it did made me think it’s probably better to stop, at least till the kids are both a little bit older, out of their Pampers, in school and won’t be a burden for ‘la famiglia’ if they stay over with them for a few days. I don’t mind stress on a production, it is an important part of it, as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with the real world outside.
Francesca got all better again (though, her driving is still a bit peculiar but that seems to be part of the cultural heritage here) and I have been doing video-related work here in Padova. Later on I will probably be confident enough and dare to share some motion-graphics work/-exercises with you, but editing video’s and building interactive touch-screen applications is something I don’t mind doing to make a living but rather stay secretive about it on this blog, and stop-motion developments simply were going too slow to be worth writing about. The next subjects are already lined-up though and won't take as long to get posted.

Animating Adventures on Flickr

2009-06-22T13:37:00.001-07:00

And Flickr here in the sidebar. Although I am quite busy with non-animation activities, I activated a Flickr account to share pictures, drawings and maybe storyboards in the future without polluting this blog too much. It's still very fresh and need to be set-up properly but it can found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/animatingadventures and I will refer to it when there is something new or of some interest to see of course.

Sunday Drive

2009-06-22T09:11:00.001-07:00

Sunday Drive or Passeio de Domingo is a film coming from the mind of José Miguel Ribeiro and it's starting to take its own tour around the festival scene. I had a great time working on it and look very much forward to see it on a big screen. The mise en scène are amazing and driving force behind this is Francisco Xavier Menezes. I recently found that he also has a blog to present some of his impressive works right here on blogspot: http://fxm262.blogspot.com/

A little making-of "George and Paul"

2009-05-29T06:37:00.001-07:00

The guys behind George and Paul posted something on their blog to feed those who have a little making-of-appetite.

Ka-Ching Cartoons Animation Studios: a little making of 'George and Paul'

Storyboarding Adventures

2009-05-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

Here a little sneak-peak on something I work on for some comic relief. With a running time under one minute it probably won't be epic. But it does give way for some experimentation and can be wrapped in the not so distant future.

I can make this storyboard as sketchy as I please since I'm the only one that need to make sense out of it and that is really nice working. Though, it does make me a little bit hesitant to post them here in higher resolution for now.

Here is to hoping that my producer doesn't read this because I'm actually suppose to be working on something else, and completely different.

Me, Mac and Roe on Animation Blog

2009-05-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

It really made my day yesterday that I got mentioned on the animation blog that I like so much. There are so many wonderful works there that its a great feeling to be a little part of it myself now too. It's nicely written too. http://www.animationblog.org/

Mac & Roe on Vimeo

2009-05-19T12:23:00.001-07:00

This short is a few years old already. I made it as a technical experiment few years ago, with a lot of help from my friends, wile I was working as an animator on a television series. It has been on Youtube as part of the Nederlands Film Festival Online, but this version is of significantly better quality, which also helps to enjoy the soundtrack, composed by the wonderfully gifted Michiel Meeuws, better.

Spots Arrived!

2009-05-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

After a delay of weeks, our spots finally arrived. They're nothing fancy, simple E27 Par-cans as used in discotheques and expos. The local restrictions for power-supply will keep us from using professional spots (the supply simply stops providing whenever we go over 2500kwh and that is something I dont like to see happening wile shooting). The bright side of those restrictions is the warm and fuzzy feeling we'll have realising how eco-friendly we'll be producing animation.

Studio 1

2009-05-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I've started this blog is to show what we are up to with some of our own animation projects. The first one we'll make will be a very tiny silly short, to test our set-up. Soon, more on that. We are preparing a small location for small setups and things are slowly coming together. I say 'slowly' because it's done mainly in our spare time besides the professional jobs we are working on. But, nevertheless, it's 'together' enough to baptise the space "Studio 1" already.

Some pics:

Studio 1 is located in cool shadows of the lovely suburbs under the warm Italian sky.

Now the spots arrived it's time to wire the place up. We'll be putting up a mock set-up to do some testing with the light and cameras soon enough.

To be continued ...

edit: Its funny but I call it 'the basement' whenever I talk about it now, while before I took out thirty years worth of stuff it was always 'the studio'. O well, 'Basement 1' is maybe cool too, it has a bit of Thunderbirds' feeling to it. I wonder how we'll call the garage when its converted.

George and Paul Pilot Online

2009-04-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most recent projects I have animated and the first to fill a post on my freshly started blog.

I had a great time working on it and I think it turned out a very nice pilot. Some people seem to wonder wether it is CGI or not. Well, it is not. Everything that moves is shot frame by frame in stop-motion. Digital techniques were used afterwards to remove wires and rigging and such, and some compositing was done to combine together footage that was shot separately or backwards. Basically most of what you don't see is done digitally.

Hopefully it gets picked up by somebody in tv-land and it will be produced as a series. With the cool people behind the production, the creative challenges and the dynamic possibilities it is very much an animators playground. I think I would love to see stuff like this if I was still a kid. It is definitely this kind of thing that made me want to become an animator.