Matt Luhn’s How to Draw Cartoons Books

My Friend and Teaching Buddy, Matt Luhn just came out with a really cool new set of books. They are geared towards beginners, but really have some great info inside. They are a great gift for people trying to get into animation, escpecially kids in grade school. You can find the books in a bunch of art stores. Matt also teaches a class that goes along with all the great stuff in the book.

Matt and I are hoping to set up another story/animation masterclass soon. The first class we did in Montreal was a big success. Here are some comments about the class.

Cal Arts Producers Show 09

I was lucky enough to attend the Cal Arts producers show this year. For those of you who don’t know the school it is one of the premier animation schools in the country. Pixar has many of its directors, animators and story artsits come from the school. Every year all the studios come out to see the show and recruit new talent. I am impressed by the films coming out of the school but not so much by the animation. In talking to many of the students, I felt they wanted to do story or art. Not many were interested in Character Animation. Maybe because its done mostly on computer and they want to draw, which I can understand. I hope some of the students can focus more on animating though. The industry is hungry for talented animators and alot of the animation talent is coming from other schools that focus a bit more on character work. I still think Calarts is one of the best animation schools. Here are some links to some of the students films from this year.  Great work… Next year, more character animation!

Nelson Boles
Noel Belknap 4th year
Sabrina Cotugno 1st year
Elle Michalka 1st year
Jeff Liu 2nd year
David Ochs 1st year
Shion Takeuchi 3rd year
Dylan Forman 2nd year
Tahnee Ghem 1st year
Marcos Cohen 1st year

Andres Salaff 4th year
Sharing by Kris Anka
The Terror from Mars by Daron Nefracy
Leonardo’s Chase by Carlos Romero

If anyone has more links to calarts films please post them in the comments section or email me.

-Gordon

Summer School

As the semester comes to a close, what are you going to do? There are alot of Summer Animation classes going on. Here are a few notable ones….

http://www.csssa.org/main.php?page=studies&sub_page=animation

http://www.csusummerarts.org/courses2009/animation.shtml

http://www.gobelins.fr/~summerschool/en/informations.php

please leave links to other summer programs in the comments section.

Spline Doctors Animation Challenge

I thought it would be fun to put together a little contest of sorts. I’m not sure if anyone has heard this piece of Dialogue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KUNpsqOgYA

The challenge is to animate part of the flip out that Christian Bale goes on. You can put him on the set of terminator, or batman.. whatever. Come up with a nice little scene. Feel free to bleep out the F-bombs or edit the clip anyway you want. You can pick a small manageable part of the clip to animate. You obviously will not have time to animate the whole thing. Click here for the audio. We will pick the winner and post a bunch of the other contestants work on the site. The winner will receive some pixar swag and possibly something else (ie signed poster or something like that) This piece of dialogue is just too juicy to pass up. Email splinedr@gmail to put a link to your entry. You have until April Fools Day to submit for judging.

Good luck..

Spline Doctors

ps… This contest is for fun and is in no way connected to Pixar. It is meant to be a learning exercise for doing a dialogue scene.

PPS… here is a funny version done on Family Guy…  LINK

Animation in London

I had the opportunity to teach some animation in London and I wanted to thank all the people that came to the class. It was an amazing experience, being in such a vibrant city. It seems like the animation community in London is really exciting. I only hope I can return one day. I will hopefully posting some missing images from the presentation.

-Andrew

Here is a link to the many studios in the UK