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.

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

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.

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

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

Click here to read along.

–Dr. Stephen G.

I challenged my class at CCA to take a piece of music and animate flour sacks to it… If they wanted to they could also pick a favorite sequence from a film they love and animate it with flour sacks. The purpose of the assignment is to explore staging, acting, cutting and most of all, Straight Ahead style animation. Here are a few of the Sack tests the students did…

Great job to everyone! Expect the other students films soon.

Note: These will play from Safari but need to be downloaded on Firefox

Daniel Gonzales
Nadan Pines
Kyuhee Lee
Bessie Chiu
Grey Jenkins

Carlos Baena just updated his website and it has loads of great animation resources…

Check it out

Carlos Website

http://www.animationmentor.com/index.cfm