Bale Contest Winners!

After looking at over 25 entries from all over the world, the Winner is…..

Chris O’Hara!!! with his hand drawn entry “Baleistic” Congratulations Chris. Great idea, animation and storytelling.

Second Place:     Dan Huertas

Third Place:         Brandon Beckstead

Honorable Mention: Mathew Rees, Alex Jansen

Thanks to all who participated.  Judging was based on idea, acting and execution. Some were well executed but lacked a good idea. Others were funny but lacked good acting. This piece of dialogue is not easy to do. Animating someone angry is so difficult. It requires a tension in the acting and showing what the character is feeling through the body and expression. Overall I was impressed with the quality of the entries. Here are most of the other entries. Some were not suitable for the site due to some character copyrights and others I could not get to play. I appreciate all the hard work that people put into this. Some submissions were over a minute long. We also had a variety of experience. From High School to Industry professionals, the contest was really well done.

This contest was in no way related to Pixar and was done as an exercise in acting. Thanks to Christian Bale for the dialogue.

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

Animate – on your iPhone!

A fellow pixarian named Josh Anon, wrote a really cool i phone app called flipbook. I have been having alot of fun drawing and animating on this really cool application. It has onion skinning, it has multiple layers,  and its easily the best paint program available for the iPhone. It really is an amazing program.  After you are done creating your masterpiece, you export it to the flipbook site and you can download the quicktime movie of the work and share it. Think about it, you are sitting in a coffee shop, or on the train. You can thumbnail out your whole scene on this thing. I recommend getting some sort of stylus. Its not easy to draw with your finger. For a version 1.0 app, its great and will only get better. (especially with my feedback)

-Andrew

Fun Micro Expression Test

A while back we had a great Facial Reading expert come to pixar to help us understand more about the face. We learned about something called micro-expression which are expression we make very quickly that can reveal how we are really feeling. It is very useful for people trying to spot lies and so forth. Its also great to try and put into our work, especially the work of a computer animator, who can get lots of subtle stuff into their work.

Here is a Micro Expression Test. Click on the number, then whet micro expression flashes by.

Expression test

Happy Halloween

Thanks for all your questions to ED. We had a great interview with him which should be up shortly. Sorry for lack of posts. Things are very busy here. We had a great costume contest for Halloween at work. Former Spline Doctor, Angus Maclane and I took first and second place…. He was a half order of chicken and I was global warming. Expect some new posts soon.

-Andrew