Spline Doctors » Fun and Games

Walk Challenge Winners

Dr. Gordon — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:06:26 +0000

Winner - Pier Pressure - Drew Winey

Thank you all for entering the 2010 walk challenge. I think we really had some amazing entries and I was personally inspired to start doing a walk myself. The whole reason for doing this challenge was to get people to think about character through their walk. Often, when a reel contains a walk cycle, it is often bland and out of context. It tells you nothing about the character. I think that every one of the walks we judged had character. Myself, Victor Navone, Scott Clark and Travis Hathaway judged the entries.

Best Overall Walk – Drew Winey – Pier Pressure

2nd Place – Tyler Kakac – Disco Walk

3rd place – Eleanor Dayton – Kid on Moms Leg

spline doctors walk challenge 2010 from andrew gordon on Vimeo.

Congratulations to all the winners. First prize will be receiving a signed poster from Toy Story 3. The other winner will receive some other Pixar schwag as yet to be determined.

Walk Contest Extended to May 21st

Dr. Gordon — Tue, 11 May 2010 04:07:24 +0000

I have extended the deadline one week since I have not been getting many entries, so keep working on those walk scenes. The winner will be sure to get some cool stuff and potentially be featured in a 3d world Article. Please email your entries to splinedr@gmail.com

Good luck!

Andrew

Bale Contest Winners!

Dr. Gordon — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:48:56 +0000

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

Dr. Gordon — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:38:02 +0000

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!

Dr. Gordon — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:02:15 +0000

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

Dr. Gordon — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:22:00 +0000

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

Dr. Gordon — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:55:00 +0000

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

Some Cool 2d animation software

Dr. Gordon — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 03:32:00 +0000

The best thing animation students can do is to do 2d animation before they enter the vast world of 3d animation.It teaches you the basics much quicker and really helps you understand the process. Here are a bunch of 2d animation software packages that are out there for the computer. I like using these packages because it lets me experiment more and try out different techniques. Its also easier to make changes.

Here they are:

Pencil – A free open source program

Mirage – Alot like deluxe paint 4 for the Amiga only better! (TV Paint is the european counter-part)

Flipbook – widely used 2d program. Very simple and robust

Feel free to submit any other 2d animation programs that you know of.

-Andrew

Congratulations "Virgin Voyage"!

Dr. Burke — Mon, 14 May 2007 00:59:00 +0000

I just wanted to tip my hat to Andrew Gordon, Scott Clark and all of their students who worked so hard on their class project last semester “Virgin Voyage” which recently took an award for “Audience Choice” at AAU’s 1st annual Epidemic Film Festival in San Francisco. For those not familiar with previous posts about this project, Scott and Andrew recorded improvisation performers and had their students put it through it’s paces, simulating a working production environment. They designed characters and sets, laid out the sequence, animated, and lit and rendered. It’s great to see innovative teaching and great student work get recognized. Congratulations again to everyone involved!

Adam

The Virgin Voyage

Dr. Gordon — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:28:00 +0000

We never did post the final version of the project we did last semester. Here it is. It does not have alot of the sound effects or Music yet. Scott and I think the students did a great job!

All the students in our class are extremely talented. Alot of them are out on the job hunt. Maybe someone out there needs some animators… Feel free to contact us regarding any of the work and we will put you in touch with the student or students who did the work. You can email us at gordo@splinedoctors.com or clark@splinedoctors.com

Link to Virgin Voyage

(remember to right click in safari. It may come in as a text file.)
if it does download as a text file, remove the .txt from the end of the file and it should play fine in quicktime.