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

Oscar Nominees Blog

I was lucky enough to meet the nominees of this years oscar for animated short film. Ron Diamond of Animation World Network is bringing them around to all the studios to show their films and give them the royal treatment. I think its great that he does this, because animators quietly do their films with out all the hollywood glitz. Its nice to see them get the star treatment.

Check out the blog he has posted

AWN Oscartour

-Andrew

Annecy Info

For those of you who will be in Annecy this year, there will be a few Pixar talks related to Ratatouille. I’ll be talking on Wednesday the 13th. Two other animators, Ross Stevenson and Patty Kihm will also be presenting material. Click on the link below for more info

http://renderman.pixar.com/annecy.html

5 sets of Eyes

Someone was asking me the other day about having people look at your work. I think for an animation Student it is very important to have people give their opinion about what you are doing. If you work in a box and dont show anything to anyone, your work will start to suffer. I know it seems obvious but its always important to get different opinions. The other day some guests were looking at a bunch of shots and they didnt laugh where I thought they would laugh. It makes me wonder about the shot and really try to figure out how to push the entertainment value. On a professional level I try to have 5 people to show my stuff too. When I first started, I just wanted to have good work. I would try to ask the star animators to look at a scene. Sometimes the changes they suggested were too difficult to pull off or not within my comprehension to understand. The cool thing about it was seeing how much better I could make it. As you get more experience you start to become more confident, but it is still imperitive to show other people your stuff. I do wonder if animators like Milt Kahl or Frank and Ollie asked people for comments. It seems that when you get to that level, people are afraid to comment on that animators work. I think this is wrong. Once you stop being a student, you start to wither.

-Andrew

ps - sorry for the lack of articles. It is very buzy here. hopefully I will get an interview up one of these days.