Variety has an article on the 10 animators to watch in 2015. Among them is Daron Nefcy who is already knee-deep in storyboards for season two of her first animated series, Disney’s “Star vs. the Forces of Evil.†based on a drawing she created during her junior year at CalArts and Lorelay Bove, who brought her Spanish background to the design of “Wreck-It Ralph.â€Â and is set for larger role on Disney’s still-secret 2018 feature.
You can read the whole article here.
Artist and teacher Jon LeMond posted a quick note about six Android virtual mannequin apps that will allow you to replace the old school wood mannequins from the days of yore before computers took over the art world. You can rotate light, and pose all of the digital mannequins right on your phone. Cool stuff, if you need some sort of funky foreshortened arm pose or an’t quite get a down shot right.
You can read the whole article here.
Engadget is reporting on a group of Dutch 3d animators that literally printed out every frame of a short film in with a 3d printer and made it into an exhibit.
From the site:
Why 3D print a computer animation? ‘Art’ is a good enough reason for us, and that’s exactly what drove Dutch artists to put a hundred frames into a single mind-bending installation. Using an Ultimaker 2 3D printer and liberal amounts of glue and string, artists Job, Joris and Marieke squeezed all the cells from a short animation (below) into a single mise-en-scene. At a glance, you can see the fate of the teal-hued hero as he vaults off a cup and into a vase, with each detail (including a bouncing ball and shattered cup) faithfully reproduced in PVC. If you want to feel like you’re inside a computer where time has lost all meaning, it’ll be exhibited at Amersfoort’s Kunsthal museum on March 29th.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MpTHZa6eP8
If you remember a while back we reported on a Cintiq alternative called the Ugee 1910B 19″ Monitor Drawing Tablet which you can currently purchase on Amazon for only $429 and users really seemed to like. Today I was alerted to a fantastic and very lengthy in depth review of  the device itself by an artist named Holly. The review points to an unboxing video as well as two other demos of using the tablet monitor and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the results. If I needed a new Cintiq I might actually drop the cash for this one.
You can read the full review here.
Of course you REALLY don’t need a huge tablet like this when you can still buy an LE 1600 for LESS THAN $100 at Gainsaver which works perfectly well for a cheap digital sketchbook. Also recently I purchased a J3400 from eBay also made by Motion which I’ll put through it’s paces and hopefully do a review.
If the Ugee makers want to send us a demo unit we’d LOVE to take the tablet monitor through it’s paces.
Yesterday we lost another one of our own in the Animation industry in Gordon Kent who’d been in the business since 1977. I met Gordon many years ago at Warner Bros. on my very first job working as a character layout artist on the series Tazmania where he was the Story editor and have bumped into him off and on at studios and parties throughout the years. He was a kind and thoughtful man who had a dry sense of humor and he had a unique style of drawing which I really liked(and you can see above). Incidentally, we interviewed Gordon last year about how he got into the business.
I’ve been doing this since 1977… I worked on a show called CBS Storybreak for two seasons. I was associate producer – but my job entailed hiring character and background designers, storyboard artists and story editing (and some writing). I also was the voice director for most of them and worked with the composers and sound effects people as well as working with the engineers on the final mix. I got to learn and do a lot. That was for Buzz Potamkin at Southern Star. I also worked for him years later at both Disney TV and Hanna-Barbera. At HB I got to be Supervising Producer on a couple of movies for TV – Titles change in animation all the time – today that would be supervising director. The Flintstones’ Christmas Carol was my favorite project there. I’ve been an animation timing director since then and have been lucky enough to work on Kim Possible, Teamo Supremo, Billy and Mandy and Bob’s Burgers among dozens of other shows.
Rest In Peace Gordon Kent… you will be missed by many.
You can read the full interview here if you like.
Toon Talks has a nice interview with Eric Goldberg up.
From the site:
To anyone who has met Eric, I’m sure you’ll agree that he embodies everything we love about the characters and craft of animation – he really is a ‘living cartoon character’! What a wonderful honour and pleasure to have him on the show!!
In the mid-1970s Eric broke into the industry working on Raggedy Ann and Andy at the Richard Williams studio where he quickly raised through the ranks from Assistant to Director! For a time in the 80’s Eric ran his own studio, Pizazz Pictures before returning to the States to work at Walt Disney’s as a lead animator on the Genie in Aladdin and later co director for Pocahontas, and the lead animator on Phil in Hercules. While at Disney’s Eric began his own short which was set to the George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. His short later became part of Disney’s Fantasia 2000 after he was allowed to use Disney’s staff which were on down time from The Emperor’s New Groove, to help complete it. He was also director for Fantasia 2000’s “The Carnival of the Animals†segment.
Eric also developed Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are as a CG animated feature film and was an animation director on Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes: Back in Action, as well as providing the voices for Speedy Gonzales, Tweety, and Marvin the Martian.
Eric also directed a short cartoon for a Buddhist cultural centre in Hong Kong, A Monkey’s Tale. A fun lesson about greed. He animated the title sequence of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 2006 remake of The Pink Panther, with Bob Kurtz of Kurtz and Friends. Later returning to Disney, where he directed four minutes of animation for the Epcot attraction Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros and contributed to animated short How to Hook Up Your Home Theater. He was the supervising animator for Louis, the Alligator in The Princess and the Frog and Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh and head of animation on Get A Horse!But all this, is still just a drop in the sea of contribution Eric has added to our industry.
