What is your name and your current occupation?
Dean Yeagle – I have my own animation company, Caged Beagle Productions, and I do cartoons for Playboy Magazine and publish my own books as well. Â My pinup girl character, Mandy, has become known all over the world due to the Internet, and I do original drawings of her for galleries and collectors.
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Well, aside from a summer job when I was just out of high school with the Head Start program, animation was my first ‘real’ job. Â It was interrupted by a stint in the Navy during Vietnam, and then I went back into animation. Â There’s plenty of ‘crazy’ in animation, anyway.
What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?Â
I produced, directed and largely animated the Cookie-Crisp cereal spots for eight years…they were fun, sort of like 30 second Tex Avery cartoons.  I worked on  various TV specials, for Warner Bros. (animating Bugs and Daffy and Elmer), and animated the Trolls in The Gnomes; I did pre-production work on ICE AGE; and I did lots and lots of commercials and worked with some great people, here and in London.  And now I’m doing full-page color cartoons for Playboy Magazine.
How did you become interested in animation?Â
The way everyone does – watching cartoons as a kid. Â The Disney features were just magic to me, and I knew early on that I had to be involved in doing that. Â The old Disney ABC network show often had programs about the process of animation, and I knew Continue reading
What is your name and your current occupation?
Jason Meier - Fanboy and Chum Chum Supervising Producer at Nickelodeon Animation Studios
What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation? Bus Boy, Park Staff at Lake Casitas Recreation Park, Waiter at a mediocre Italian restaurant where I had to where a tie. Customer service is the pits.
 What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of? I love working on Fanboy and Chum Chum, but honestly I was super excited to animate my favorite mass murderer, Jason Voorhees in Freddy Vs Jason. It was a childhood dream come true.
How did you become interested in animation? When I was a kid, Saturday mornings started at 6 am watching any and all cartoons. I would pretty much watch anything that was animated, The Flinstones, Jabber Jaw, The Snorks. Anything but Continue reading
Today Toon Boom announced our new release, Storyboard Pro 5! Storyboard Pro is recognized as an industry standard in storyboarding, and the studios and artists who use it to create stories are passionate about what they can do with its toolset.
Storyboard Pro 5 is available for free as a benefit for customers who own a Desktop Subscription or Perpetual license with Support. Simply go to the Toon Boom site and download your new software today.
You can buy Storyboard Pro 5 for as low as $38 per month on a yearly subscription or $999 for a perpetual licence. A full breakdown of pricing can be found here.
If you haven’t tried Storyboard Pro yet, download our free trial of Storyboard Pro 5 here. There are loads of free learning materials available to help get you started.
What’s New
The new release of Storyboard Pro streamlines the workflow with new creative tools for artists, adds improvements to the 3D workflow, and provides better integration with editorial.
With a new more neutral UI colour scheme that reduces eye strain, Storyboard Pro 5 makes it easier for artists to accurately see the colours they are working with. Of course, for artists who prefer the original look, the traditional colour scheme is still available.
A better 3D Workflow
The 3D toolset in Storyboard Pro lets you integrate 3D models, block out camera shots and create scenes with depth. Storyboard Pro 5 includes several new features that provide better integration between 2D and 3D.
There’s the new Snap to Surface that makes it easier to position and animate 3D models on a 2D plane like a floor or wall (this feature works with 2D artwork as well). You can create layers on surfaces when you want to draw on 3D models, which is a powerful way to add 2D artwork to your 3D scenes. The 3D camera is much more responsive making it easier to position, do tilts, pans, rotations and camera rolls. And Alembic and Collada can now be imported (added to existing support for FBX and 3DS), making it easier to bring in CG content.
Here you see a 2D prop being positioned inside a 3D spaceship. Positioning and animation controls let you easily place your artwork, which will maintain contact with the surface no matter what changes you make.
Enhanced Bitmap Drawing Tools
Storyboard Pro has both vector and bitmap drawing tools that interact seamlessly. This provides the flexibility that artists are looking for when developing artwork from sketch to cleanup. New in Storyboard Pro 5 are customizable tips for bitmap brushes. These enable more artistic freedom and control over the look and feel.
Change the roundness, hardness, and angle of tips as well as add randomness to affect the resulting lines. Brush tips can be customized, and you can create your own in Photoshop, Harmony or Storyboard Pro.
Better Organization with Layer Groups
In Storyboard Pro, artists can break out their artwork into an unlimited number of layers in a single storyboard panel – for example, character line work and shading can be drawn on separate layers. This enables artistic freedom and makes it easier to edit drawings. For an even more fluid creative development process and exchange between artists, Storyboard Pro 5 features the ability group layers of drawings – making it easier to organize and share content.
When you select a group of layers, all the layers move together. With Layer groups, artists spend more time being creative and less time searching for artwork, which is especially important when projects need to be turned around quickly.
Faster Revisions with Shared Drawings
Some drawings, like a background, are regularly reused in a storyboard. To make it easier to update this kind of artwork, you can now share drawings – use a single drawing across multiple panels. When you make a change, the artwork updates everywhere so you can move on more quickly to the next creative process.
Qt Application Scripting
New Qt Application scripting support can help you save time by creating scripts that automate manual tasks, or you can create new tools that can be accessed at the click of a button.
To get you started, a number of example scripts are available in this release – delete hidden layers, export the camera path, change the timing of multiple panels simultaneously, and others.
Better Integration between Storyboard Pro and Editing
Added support for 23.976 NDF timecode enables the seamless transfer of animatics from Storyboard Pro to the editing suite making it even easier to collaborate with editors. Storyboard artists can now work with this frame rate, directly exporting animatics and timelines with panels, sound, transitions, and timing to editing suites via EDL, AAF, and XML.
For those who haven’t tried Storyboard Pro yet, now is a great time. The new features in Storyboard Pro 5 add to an already great blend of creative tools and technical capabilities that help customers increase pipeline efficiency and creative output. Try it out!
Here’s another one I found after ‘falling down the rabbit hole’ on Youtube. Not as good as the League of Legends on I posted earlier if for no other reason than I can’t see what’s going on at times. Still, it’s pretty well done all in all!
Welcome to SMITE, the online Battleground of the Gods. Play free at www.SmiteGame.com and seize victory in intense battles of strategic action, each fueled by over 10,000 years of mythology.
This SMITE Cinematic Trailer showcases a few of the gods playable within the online action game SMITE.
Combining the deep strategy of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games with the intense action of First Person Shooter (FPS) games, Hi-Rez Studios delivers a unique gaming experience unlike any other. SMITE is currently available on PC and Xbox One.
Subscribe to SMITE on YouTube to unlock Nu Wa, and the YouTube subscriber-exclusive Water Dancer skin, for FREE!: http://www.hirezstudios.com/smite/pro…
A truly beautifully animated Cinematic piece from Blur Studios for the game “League of Legends”. I wish they’d make a feature film like this instead of all fuzzy animals.
Riot Games and Blur joined forces once again to excite and delight the League of Legends community. This second installment in the League of Legends Universe showcases its champions like we’ve never seen them before as they engage in an epic and equally brutal team battle lasting over six minutes.
What is your name and your current occupation?  Daryl-Rhys Taylor :and I am an animation graduate freelancing from home.  What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I worked in a gallery called ‘The Animation Art Gallery’ (now Art You Grew Up With) and they had a stock room full of Mickey Mousde merchandise received from the manager of Blue. I had to catalogue all of it and sell it on Ebay.  What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?  I enjoyed working on my student film. We were the only ones to ever do a 2D film in our college. I really enjoyed my week at Brown Bag Films being a storyboard conformer on the upcoming Disney Junior show “Doc Mc.Stuffins” and any time I’ve visited Phil Vallentin at Espresso Animation. Also I’m proud of “The Booger Monster” children’s book I’m illustrating right now for the Koncept Factory. How did you become interested in animation?
I have always known I wanted to be an animator. All I ever did when I was little was watch cartoons and draw. I loved the Looney Tunes and the Disney Classics. I read all the books when I was growing up. One of my happiest memories was when
