Search the Community

In commemoration of Netflix's reboot of the 1960's Irwin Allen schlock sci-fi series "Lost in Space", thought I'd post a short CyberPaint SEQ file I created 30 years ago (nearly to the day) in honour of the misadventures of the Space Family Robinson. I have also included a later AVI file where I added sound. This was done back in the days of Win95, so I don;t remember all the software I used to move the SEQ over to the PC for editing, but I do know I started by saving each frame of the SEQ as a PI1, and then converting these pics to Gem IMG format. The sequence was rebuilt using a simple slideshow program, and add the sound (which I created using CoolEdit Pro). I used to play with Cyberpaint quite a bit, but this is the first time I've shared any of my animation projects. Hope someone enjoys it. LIS.zip

I actually got to see Pixar's Coco at a sneak preview at work a couple of weeks ago, but couldn't write anything about it until the movie was in theaters. (I work at CalArts in the Character Animation Program, for those that haven't been following along.) It was an interesting screening, because Disney had what I could only describe as their Secret Service on hand to make sure nobody recorded anything or took pictures. Several dark-suited individuals (I don't recall but I'm almost sure they had to be wearing sunglasses), stood in the front corners of the theater with very stern looking expressions on their faces. There were numerous signs that we had to put up in the theater about not recording or spoiling anything about the movie, including threats of fines and other fun legal action. Although I guess since I only write Spoiler-free reviews... I probably technically could've gotten away with writing this review sooner. But it probably wouldn't have been worth the risk of getting my . I wonder though - were those really Disney Secret Service? Or did they just use cast members from Disneyland who wanted a little overtime? For all I know, they're usually dressed up as Chip 'n' Dale or Snow White. The other reason the screening was interesting, is because we were watching the movie in a theater full of animation nerds. So if a movie is really good, then the reaction will be really enthusiastic. On the other hand, if the movie is a stinker, then the reactions can be... brutal (which in their own way can be entertaining). Since The Good Dinosaur, I haven't bothered with Pixar. I skipped Finding Dory and Cars 3, because the former just looked like a rehash of Finding Nemo, and Cars 2 was just too awful to give that franchise another chance. I almost skipped Coco too. None of the trailers or commercials appealed to me at all. But I decided that Pixar had more hits than misses, and besides, I was effectively getting paid to watch it. So why not? It's... research. Yeah. That's it. Unfortunately - I didn't think Coco was very good. The main problem I had with it was that it was just too predictable - to the point of being trite. The basic premise has been done to death: kid wants to pursue music, but his family doesn't want him to. Kid pursues music anyway. Family finds out. Stuff happens. You can figure it out from there. Coco isn't even the first animated film this year to have this exact same story, either. Now, it's not all that uncommon to have the same basic premise as other films, but even within its details, Coco was too predictable. There are a couple of supposed plot "twists" that are meant to surprise the audience. But the film telegraphs them so early, they should come as no surprise to anyone by the time they're revealed. They certainly didn't surprise me - I sat there for some 20 minutes waiting for the movie to just get on with it already. I should point out that during a couple of these "reveals", the audience I was with reacted as the studio hoped they would, with vocal shock and awe. But someone I talked to with afterwards wasn't entirely sure that wasn't sarcasm. I honestly don't know. Maybe they were making fun of the obvious. Or maybe they just aren't familiar enough yet with recycled film clichés to recognize the obvious. Even though the story is all-too-familiar, what should have made this film more original was that the story takes place within the context of Mexico's Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead). And although there are story points and visual elements unique to that, Coco is now the second animated film within the last few years based in that setting. The other problem that I had was that the main character was just so generic, that by the end of the movie, I'd forgotten his name. And no - it isn't Coco. That's another character in the film. In fact, it's a secondary character in the film. But due to advertising, the name Coco was so burned into my brain before ever seeing the film, I never really paid attention to what the main character's name actually was. The fact that he was called by a nickname during part of the movie didn't help, either. Now, I want to make it clear that Coco isn't a bad film. The animation is really well done. There's a dog in particular that's a great deal of fun to watch, that reminds me of Scrat from the Ice Age films. (Maybe too much, since it doesn't really fit with the rest of the film's style... as if Pixar were saying, "Look! We can do wacky, too!") There are some genuinely funny moments here and there, and a couple of heartfelt ones. But given the film's predictability, there's never a sense of real menace, or urgency, or consequence. There are some scenes that are visually impressive, but nothing that really "wowed" me like the best Pixar films used to do. Even when we visit the Land of the Dead, so much of it still looks like the real world, it becomes kind-if boring. Overall, the film is... competent. Professionally made and visually polished, but nothing I'd go out of my way to see. That said, Coco has been getting rave reviews. Maybe people are just really glad it's not another sequel (or The Good Dinosaur). Maybe I'm just jaded. But I didn't connect with Coco. I sat there, distantly, fully aware I was watching a movie. But never losing myself in it. In the end, I think Coco is just so-so. Want to go-go? I'd say no-no. It gets a 5/10.

Highly inspired by this : http://68000.web.fc2.com/bad_apple.html I decided to do my own version of this demo for the sega megadrive I initially wanted to proof it was possible to achieve full resolution video while keeping 30 FPS playback rate. After many effort i finally completed it. 4 MB version : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/93332624/dev/megadrive/demo/BadApple_p1.bin https://dl.dropbox.com/u/93332624/dev/megadrive/demo/BadApple_p2.bin 8 MB version (without bank switch) : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/93332624/dev/megadrive/demo/BadApple.bin Note that the 8 MB version can work only with Mega Everdrive or custom flash cart supporting full 8 MB mapping (without SSF2 bank switch style). Also some special emulator can support it as well as this one : http://umk3.hacking-cult.org/2.11hack.zip The good point is that it does work on real hardware exactly as on emulator

When it's an "animated film". This year's Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize winner, Yonatan Tal, said the other night when accepting the award, "We can make cartoons... but we'd rather make animation." That's a pretty interesting distinction, and one that wasn't lost on me when watching our student films this year. For many of the films, they felt less like traditional cartoons, and more like short stories that happened to be animated. As with last year, and the 22 years that preceded it, we just wrapped up our end-of-the-year student film screenings. "We" being the Character Animation Program at CalArts, for those of you who haven't been following along. And those 22+ years are just the ones I've been involved with as technical staff. Our program goes much further back than that. Scary though, to think I've been with the program now more than half of its existence. The Open Show (on April 22nd) was comprised of 167 student films, one faculty film, opening titles and end credits, spanning some 7 hours and 10 minutes. Not including two half-hour intermissions. I'm not sure it was our longest show ever, but it was certainly the most films we'd ever shown. And that's one school year's worth. About the equivalent of 4 feature films worth of animation. Or about 19 episodes of an animated TV series. And over 320 people binge-watched them all, back to back to back. (Admittedly, not everyone stayed for the whole thing. But more than half did. But we had popcorn.) As usual, it took me about 85 hours over the course of that week to assemble, edit, mix, stage, and screen everything. But it all went off without a hitch. Exhaustion, yes, but hitch, no. There were some HDCP hitches during a separate screening for faculty (which was also Saturday), but since they stop between films to judge them anyway, the hitches weren't complete showstoppers. And I've figured out the solution for next year (BlackMagic and Denon don't like each other). This Wednesday (May 3rd) was our Producers' Show. This is what our faculty spent all of that Saturday sorting out. The top 21 juried films were screened for industry big-shots, alumni, students, faculty, and whoever else could get tickets at the Directors Guild Association theater in Hollywood (our third year there). There were around 670 people there, spilling over into a second theater. Despite some delays in getting everyone seated, this show also went off without a hitch. Which is good - since it's my job to make sure everything is as technically hitchless as possible. The folks at the DGA were all super professional and accommodating, even though Hollywood itself is a horrendous nightmare to drive to and/or through. Sure glad I only have to go down there a couple of times a year. But the place was packed, people enjoyed the films, and hopefully some students get some jobs out of it. Seriously. The cost of education these days is completely ridiculous. Something different happened this year with the Producers' Show though... we were written up by Variety. Yes... that Variety. The one that uses the word "boffo" a lot. Usually in relation to box office results. We have our own boffo box office results, incidentally. Although we don't actually see any financial returns from it. Looks good in magazine articles though. And why were we written up by Variety? Well, because our Program's Director - Maija Burnett - was named "Animation Instructor of the Year" by them. That's why. Pretty cool, and well deserved. Although this meant she had to go into Hollywood twice this week. Wouldn't wish that on anyone. Anyway, as always, you can watch over 100 (and counting) of this year's films on our Vimeo channel. And, as always, I'm posting some of my favorites right here, and I'll likely add a few more as they appear online: 2017 Character Animation Producers' Show Intro Yonatan Tal https://vimeo.com/217243008 FishBowl Josue Geronimo https://vimeo.com/215356713 Winston & Pigbert Julian Sanchez https://vimeo.com/214980866 Overweight Yonatan Tal https://vimeo.com/184283183 Shadow Crystal Kung https://vimeo.com/214418146 Virtual Critters Li Wen Toh https://vimeo.com/214560834 A song for the whales Lorenzo Fresta https://vimeo.com/214550972 Sketch Erika Shing https://vimeo.com/214437486 Blue like the ocean Frank Liu https://vimeo.com/214397221 I think I love you Xiya Lan https://vimeo.com/214413623 S T E P S Alex Avagimian https://vimeo.com/214238898 Sewing Circle Jackie Lee https://vimeo.com/214400209 Cycle Alex Ishida https://vimeo.com/214272626 - WINSTON Aram Sarkisian https://vimeo.com/214244578 "123" Hannah Gibbs https://vimeo.com/214407223 Cat City Victoria Vincent https://vimeo.com/214352663

Hi everyone. I've been working on a project I'm calling AtasciiTube. It's a HTML5/JS app to play for ATASCII animations. I'm still refining the code, but it's working pretty well so far. Check it out: http://breakintochat.com/collections/atascii. Also, I want to send out a plea to anyone who saved any ATASCII animations from years ago. I have found quite a few, but I know there have to more out there. If you were an 8-bit sysop or user back in the day, or maybe you dabbled in creating these animations yourself, please give me a holler! I'd love to add any animations you can send me.

Hey guys, I am not a programmer by any means.I was experimenting with visual bb and decided to make a sprite using both player sprites. I am now wondering if anyone would be willing to show me a code where I can combine both sprites as one. My first goal is to combine both sprites and then hopefully add some code so I can design a walk cycle. Anyone willing to share an animated double sprite code to an artist?I just wanna create art, I wish I understand programming. I provided art example below, I'm sure it will be nice to see if someone was willing to help out. My next step is walk cycle if someone can help with the code. I've seen this code for flicking, but I am not sure how to use it or write it in a code for my character. Assuming flicker is best. My understanding is, it allows you to use one player sprite instead of two? frame1 player0x = x gosub ShowLeftSide goto frame2 frame2 player0x = x + 8 gosub ShowRightSide goto frame1 Art player0: %01011010 %00110100 %00101000 %00110000 %00011000 %00110000 %00110000 %00110000 %01010000 %11100000 %01000000 %00000000 %10101010 %11111111 %00000001 %10110110 %01011000 %01010000 %01100000 %11000000 %10000000 %10000000 %11100000 %10000000 player0: %10110000 %01011000 %00111000 %00011000 %00110000 %00011000 %00011000 %00010100 %00001100 %00001110 %00110111 %01001011 %01010000 %01101111 %01011111 %01011000 %01011101 %01011101 %01011011 %01100110 %00111001 %00000011 %00000011 %00000001

Wah wah wah wah, wah wah, wah wah wah wah. Sorry... couldn't resist. I've been a Peanuts fan as far back as I can remember. I read Peanuts books and drew Peanuts cartoons as soon as I was old enough to read a book or hold a crayon. I've still got a picture I drew as a little kid of Snoopy's dog house (a cutaway view showing the inside and all of the stuff that he had in there), and there's a photo somewhere of me standing in front of a chalkboard we had at home drawing Snoopy on it. I had stacks of Peanuts books that I read and re-read endlessly. I have every volume to date of The Complete Peanuts from Fantagraphics, and am now in need of a longer book shelf to fit the last few remaining volumes. Charles M. Schulz was and is the single biggest artistic influence in my life, and out of Peanuts grew my love for cartooning. Oddly enough, Charles M. Jones (the Warner Bros. director) is the second biggest influence on me. Not sure what the deal is with artists named "Charles M." something-or-other, but there you go. That said, I'm not a collector of Peanuts memorabilia. I never kept my original, old Peanuts books in pristine shape. I read them until they were dog-eared and ragged. I own almost no other Peanuts merchandise. I don't necessarily think that everything with "Peanuts" on it is a good thing. Chocolate bars, for example. Why ruin a perfectly good chocolate bar by putting peanuts in it? It's like, you're eating this really tasty, smooth chocolate bar, and then it's like biting into a chunk of particle board. I mean, by themselves I like peanuts, or as peanut butter in a Reese's peanut butter cup, but that doesn't mean I want big, nasty hunks of them in my chocolate. Same thing with Rocky Road ice cream. Why on earth would anyone... Oh. Sorry. Right. So... not everything with "Peanuts" stamped on it is good. Particularly when it comes to animation. On one hand, A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown nailed it. They're funny, iconic, and perfectly translate the humor and characters of Peanuts over into the world of animation. But there are others. Many others. Forty-five others. And many of them were stinkers. They never quite recaptured the spirit of the original holiday specials with It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown. They really jumped the shark though with It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown, when they animated Snoopy's dancing by rotoscoping a female dancer. Even though I didn't know much about animation at the time, I knew it was creepy and weird. The four original feature films didn't fare much better. While the first two were pretty good, generally they were just television specials that ran too long. Still, between the original Christmas and Great Pumpkin specials, and a really good Saturday morning TV series which basically lifted episodes right out of the comic strip, it's easier to think of Peanuts animation in a positive light, and overlook the negative. That is until a few years ago when I read the announcement... that they were going to make a new Peanuts movie, using CG. Say what? I remember getting really upset. Every, and I mean every attempt to CG-ify a traditional cartoon or comic strip character had failed horribly. Scooby Doo, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Alvin & The Chipmunks (admittedly, no great loss there), Casper, Garfield, Dino, The Great Gazoo, The Smurfs, Underdog, Sherman and Peabody... and many of them shoehorned into impossibly awful live-action train wrecks of a movie. Seriously... have you ever watched the Flintstones movie? Single worst movie-going experience I've ever had. I felt like I needed to shower afterwards. Or rinse out my eyes with iodine. Anyway, they're all catastrophically bad. That's my point. Peanuts weren't designed to be three dimensional. Look at any toy featuring them. They never really look right from any angles but those Schulz drew in the strip. He cheated their shapes and proportions when drawing them from different angles all the time - that's what cartooning is. It's abstraction. So I was expecting the CG Peanuts movie to be pretty-much the worst thing in the history of awful things. For the next couple of years, every mention of the project made me cringe. But then, I saw the . And I thought, "Hey... that's not bad." But still, it was just a teaser, and mostly featured Snoopy. Could they make a whole film work? How would they handle all of the other characters? Then came . And I thought, "Whoa. I think they nailed it." Because what Blue Sky did, which was the right way, and the only way to animate the characters, was the way Bill Melendez had figured out 50 years ago. Stick to Schulz's designs. If a character doesn't work from an angle or in a certain pose, then they shouldn't be shown that way. Blue Sky didn't animate them as in-the-round CG characters. They restricted them based on Schulz's designs, animating with 3D tools, but as if they were working in 2D. In other words, they became abstractions - just like Schulz had done when he'd created them. It looked brilliant. A slightly textured, slightly dimensional yet still completely faithful version of Schulz's cartoons. I was really impressed. I had no confidence that a studio would ever take such a different approach, especially in this day of Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks all spewing out effectively the same character designs over and over and over again. The big question then was... would the movie itself be any good? The writing has to be true to the characters, to the voices Schulz gave each of them out of his own head and his own heart. Peanuts was an incredibly personal strip to him, which is why it's in his will that it will never be continued by anyone else. Any Peanuts strip you read now are reprints. He never used ghost artists, or gag writers (which are both extremely common in comic strips). When he could no longer continue drawing the strip due to failing health, he ended it. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the very day before the last strip ran in the papers, is the day he passed away. So then... last Friday night, we had a screening of The Peanuts Movie at work. We have a theater there with a state-of-the-art digital cinema projector, and Fox and Blue Sky were gracious enough to send a copy of the movie out for our students to watch. And while you might think animation students will automatically love any animation comes along, the truth is, they can be amongst its harshest critics. Nothing makes an animator madder than wasting their time watching a bad animated movie. However, that wasn't the case. The students genuinely enjoyed this movie - laughing along with it, being touched by the homages to Schulz, connecting with the characters... all of which in a way kind of surprised me. Because from my perspective - sure, I like Peanuts. I'm old. I grew up with Peanuts when it was phenomenally popular. They named a couple of Apollo spacecraft after Charlie Brown and Snoopy, for crying out loud. But I wasn't expecting Peanuts to have crossed generations. I guess I shouldn't have underestimated their timeless appeal. The humor and characters resonate with audiences to this day. Schulz's writing ran the gamut from funny to poignant, silly to melancholy, but always with an underlying sincerity and truthfulness to it all. So did the movie work for me? I suppose at some point, I should start writing an actual movie review. But I wanted it to be very clear - Peanuts means a lot to me. I wouldn't have pursued a life in the arts without it. Getting the movie right, in my eyes, is no trivial matter. And yes, they got it right. I sat through the whole film with a huge smile on my face. The writing was spot-on (with some really funny moments), the animation was perfect (the animators obviously had a lot of fun), but most importantly - the movie stays true to the characters and Schulz's humor. It manages to update the delivery medium of the material without trying to force it into new directions that don't fit. It's not "edgy", the kids aren't spending all their time texting or making pop culture references, the characters are who they have always been. They're timeless. And even though some of the jokes are familiar to fans of the strip, that's okay - because the source material is why all of this worked in the first place. It's Peanuts, it doesn't need to be something else. In fact, it shouldn't. I really appreciated that more is made of the friendship between Charlie Brown and Snoopy than is sometimes seen in the TV specials. They're clearly best friends, and it's really heartwarming to see that emphasized. Charlie Brown is at the center of the plot, and Snoopy is there to support him. Certainly, Snoopy gets his fair share of the spotlight in his fantasy sequences, but even those exist to drive Charlie Brown's story forward. There are a lot of wonderful nods to Charles Schulz throughout the film. It's as if his own hand begins the movie, starting us off on the right track. And there are further homages to Schulz, Bill Melendez (who created the original animated specials) and Vince Guaraldi (who created the original iconic music) throughout - always thoughtful, often funny, and very touching. Carefully selected panels from the strip run alongside and tie into the end credits, which was a perfect way to end the movie. (Plus - there is a post-credits scene, so stick around for that too.) All that said, The Peanuts Movie isn't perfect. There are a few jokes which are a bit too familiar. There are a few liberties taken which are less in line with the comic strip, and more in keeping with some of the animated specials. And there's some dialog at the end of the film which is a bit clunky and overstated. I kept thinking Schulz would have found a simpler, more eloquent way of getting to the point. But in the end, it was still a delightful film to watch, and obviously a labor of love for the people who worked on it, who clearly respect and want to celebrate the legacy of Charles Schulz and Peanuts. I wouldn't mind even waiting another eight years for the next one. Load up the kids, grab some popcorn and check it out. The Peanuts Movie gets a 9/10.

As with last year, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and even the year before that, (and all of the years before that before I had a blog), it's the end of the school year here at CalArts, and I've been buried in work, putting our student animation shows together. This is number 22 for me, if I'm doing the math right. No guarantees there, by the way. Last weekend... no. Ummm... wait, what day is it again? Okay... on April 23rd, we had our Open Show, with 163 films turned in this year (beating last year's record by one). Everything went really well, with just a bit over 6 1/2 hours of films to screen (with intermissions, the show ran just under 8 hours). That's pretty impressive - a group of students, cranking out the equivalent of 4 feature films' worth of animation, in just about 9 months. It does take a lot of work to assemble the films together, fix audio levels, and get everything ready for the screening. This year went pretty quickly - only a little over 80 hours to do the whole thing. Admittedly, that's all in one week, but it's still a lot better than 90-100 hours of some previous years. If you do something enough times, you start figuring things out. What I've been working on since then is our Producers' Show, which is tonight at 7:30 PM. This is the best 80 minutes or so of the films of the year, as judged by our faculty. So I've been working on assembling the films together (fortunately, one of our faculty - Ben - does the audio mixes for all of the films, which is a huge help to me, and the films sound amazing in 5.1 surround), creating the DCP, checking everything (several times), authoring a backup Blu-ray (which is what I was finishing up while typing this), creating various signs, posters, and programs (the students create the design, I do the typesetting and make it all print-ready), and probably a dozen other things that are escaping my mind at the moment. This year was a bit different than usual though, in that I had to use all-new software for everything. Previously, I'd been using Final Cut Pro 7 to cut everything together. I had a workflow that worked really well, and since I was running an older Mac Pro and a slightly older version of OS X, I could get away with it, since everything still worked. But this year, over a year after the computer labs I manage had been updated, I finally upgraded my office computer to a coffee-can Mac Pro (the cobbler's children have no shoes). I had been using it for tests, but not day-to-day work. When I finally made the jump, Final Cut Pro 7 didn't. Oh, it will still sort-of run, but it's become incredibly unstable, and that's not something you want when editing the entire year's output of almost 170 students. So for the Open Show, I switched to Premiere Pro. I'd been using it some, but transferring an established workflow over to a different application is often fraught with problems, so I was more than a little nervous. However, all went well, and despite a couple of work-arounds, I was able to do everything I needed, and if anything, faster because Premiere Pro uses a modern code base and GPU acceleration, while FCP7 was already seriously showing its age. So one down, one to go. For the Producers' Show, since it requires doing a layback of the 5.1 mixes (something I have yet to figure out in Premiere Pro), I switched to Final Cut Pro X. The transition there - not so easy. As is often the case with Apple, they tend to get overly-cute about how their stuff works, and it's not always the best way. Often, I found the interface actually getting in my way, as it would presume I wanted to do things, that I didn't really want to do. I was able to work around it though, and since the Producers' Show is so much shorter and easier to edit (21 films, instead of 163), I got through it just fine. The second part of that though, was authoring the DCP. For the last several years, we'd gone with QuVis' Wraptor. It was a plug-in for Apple's Compressor, so it worked with Final Cut Pro 7 pretty well. However, with further updates to Compressor, Wraptor stopped working. QuVis blamed Apple, and threw their efforts into supporting their free plug-in that comes with Adobe's Media Encoder. And while their basic version still works, their Pro version (which has higher quality settings), stopped working due to some wonky licensing problems. Ugh. So, since we weren't going to sacrifice quality and use the free version, we had to move to another authoring application. Fortunately, I had run a lot of DCP authoring tests this spring, "just in case" we would need to find an alternative. These were all short tests, using about 30 particularly challenging clips from student films, run multiple times, with multiple settings, using multiple applications. It added up fast. In the end - over 400 tests. No exaggeration. Hey... I like to be thorough. In the end, despite all of the (high priced) options out there, the winner turned out to be the open source, and completely free, DCP-o-matic. And it won because of its quality and features, not because it was free. We were preparing to dump thousands of dollars, if needed, into a new authoring app. Turns out, we didn't need to. Still, putting a show together for 600+ industry bigwigs, using unfamiliar software (for editing and authoring), with little time to test the final results, can be a bit stress-inducing. But the final version we ran on our DCP projector at work looked good. We'll only know for certain how it all worked for real, after tonight. We're still at the DGA again this year. It went very well there last year, and they're super-nice people to deal with. The location is a pain to get to though (driving through the heart of Hollywood). It's looking promising for us to return to the TV Academy next year (you can see time lapse videos of the construction here, or a live view here). So now - time for the films! Instead of linking to all of the Producers' Show films, I'm just going to put a few of my favorites from both the Producers' Show and Open Show. If you want more, you can see all of the films our students have uploaded this year at our 2016 CalArts Character Animation Vimeo Channel. New ones are being added almost daily. Here are a few favorites from the Producers' Show: David Davis Open Heart https://vimeo.com/164596629 Xiya Lan You look scary https://vimeo.com/163109106 Li Wen Toh Desert Critters https://vimeo.com/164132084 Henock Lebsekal Hellfire Erin Kim cycles Tiffany Wei Meal Time! https://vimeo.com/164741894 Alexander Santa Cruz LABCOAT https://vimeo.com/164032499 And here are a few favorites from the Open Show: Lorenzo Fresta Waves https://vimeo.com/164046875 Ruth Baraz BioTech https://vimeo.com/164031284 Cindy Yang And Then https://vimeo.com/163110999 Julia Rodrigues in/ex troversion https://vimeo.com/164177132 Nishant Saldanha Hello Mary Lou https://vimeo.com/164380866 Stacey Tindaan Steal My Heart https://vimeo.com/164637066

Because there apparently aren't enough animated dinosaur movies out there already, and because Disney didn't learn their lesson from the last one of these that they made, we have Pixar's The Good Dinosaur. We had a screening of it at work the other week, and while none of the creative team were there to present it, the reps from Disney and Pixar who were there, felt under some obligation to tell us how "close to the heart" this film was for all of them, and how this movie was all about the "power of family". Now, when someone feels obligated to tell you what the underlying theme is for the movie you're about to see, you know you're in trouble. But then, The Good dinosaur has had nothing but trouble since its inception. It was pushed back from its original release date twice, had the original director and producer fired from the project, and with less than six months to go before its release, had nearly the entire voice cast replaced. I'm sure there must be some point at which movie studios see a train-wreck like this coming and it's still possible to stop it. But The Good Dinosaur passed that point, and kept on a-rollin'. Presumably, they got to some point where they'd spent so much money on it, that it made more sense to just try and shove it out the door in whatever state it was in and try to recoup some money from it, than ashcan it completely and try to write off the whole thing. You might have guessed by now that this isn't going to exactly be a positive review. The funny thing is, if you read many of the reviews for this film on Rotten Tomatoes, they all start off about the same way... "This isn't a bad film, but it's not one of Pixar's best," and then the reviewers inevitably find something about the film to praise (typically the visuals or animation), and end up giving it a begrudgingly positive review, as if the fact that it's a Pixar film somehow earns it a free pass. Consequently, the film has ended up with a much higher average score than it really deserves. Well, I'm not giving Pixar a free pass. The Good Dinosaur is, in fact, a bad film. It's borderline terrible. If not for Cars 2 (which will likely, and hopefully, stand forever as Pixar's worst film) this would be right at the bottom. It's so bad, it's really difficult to stick to my spoiler-free policy to accurately describe why it's so bad. While I still hate the idea of spoiling any films for anyone, the simple fact is, there's nothing in this film that's worth seeing in the first place. But I'll use Spoiler tags where necessary. First, let's get the one positive thing out of the way - the backgrounds in this film are astonishing. Even for Pixar, these are breathtaking visuals. They're hyper-realistic, to the point where you'd almost swear you were looking at a pristine, idealized natural environment. It's really next-level stuff, but it's sadly wasted here. I would have rather spent 90 minutes just watching the backgrounds, frankly. So, onto the movie. The premise for the film is that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs missed, and they continued developing into marginally more intelligent versions of themselves. The movie takes place when cavemen have appeared, so it's basically like a prequel to The Flintstones, except before the humans took over and enslaved the dinosaurs. The film centers around a family of agrarian dinosaurs whose farm is in jeopardy, because a caveman child keeps stealing all of their corn. Now, I'm not sure how a 50 pound kid is eating enough corn to risk starving out five dinosaurs, but there you go. The youngest dinosaur - Arlo, who was born the runt of the litter (see also: Finding Nemo) - is tasked with stopping the kid. Of course things go wrong and the two of them end up lost, and have to rely on each other to find their way home. Now, by this point the movie has already degenerated into a series of predictable clichés, and never manages to find a direction. It's a scattered mess as it jumps between being a family drama, a comedy, a coming-of-age story, an adventure, a buddy film, a western (I am not kidding - there are cowboy dinosaurs in this mess), a kid's movie, and pretty-much anything else you could think of to borrow from other, much better films. None of it is done well, either, as everything comes off as trite and half-hearted, and the characters are generally unlikable or at best unsympathetic. The only character that's remotely appealing is the caveboy (only ever refereed to as "Spot"), and he isn't even the titular character. This is supposed to be Arlo's journey, but as so often happens in animated films, the sidekick ends up being far more interesting than the lead, and this sidekick doesn't even talk. Besides the jumbled, random mess of a plot, I had a real issue with how Arlo's story is resolved. He's effectively bounced along from point to point by circumstance, and by the end hasn't really learned anything. At the end of the film, The ending doesn't get any better from there, either. But then again, by that point I really didn't care. Maybe apathy killed the dinosaurs. So the story is a disjointed mess, the characters are unlikable, and the writing is terrible. The few times the audience laughed at the film were due to it being embarrassingly bad (cowboy dinosaurs) or wildly inappropriate Finally, is the look of the film itself. Yes, the backgrounds were stunning in their beauty and realism. But the character designs had nothing to do with their environment, nor each other. The main dinosaur family looked like Gummi candy. The villains were ugly and indistinguishable from each other, the cowboy dinosaurs were heavily caricatured, and the humans looked like they were thrown together almost as an afterthought. The Good Dinosaur is an eye-roller. There's not a genuine moment in the entire film. It's movie making by committee at its worst, and a huge stumble for Pixar. They refused to let die an idea that nobody thought was working, yet nobody had the courage to just walk away from. Perhaps the biggest puzzler in all is this: why is this movie about dinosaurs? There's no reason for it. The fact that they're dinosaurs contributes nothing to the story. They could have been replaced by almost any other characters, and the movie would have been exactly the same. Maybe for the original concept it made sense, but there was never any payoff here. Maybe they figured they could still sell some cute dinosaur toys. The "Good" Dinosaur, isn't. It gets a 2/10. Go see The Peanuts Movie instead. Or a documentary on Wyoming. Sanjay's Super Team, the latest Pixar short, precedes the movie. It's an admirable and obviously heartfelt effort, but being such a personal film for the director (about being raised as a boy in America with a traditional Hindu upbringing), it felt more to me like a student film or an independent project, than a studio short subject. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and the film was certainly well produced, but for most of it, I just couldn't find a connection with it. Up next... a little science fiction film that some people have been talking about.

Another year has come and gone. And no, you didn't collapse into a coma and wake up seven months later (well... for all I know you didn't) - rather, another school year has come and gone. And as usual, the annual screenings of our student films have been taking place (here's the obligatory link to last year's blog entry). The Open Show, where we show all films from the Character Animation Program, took place in the Main Gallery at CalArts at the end of April. Here's a wacky fish-eye photo taken with 360 Panorama: To give a sense of scale, the screen (100 feet away) is 20 feet wide, and there are around 300 people in the audience. With 162 films submitted, we matched our record from last year. This year though, we did things a little different. Since 2008, when we moved the show into the Main Gallery, we've had to split the show into two halves to avoid other end-of-year events taking place nearby. This caused us to have a 3 1/2 hour gap in the middle of the show, delaying the second half until 10 PM. And while most people came back to watch the second half, the long break was really disruptive, made the show end really late, and wasn't very fair to students whose work was shown in the second half. So this year, we decided to back up the start of the show (to 11 AM) and run it straight through - 6 1/2 hours worth of films (we did throw a few intermissions in there, to make it tolerable). This worked much better, as people stayed around for the whole show, and everything was done and dusted by 7:00 PM. Early enough even for dinner! (We also had a concession stand with soda, candy, popcorn and hot dogs.) The show went very well, and despite the time change, was probably the smoothest one to assemble and set up for yet (although it's still a ton of work, and I still feel exhausted from it). Quite a few of this year's films are now up on our 2015 Vimeo channel, if you want to check them out. Tonight (May 6th) is our Producers' Show in Hollywood. This is a shorter selection of faculty-juried films that are shown to about 600 people including members of the animation industry, alumni, family, and friends. And if changing the Open Show wasn't enough, this year we've also moved the Producers' Show. Not just the time (a half-hour earlier), but to a completely different venue. A few years back, we moved from our usual venue at the Leonard H. Goldenson theater (part of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences - aka the Emmys) to the Samuel Goldwyn theater (part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - aka The Oscars). That move only lasted for one year, since although the Goldwyn was very nice (and much larger), the logistics of returning there just didn't work out. So we were back to the TV Academy through last year's show. Now though, we're trying a different venue - the Director's Guild of America theater. So, why the move? Well, simply put, the TV Academy theater is basically just a big hole in the ground. Literally. As I mentioned in last year's entry, they were planning on demolishing that theater with an eye towards building a new one. And last November - it came down. Now, it's a hole in the ground (albeit with some steel beams sticking out of it). So we had to go somewhere, and the DGA seemed a good fit. The main theater is the same size as the TV Academy, but we also get a second theater as part of the deal, so if we have overflow, we have room for another 155 people. Bonus! There's a nice, large lobby for our reception afterwards, and it's not nearly as difficult to get to as the Goldwyn, so this looks like a very promising location for us. Whether we return to the TV Academy theater again someday just depends on how well things go at the DGA, and how the new TV Academy theater turns out when it's finished. Tonight though, we're at the DGA. And since most of the films are online, you're welcome to watch along if you'd like - and you don't even have to sit through the guest speakers at the beginning! Show starts at 7:30 PM, but you can start earlier if you want to skip ahead to the catering (sorry... you're kind of responsible for your own food, since you won't actually be at the theater itself). Enjoy! The films of the 2015 CalArts Character Animation Producers' Show: John Kim, Seth Boyden, Sasha Schotzko-Harris and about 73 other students Opening Titles https://vimeo.com/127546041 2015 Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize Winner: Seth Boyden An Object At Rest https://vimeo.com/126177413 2015 Peers' Pick Award Winner: John Kim Battle Deadline https://vimeo.com/126089225 Yonatan Tal Aquarium https://vimeo.com/126089746 Erin Kim Ear Fear https://vimeo.com/126091504 Brandon Wu The Mountain King https://vimeo.com/126595275 Wesley Fuh Sherm https://vimeo.com/126706809 Lucas Fraga Pacheco Tinkle https://vimeo.com/110946844 Julian Sanchez Everything's fine https://vimeo.com/126157236 Megan Ruiz A Hollow Taste https://vimeo.com/125762057 Jerrold Chong Ways Of Seeing https://vimeo.com/126340630 Hikari Toriumi KOISHI https://vimeo.com/126226405 Kendall Nelson Truth and Silicon https://vimeo.com/125891400 Sasha Schotzko-Harris Something Afoot https://vimeo.com/126294951 Ben Mansfield Khan https://vimeo.com/126232329 Kiernan Sjursen-Lien The Ballad of Possum's Broom https://vimeo.com/126185119 Warren Fok Gnome Man's Land https://vimeo.com/126852221 José Antonio Areán Álvarez Spider's Scramble https://vimeo.com/126833922 Aron Bothman The Red Witch https://vimeo.com/126629137 Rhea Dadoo Croaked https://vimeo.com/125971072 Xi Chen Eye Level https://vimeo.com/126632442 Yon Hui Lee Dodoba https://vimeo.com/126775227 Li Wen Toh Space Critters https://vimeo.com/126645046 Vincent Tsui Made in China https://vimeo.com/132693003

Classic games that have smooth controls & animation: The Super Mario Bros. game series on NES are a given. Many NES games have smooth, refined controls and are well-animated. Jungle Hunt on ColecoVision is another one. Your pith-helmet-wearing character controls as smooth/refined as on a good NES game. Jumping is smooth and well-animated. The falling boulders and crocodiles animate well. Swinging ropes move as smooth as windshield wipers. Looks like everything was done in a high framerate for smoothness. Even the side-scrolling was pretty decent. Very impressive for it's time! Other versions of Jungle Hunt at the time have choppier, more 'computer-y' looking animation -- like they were done at a much lower framerate. They also don't control as well. Post some examples of smooth animated/controlled games and discuss

Pixar has an interesting history of making terrible trailers for what turn out to be great films. The trailers for Inside Out did nothing to pique my interest in seeing the film. But at the reception to this year's Producers' Show, I talked with some people from the studio who were genuinely excited about the movie. Now, if the people who have to spend day after day working on something, still like it after several years, that's a good sign. From my standpoint, I was just glad to see Pixar making a film whose title didn't end in a number. Since Up in 2009, only Brave wasn't a sequel of some sort, and they've already announced Toy Story 4, Finding Nemo 2 (Finding Dory), The Incredibles 2, and (please, no...) Cars 3. Pixar used to be an island of relief from a sea of animated sequels, but since being acquired by Disney, that's history. Even when the sequels are good, Pixar just isn't perceived as the creative force it once was. So on the now-rare occasion when they make an original film, they really need to get it right. The day after this year's Producers' Show, Pixar gave an early screening of Inside Out at CalArts (the film's director - Pete Docter - and much of Pixar, are alumni from the Character Animation program). However, I didn't go. Usually, when a studio brings a film for us to see, I try to attend. But I skipped it this time. For one thing, our theater only holds 120 people, and there are over 160 students in our program, so it's not always the most comfortable viewing environment in there. But also, I was so exhausted from the Producers' Show and the weeks leading up to it, I had already decided to take the day off and stay home. And frankly, after watching 162 student films multiple times, I'd already seen more than enough animation recently. Afterwards though, I kind of wished I had seen it there, because the reaction was apparently phenomenal. I was told you could hear some of the students actually crying during the film, and at the end, they gave Pete Docter a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. That's pretty unheard of. Sure, animation students are particularly appreciative when they see a good film, but they're also pretty critical when they don't. Anyway, after catching up on some other summer films, finally, last weekend I managed to see Inside Out (back at the ArcLight). And while not standing-ovation-worthy, it was still a very good film. The basic premise is, our emotions are controlled by tiny cartoon characters running around in our heads: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. I suppose having any more than that would have just made the film too cluttered. The main character in the film whose emotions we're watching is an eleven-year-old girl named... uh... something. Emily maybe? I'm not really sure. And that's kind of the problem I had with the film. The cartoon emotions are more interesting than the girl whose head they're inside. The girl's family has to move from an idyllic life in Minnesota, to the festering scum-pit that is San Francisco. At least, that's how it appears in her eyes (the San Francisco board of tourism is probably not going to use this movie for any promotional purposes anytime soon). She has to leave her old friends behind, attend a new school, and live in a run-down house with no yard, and no furniture since their stuff hasn't arrived yet. Consequently, her emotions are trying their best to cope with the situation, but things go wrong, as Joy and Sadness get lost in memory storage, leaving the girl with only Disgust, Anger and Fear. And then, apparently, parts of her personality start collapsing, memories start fading, and... well it all gets a little dark and kind of weird. I'm sure in there someplace is a metaphor for growing up. Certainly, at times, the film is a tear-jerker. But it almost seemed manipulatively so. As if the emotional payoff for the audience wasn't earned because of the arc of the main character, so much as it was crafted to elicit that response using the little emotion characters. I felt there was a lack of genuine connection between the girl and her emotions, as if the emotions weren't really part of her, but merely watching and manipulating her. Maybe that relationship resonated more honestly with eleven year-old girls, or parents of eleven year-old girls, but I didn't feel particularly connected to the main character. Lack of connection aside, I did think Inside Out was a good film, and by and large an entertaining one. That said, there are a few in the film, and at times the world inside the girl's mind seems haphazardly thrown together for the sake of forcing the emotions to follow a particular path. There are some funny moments in the film (the funniest by far were during the end credits, when we got to see the emotions of other people), but the film is less about being funny, than about the emotional storying playing out. There's some forced drama that seems artificial (and predictable), but the characters in the film, if not always memorable, are at least likable. There are a few truly engaging characters along the way, good voice acting, and Pixar's typically solid animation, but no particular scene that stands out as being amazing or ground-breaking. The look of the world inside the girl's mind was also somewhat disappointing. We see glimpses of places that look like they would be fun to explore, but we never get to really experience them in all their splendor. Rather, the movie spends most of its time amongst her stored memories, which look like endless rows of gumballs. The real world that the girl inhabits is dreary and unpleasant, with only her memories from Minnesota serving as bright spots. Inside Out isn't Pixar's best film, but it's a solid, promising return to them making films from more ideas. With a string of sequels lined up, we probably should enjoy this while we can. Because based on the , things aren't looking so good. Inside Out gets a 7.9/10. Preceding the movie was Pixar's umpteenth short film - Lava. This left me completely underwhelmed. The short was about a couple of singing volcanoes, and using the word "lava" as a pun for "love". And that was it. The design and animation of the volcanoes was incredibly disappointing (and a new low for Pixar), and the story fell completely flat. I suppose if you like seven minutes of ukulele playing, maybe it will work for you. At our Producers' show, we had two films about anthropomorphic mountains: An Object at Rest (which was just nominated for a Student Academy Award) and The Mountain King, both of which were far better written, better animated, more entertaining, and more compelling than Pixar's effort.

Not one of the high points of the series!

No no no... Post Clone Wars is not a breakfast cereal. But that would be kind of awesome - a breakfast cereal where all of the pieces looked exactly the same! No odd-shaped ones or broken bits in the bottom of the box, because, you know... they'd be clones. Ummm... right. Where was I? Oh right, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. So, I used to blog about the show while it was on the air. Then Disney pulled the plug after season 5 without wrapping up the series properly - mainly because Clone Wars was running exclusively on Cartoon Network, which is owned by Warner Bros. Well... Disney can't have that, can they? Buncha jerks. However, that wasn't quite the end. A good chunk of season 6 was completed, and released this year on Netflix. I won't go into every episode and recap everything, but suffice it to say if you have Netflix, it's well-worth checking out. There were basically four main story lines: The first one revealed the origins of the Clone army, how Order 66 worked, and how close the Jedi actually came to discovering the plot. As with much of The Clone Wars, it really helped to fill in some of the plot points from the movies, and add some much-needed depth to them. The second one was about banking. Yay, banking. But it delved more into how the Emperor was manipulating everything behind the scenes. And also, we saw Anakin continue his slide towards the Dark Side. And then there was a story with Jar Jar. And his girlfriend, apparently. Yeccch. But as annoying as Jar Jar can be, the story itself dealt pretty heavily with some interesting elements of The Force™, which lead to... The final story, with Yoda going on a journey to learn more about The Force, including a pretty cool visit to Dagaboh. Some stuff from the movies gets explained in here as well - such as why some Jedi disappeared when they died, and some didn't. Some of it is pretty far out there, but still cool to watch. There's also a set of four story reels on StarWars.com of more unfinished episodes, although I haven't watched them yet. And finally, there were another two stories written - one about Darth Maul which was turned into a comic book, and another which will be released as a novel at some point. Despite this, the Clone Wars did come to an end without really bringing us up to SW: Episode III (although you could tell by the shift in the mood of the series and Anakin's growing conflicts that they must have been getting close), or resolving some of the character arcs like whatever happened to Ahsoka and so on. In the end, The Clone Wars was a really good series. It expanded the Star Wars universe, filled in some gaps, and was more often then not pretty entertaining stuff. But now... there's Star Wars Rebels. Airing on Disney XD (take that Warner Bros.), this series picks up between Episodes III and IV (seemingly closer to IV) with a group of new characters and the beginnings of the rebellion against the Empire. I've watched the first five episodes and so far it's quite good. Like The Clone Wars, it has a young lead character to bring a young viewing audience into the series. But also like The Clone Wars, it doesn't becoming cloying or annoying. The character (Ezra) borrows pretty heavily from Disney's Aladdin, but that's not so much a bad thing (at least he doesn't sing). The tone is generally lighter than The Clone Wars, but then, the Clone Wars are over, and have apparently been for some years. They seem to be trying to strike a mood more in keeping with the original trilogy, rather than the prequels. Although the war is over, there's still fighting going on, and there's still death that happens, so it doesn't treat the rebellion or the oppression of the Empire lightly, but there's a good mix of humor in the show, and the characters they've created seem pretty well thought-out. Two of the lead characters are strong, smart females, which is a plus, since Star Wars has always been a pretty male-dominated universe. It's encouraging to see them continue with that same spirit that Ahsoka brought to The Clone Wars. If I had any disappointment with it so far, is that they've created yet another lightsaber-weilding villain specifically for the show. Look... why not just have Vader in there doing his own dirty work? Isn't he supposed to be hunting down and destroying the Jedi around this time? Squashing the rebels would seem to be in his job description, too. Not that The Inquisitor is a bad character, but he just seems too derivative and frankly, unnecessary. The visual style is a bit different than the Clone Wars. Gone is some of the painterly look of the textures, and the animation seems more refined, but that should happen anyway as studios get more adept at producing CG animation for TV. Some of the inspiration for the look of the show came from Ralph McQuarrie's concept paintings for the original trilogy, and you can definitely see that here and there (one of the characters is based on Ralph's original concept for Chewbacca). The visuals are first-rate, and pretty amazing for what amounts to a half-hour cartoon show. Kids are so spoiled these days. I'm not going to recap the series like I did for The Clone Wars, but I'm definitely going to watch it. Hopefully they'll continue to make fun, interesting, and compelling new Star Wars stories. What with J.J. Abrams directing Episode VII, someone has to. Am I right? Hopefully though, some day, when they eventually end this series, how about a proper wrap-up next time, 'kay?

So I went to see Frozen a few days ago. Opening week, Black Friday, afternoon matinee, packed house, tons of kids. Now I've been in movie theaters before with lots of kids, and if the movie doesn't completely hold their attention, it's a miserable place to be. They get restless and bored, never sit still, and never stop talking. If a movie is too complex for them to follow, they never stop asking questions. If it's too scary for real little kids (and the parents too irresponsible to recognize that their kids shouldn't be there in the first place) they scream and cry. For a film to be successful in that setting, it has to strike a tricky balance. That doesn't mean the movie has to be dumbed-down to the point of being agonizing for adults to sit through though (despite what movie studios generally think). Kids are a lot smarter than studios give them credit for. A movie should be able to entertain both kids and adults alike - just on different levels. The basic qualities of a good story and compelling characters should be able to entertain kids, and if the writing is smart enough, have enough additional layers to keep adults engaged as well. Going into Frozen, I can't say I was expecting much. It's had a rough life in production. After Disney's The Princess and the Frog failed to be the hit they were hoping for, Disney assumed people were done with princess movies, so they cancelled the ones that were in-progress, including an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. The film Rapunzel was too near completion to outright cancel, and went through a lot of changes before finally being retitled and released as Tangled. When that turned out to be a hit, suddenly princess films were back in, and Disney revived The Snow Queen - following Tangled's lead with a new title - Frozen - and trying to give it the same updated vibe. (I suppose Pinocchio would be re-titled Wooden, Snow White would become Poisoned, and Pocahontas would be… well, it would still just be Boring ). Anyway, Frozen was rushed headlong into production and I wasn't hearing very many positive things about it. Usually if a film is going to be good (like Wreck-It Ralph) there's some advance buzz about it ahead of time. Plus, the early trailers for Frozen - featuring an incredibly annoying and bugg-utly snowman sidekick - left me cold (sorry… ). All that said, I was pleasantly surprised by Frozen. I think this is as close as Disney has gotten to a "classic" Disney fairy tale since Beauty and the Beast. It's not as good as that film, but it has that sort of feel to it, as if they're on the right track. The movie has basically nothing to do with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, so this is very much a Disney story, and as such it comes with the usual Disney baggage - wacky sidekicks, predictable story elements, cookie-cutter characters, forgettable musical numbers, and plot-holes big enough to drive a sleigh through. The point of a Disney film like this isn't so much does it break any new ground, but is it competently entertaining enough for what it is? You know what you're in for when you walk into the theater, just as you already know what you're in for when you wait in line for any ride at Disneyland. So the question is - do you still enjoy the ride? For Frozen, I enjoyed the ride for what it was. They mixed up the formulas enough to make the film interesting, and the wintery setting makes it visually stand on its own (at least as far as Disney films are concerned). One gripe - they didn't do a very good job of establishing that it was warm summer day when the city of Arendelle got frozen. It wasn't until well afterwards that I caught onto that. For all I knew, it was a cold climate to begin with and could have been mid-November already. In many ways, the character of the Snow Queen is treated similarly to the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. The Beast wasn't so much a villain, as he was misunderstood. Here, the Snow Queen isn't so much evil as she is a tragic figure, which leaves her ultimate fate in question (and helps keep some tension in the film). Unfortunately, the film didn't spend nearly as much time with her as it should have. I wanted to see more of the story from her perspective, especially early on. The other characters are likable enough, but most don't really offer anything new. Just the same clichéd Disney characters, with perhaps a little more 'tude. The ice trader Kristoff has some fun moments with his reindeer Sven early on, where since Sven (mercifully) doesn't talk, Kristoff does both sides of their conversations. But it's only used a couple of times, then sadly abandoned in favor of the ugly little talking snowman for comedy relief and plot exposition. The animation is as good as I've seen from Disney in recent years. There's one snow monster which is particularly fun to watch. The problem is - most of it is all so much more of the same. It's competent, solid character animation, but it's not groundbreaking. Disney should be the studio making breakthroughs in CG animation that everyone else is compared against, rather than merely rising to an acceptable level of competency. Part of that is their generic approach to character design. You could interchange Frozen's characters with those from Tangled, and never notice the difference. I keep hoping Disney will cut loose and design something really amazing for a change. Fantasia-level amazing. Disney changed styles radically from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty. There's nothing keeping them from doing the same thing with CG animation, other than the willingness to do so (see also: Pixar, before they became a sequel machine). The songs were okay, but for the life of me I can't recall a single one of them now. Again, they felt like they could have been lifted from any one of a number of other Disney films. The one that the audience responded to the most was a throw-away comedy number where the little snowman sings about longing to enjoy the days of summer. The rest of the songs could best be described as dramatic musical filler. Well crafted, but not critical to the story. Plus, the mix on a couple of songs made it really difficult to discern what the lyrics were. Still though, despite its flaws, Frozen is a very good Disney fairy tale. It certainly "feels" like a classic Disney fairy tale. But perhaps because of that, and the sameness of it all, it never really emotionally resonated with me. But in a theater packed with kids on a busy Black Friday afternoon in Orange, CA, it managed to keep everyone entertained, enough to feel it was worth a matinee ticket and a bag of popcorn. Frozen gets a 6.6/10. (Addendum: I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Frozen was mercifully free of poop and fart jokes. A definite point in its favor.)

Depending on which list you go by, 20 years is either symbolized by gifts of china or platinum. China, as in plates and stuff. Not necessarily things made in China. Although I'm sure you could easily enough find china made in China, thereby removing any sort of potential confusion. Except for the whole platinum thing, which doesn't really make sense since it's actually more valuable than silver or gold, so shouldn't it be up higher? Like 75 or something? Anyway… 20 years. That's how long I've been doing this job. Doesn't really seem possible. But then, it doesn't feel like 30 years since the video game crash either. As in previous years, I'm in the midst of our end-of-year student shows. First up, on April 26th was our Open Show. This is every film our students turn in for the year. This year that number was 162 films (beating our old record by one film), running just over 6 1/2 hours (and yes, we do take breaks). The most amazing thing was that this year, we had 158 films turned in before the deadline. The four that missed, only missed it by no more than 15 minutes. That's quite staggering, since some years we've often had dozens of films miss the deadline by days. But we would generally let them into the Open Show anyway, they just weren't eligible for the Producers' Show (which is our faculty-juried "best-of" show to the industry down in North Hollywood). Over the last few years though, we've been tightening up on the rules, and this year we really made it clear that the deadline was the deadline, period. Anyone wanting to submit a late film would have to talk to our program Director first, and get his permission. Four did. After that, it was tough-luck. Having that many students pay attention to the deadline was incredibly encouraging, and a trend I hope we can perpetuate next year and beyond. Usually the week of the Open show is about a 90-100 hour affair for me to cut all the films together (it's all digital, no actual film was harmed in the making of our show), and get everything set up for the screenings (including the marathon all-day faculty judging of the films). This year started out smoother because not only did a lot of people make the deadline, more were actually early than I can ever recall. For example, late Sunday night before the Monday deadline, we already had about 70 films turned in. A year ago at that number was 25. Two years ago - five. So we're making good progress there, and spreading out the work earlier helped me get ahead of schedule. That was a very good thing too, since I lost all of that time at the end of the week trying to get our new Mac Pro-based playback systems to work (turned out to be an outdated video driver for our Teranex - but it took forever to track that down). Part of that 90+ hour week involves turning our Main Gallery into an impromptu movie theater. I've mentioned it in previous installments, but here's a better look at it. First, we start with an empty Main Gallery. The green part of the floor is 25' wide x 100' long, to give some sense of the space: Next, we add four speakers and two subwoofers (from Location Sound), a 20' wide screen (from American Hi-Definition), a Canon projector with ultra zoom lens, and over 300 chairs: Then, we black out all of the nearby windows, and attempt to shut off all of the lights. They weren't quite all out when this photo was taken: Add about 320 people, plus a concession stand selling popcorn, hot dogs, soda and nachos (part of our School of Theater's fundraising), and presto! "Instant" movie theater: The show went off without a hitch, and the quality of the films just seems to get better every year. Oddly enough, this was the first year that I didn't actually watch all the films all the way through. Even though I edit the whole show together and have to balance the audio from film to film (all 162 of 'em), while I'm working on that, I rarely stop to fully watch the films since I'd never get the editing done. But after editing is complete, I do try to QC the whole show before Saturday. I just couldn't do it this year though, unless I went completely without sleep the night before the show. I've done that before, and it's a miserable experience. So I opted for sleep instead, and I'll sit down and work my way through the whole show later. The downside is, I didn't get a chance to vote on the films to help determine which ones got into our Producers' Show. But in the end, of the films that I did watch, I felt the ones I would have given high marks for got into the show anyway. So I can't argue with the results. Last week was spent working on getting our Producers' Show program typeset and off to the printer (using artwork from our students), and having one of our faculty - Ben - do professional 5.1 sound mixes for all 24 of the films that got selected for the show (no small feat - but it makes all the difference in the world). After that, I worked on editing the show together, and creating the DCP for it. Yeah… that. We used a DCP for the first time last year, although we sent the files off to the software company - QuVis - to make the DCP for us. This year, we did it in-house using their software. Now, since I have a shiny new Mac Pro on my desk, I decided to use that to make the DCP. I'd made several earlier this semester, so I felt confidant it would work. But when we played the Producers' Show DCP back in our theater at work (we now have a DCI-compliant projector so we can check this stuff in-house) the colors were all washed out. Horribly so. At the moment, we still don't know what went wrong, or where. We suspect either Final Cut Pro X Or Compressor 4.1 was the culprit, but we just didn't have time to figure it out (that was one of the problematic Open Show playback systems, and we did so much installing/reinstalling to get that to work, it's entirely possible we munged up some settings in the process). Fortunately, we had another system still running Final Cut Pro 7 and Compressor 4.0, which all worked perfectly, and made a spot-on DCP. So I sat all the way through that DCP Wednesday to check it, and much to my relief, it worked. Unfortunately, the TV Academy Theater schedule is such that we can't bring the DCP down until just four hours before showtime. We're not taking any chances… we're bringing three copies of the DCP down to the theater on three different hard drives. So I'll probably post an update after the Producers' Show Thursday night. But if you want to mostly watch along (starting at 8 PM, PST), here are the films that are in the show: Charley Hodgkins (and many others) - 2014 Producers' Show Opening Jacob Streilein - There's a Man in the Woods 2014 Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize winner. Jacob won last year as well - the first ever two-time winner. Ricky Cometa - Corridors 2014 Peers' Pick winner Amber Ren - Once Upon A... Tammy Chang - High Tea Megan Ruiz - La Gemela Jason Reicher - Hotdog Madeline Sharafian - Acorn Kari Casady - Nocturne Simon Leclerc - boy (not online) Aron Bothman - Feast in a Fallen City Sang Lee - Johnny & Berry http://vimeo.com/93105084 JK Ramsey - Man Scouts http://vimeo.com/92889845 Anna O'Brian - Good Morning (not online) Xiya Lan - Cocoon http://vimeo.com/93223572 Ingo Raschka - Deep Squeeze http://vimeo.com/93094160 Charles Hodgkins - The Pitch http://vimeo.com/93088400 John Kim - Steadfast Stanley http://vimeo.com/93544310 Seth Boyden - Abduckted! http://vimeo.com/79623167 Toniko Pantoja - tiny nomad http://vimeo.com/93537717 Tony Unser - Sleep http://vimeo.com/93112914 Yon Hui Lee - Derailed http://vimeo.com/93699603 Seth Boyden - Hoof It http://vimeo.com/93093130 Gabriel Lin - The Best Toy http://vimeo.com/93094570 Matthew Yang - Nada Doctor http://vimeo.com/93115018 You can check out more of our films on our on our 2014 Vimeo channel. Currently, there are 109 posted, so that should keep you busy for awhile. Update, May 9th Well, the Producers' Show also went off without a hitch. The new DCP looked great, the sound was excellent, the films were a hit, and we fully packed out the 600 seat theater. It was kind of a bittersweet evening though, since the Leonard H. Goldenson theater has been our "home" for the show for most of the past 20 years, and this will be our last one there - ever. The reason being, is the Television Academy is planning to tear down the building, and build an entirely new theater. In a way, this is a good thing, because the old theater was getting a bit run down (broken seats, worn carpet, desperately needed paint job), and the rest of the facilities within the building needed some expansion and upgrading. But sad because of the familiarity and relationship we've had with the place. Plus, we don't know if the people we've met and befriended who work there will be part of the new theater when it reopens (whenever that happens is anyone's guess). Where we'll be next year is still unknown. So before we left for the last time, and after everyone had cleared out, I took a few photos. This one, shot with 360 Panorama, gives probably the best look at the place. I'm guessing they'll keep the statues. As for me - I took Friday off and spent most of the day catching up on sleep. This time of year is mentally and physically exhausting. But it only happens once a year, so I've got eleven months to plan for the next one.

Back on December 9th... I showed up to work (the Character Animation program at CalArts - by the way, isn't that just about the worst website you've ever seen? Yes it is.) only to find the hallways abuzz with all sorts of lighting equipment, people I didn't recognize, cases full of gear and… alumni. Now, alumni aren't unusual around CalArts. A bunch of them teach there. We see them during the year as guest lecturers. But this was different in the sheer quantity of them. Feature film directors. TV series creators. The CCO of Disney and Pixar and Principle Creative Advisor to Walt Disney Imagineering. Yeah… so something was going on. Usually if any one of these guys shows up, it's a pretty rare thing. But a bunch of 'em? Several classrooms were staged with lights and props, with a number of our students standing in to adjust lighting and such. Oh, and rumors that Annie Leibovitz was on her way. Yeah, that Annie Leibovitz. Vanity Fair was there to take photos for an article featuring alumni from CalArts called "The Class That Roared". I guess it's a play on "The Mouse That Roared", which doesn't really make any sense since that was an old Peter Sellers cold-war era comedy, based on a 1955 novel about a tiny country attacking the United States, which really has nothing at all to do with Disney. Maybe it's a metaphor. Or maybe it's a reference to the other book "The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" which is some sort of essay on how Disney portrays themselves as a provider of wholesome entertainment, while in fact they're a manipulative, greedy, corporate machine bent on brainwashing the youth of the America, bending them to their will and dominating the world of entertainment. Well, duh. Everyone knows that. Guessing that's probably not it either. So anyway… Pictures were taken. Selfies were taken (I understand that's a thing now). Books were signed. And pretty-much nobody got anything done all day. Apparently, the article was published. I say apparently, because I didn't get a copy. I didn't know the magazine was out until a couple of months after the fact. You'd expect them to ship us a box of 'em or something, but no. Like all of the rest of the plebeians, I had to read it online. We don't even have one in the office. Just a lousy photocopy. What's up with that? Feel free to head on over to Vanity Fair, and read about where I work, as it existed in the 70's. And check out the photos. Given all the hullabaloo, they only ended up using one from the shoot. This one: From left, top row: Brad Bird, Jerry Rees, John Musker, Kirk Wise (in beige sweater), Rob Minkoff From left, middle row: Steve Hillenburg, Mark Andrews (in ape suit), Chris Buck (with Viking helmet), Mike Giaimo, Walt Disney (just kidding), Brenda Chapman (w/glasses), Glen Keane, Pete Docter (with giant hat and ukulele), Rich Moore From left, front row: Tim Burton (on floor), Genndy Tartakovsky, Leslie Gorin (in light blue shirt), Andrew Stanton (on floor by himself, because of that whole "John Carter" thing), John Lasseter (in "Weird Al" Yankovic's shirt), Henry Selick Right - so there's a fair number of notable alumni there, at least if you follow animation. Funny thing about that. They weren't all there. Tim Burton was in London, and Brad Bird was in Vancouver BC. They were Photoshopped in later. Take that honesty in journalism! But hey, it's Vanity Fair. That's like expecting journalistic integrity from People, am I right? So, why am I posting this? Is it to brag about how phenomenally well-funded CalArts is because of all of those alumni who are cranking out hits? For example, Frozen just hit #8 on the all time international box-office list! Cool! So how much of that do we see? Well… we got mentioned in Vanity Fair. And actually, the room they're in - the famous A113? Yeah… we haven't used that room in about 25 years. It belongs to the Art School now. So we really didn't even get our picture in there. They might just as well have photographed them in a closet. We don't really see much out of any of it, other than bragging rights. I've griped about brought up the whole box office thing before, when CalArts posted a largely unreadable infographic showing the films and their box office totals. But I can give you a little better look at it than that. Y'see, I did the research on it. I came up with the idea after seeing a list of directors of animated features, and noted how many came from CalArts. It wasn't a complete list, and didn't include box office figures. So I did some digging, and came up with the following list: Box Office Revenue, Films directed by CalArts Animation Alumni (RTF) And actually, this list isn't complete either. Jerry Rees (not to be confused with Jerry Reed) isn't on it, for one. That's because there aren't readily accessible records of who actually went to CalArts. Ya'd think someone would get on that. And maybe keep this list updated (the Institute asks me to update it for them, because I'm guessing they don't have internet access). Right, so $30 billion in box office revenue, and we see diddly-squat out of it. And I don't consider that the fault of our alumni, either. I blame the studios. They're the ones who actually control the money. And this is just a fraction of it. This doesn't include TV series, merchandising, theme park attractions, home video, video games, and everything else our students have created and/or contributed to. I figure someone owes us at least a new building. But those bragging rights are good, right? Sure. CalArts loves it when it can brag about alumni, or it gets on a "top colleges" list. Newsweek ranked us the #1 Artistic college in the United States! That was, however, three years ago. But still - it's awesome because, of course, everyone looks to Newsweek to pick the college they're going to attend. Then just a few weeks ago, The Washington Post put us in the top five not-for-profit private colleges in the United States! How awesome is that? Unfortunately, that list was the top five most expensive such colleges. After taking into account financial aid. How about them bragging rights now? Anyway, the reason for posting this whole thing, is that because once again, we're coming up on our end-of-year shows. The time when all of our students (150+ of 'em) turn in the films they've been working on all year, and we get a glimpse into the next generation of people who will join that list of people driving and shaping the animation industry. Frankly, I could care less that the studios don't have us rolling in money. As long as our grads end up getting paid to do something they love to do. That's what really matters. Because, you know, of that whole "fifth most expensive college" thing. Gotta pay back those loans somehow. Anyway, in a few weeks I'll post links to some of their films as they appear online, and you can get a glimpse into the future, too.

Yet another post about 48 pixel sprites.. Im not obsessed I promise! I am using two types of 48 pixel sprite routine the, the first uses a 12 byte RAM buffer and I store the address of 6 different tables in this buffer. I use indirect index addressing to load the sprite data from the tables and render the sprite lda (spriteBuf),y sta GRP0 lda (spriteBuf+2),y sta GRP1 Pros: Can render multiple sprites with same kernel by adjusting buffer value Cons: Expensive RAM cost and costly to modify the whole 12 byte buffer The second uses absolute index addressing and has the obvious limitation of being able to only render one type of sprite meaning you need to write the whole kernel again to draw a different sprite. lda SpriteGfx1,y sta GRP0 lda SpriteGfx2,y sta GRP1 I was wondering if anyone has ever invented a kernel that works in this way: First we store the address of the first table of sprite data in 2 bytes of RAM. All 6 tables are in ascending order in ROM We store the height of the sprite tables in another byte of RAM In the sprite kernel we increment the y index by the height and index to get the data out of each table Example: lda (spriteBuf),y sta GRP0 tya adc spriteHeight tay lda (spriteBuf)y sta GRP1 Has anyone ever seen a kernel that works in this way? I am not even sure this is possible to achieve with the limitations of the 2600. If it was possible to do something like this I think it would allow people to develop animated 48 pixel kernels more easily. Obviously things like score kernels would not be able to work in this way because the sprite table needs to be in a continuos manner on ROM. Thanks, Mike

Well, I'll admit I wasn't expecting much from Monsters University. I thought the original Monsters Inc. was a pretty-good movie, but not among Pixar's best. Since I'd first heard about Monsters U, it always struck me as being the sequel (or prequel) nobody asked for. Also, it's been pretty frustrating watching Pixar deteriorate into a sequel machine. Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters U... 3 of their last 4 films were sequels. 4 out of 5 if you count Planes (which was actually made by Disney Toons, but it's still a spin-off of a Pixar movie). That said, I have to admit I enjoyed Monsters U. If anything, I think it's a better film than Monsters Inc. Monsters U follows the story of how Mike and Sully first met (although the story is more about Mike), and their efforts to become Scaring Majors in college. What follows is a Pixar version of a typical college comedy, albeit a very sanitized one. In fact, if I had a complaint about the film, is that it felt too sanitized. While there are some funny moments (and jabs at the usual college stereotypes), the movie always plays it very safe. There's nary a hint of drinking, carousing, or other decidedly non-G-rated shenanigans of most college movies. Even the stereotypes (jocks, cheerleaders, goths, frat boys) are all somewhat generic. There are very few characters that really stand out, and most are there merely to service the story. Admittedly, they're not the point of the movie - the relationship of Mike and Sully is - but I would've liked to have seen them take more chances and push things a little further. I hate to use the word "edgy", but certainly a more biting satire would have been in order. Or a more pointed parody. What's there is a good start, but I kept wondering how much more funny it could've been if they weren't trying to reign in their humor and make it family-friendly. (I should note that I'm all for family-friendly films. But a film about college that gets too sanitized just lacks honesty. I went to three colleges and have worked at one for many years. College is anything but sanitized.) Despite that, the plot (while predictable) works well, as typical college movie clichés are nicely reworked to fit within the Monsters world. The story points make sense and the whole concept of a Monsters University works within the context of the film and justifies the story. I was worried this was just an idea thrown together to justify making a sequel (or prequel, in this case), but the story and in particular the character developments are strong enough in their own right. And while most of the story falls along predictable lines (see also: Midnight Madness), in the third act the movie takes a turn which really surprised me and took things in a (literally) unexpected direction. I thought it was the best part of the film. While a lot of the ancillary characters are generic, there are a few standouts among the supporting cast. Art (one of their fraternity brothers) is particularly funny, as is Ms. Squibbles (the mother of one of their other frat brothers). Also, Dean Hardscrabble is amazing - one of Pixar's better characters and easily one of the best from the Monsters movies. Also, Claire (the president of the Greek Council), has a great design which instantly conveys her personality. Less like "let's design a monster" and more of a caricature. I wish they'd pushed some of the other character designs in that direction. Billy Crystal is really the heart and soul of the movie though. He brings a great performance to Mike Wazowski, and there are some genuinely heartwarming as well as really funny moments from him. I do have one big gripe with the film though. And I don't know if they did this just to throw the audience a curveball, or they thought it was "realistic" or just their best solution. But the moral of the story seems to be, And while I doubt that was their intent, that's certainly how it came across to me. Anyway, Monsters University was a pretty good movie overall. It was a fun take on college comedies (if not satirical enough for my tastes), had some nice nods to Monsters Inc. for fans of that movie, yet it wasn't just a rehash of it. There were some good character moments, and I liked seeing where these characters came from. If anything, they were more likable here than in Monsters Inc., and there were enough funny moments to keep me entertained. I saw Monsters U in 3D, which worked very well. Movies rendered as 3D to begin with look far better than converted ones. That said, I don't think it really added anything to it either. I'd give Monsters University a 6.9/10. (The sad thing is, their fictional campus has a better website than the one for the college I work for. ) The new Pixar short that preceded it - The Blue Umbrella - was decent enough, but not one of their better efforts. The story felt an awful lot like Disney's Paperman, or something I'd see from students where I work (and that's not a jab at the students, but I expect a different level of storytelling from Pixar).

So, for the 19th year now (not in a row... but that's another story) I've put together the end-of-year shows for the CalArts Character Animation Program. Last year's blog blurb about this can be found here. And if you poke around enough, you'll find blog entries for these going back to 2008 (with a brief mention in 2006). Maybe it's a form of therapy or something. In a weird sort-of way, I kind of wish I'd been blogging about this since the first one I did. A lot of lost memories along the way. Some of that for the better, however. Interesting to wonder... will things like blogs and Facebook and Twitter help the current generation remember things better than us old geezers do? Simply because it's been written down, re-hashed and re-read ad nauseam, albeit in an often truncated, nearly illegible form? Nah. Anyway... To recap - the Open Show (on Saturday, April 27th) was the entire output of the students of the program for the year. 140 films, 5 hours and 15 minutes (which is actually short for an Open Show). I worked about 87 hours in the course of the week putting the show together, including converting the Institute's Main Gallery into an impromptu movie theater for some 320 people. Our video projector (graciously provided again this year by Canon) was a WUX5000 with Canon's new ultra-long throw zoom lens. This enabled us to put the projector back up on the floor above the main level, and shoot across the entire gallery, about 100 feet, to a new 16:9, 18' x 10' screen rented from (and set up by) American Hi-Definition. And just to complete the trifecta of company shout-outs, our sound system (4 QSC powered speakers + 2 subwoofers + a Yamaha digital mixer) was rented from Location Sound. For playback, we used a Mac Pro running 1920x1080 ProRes 422 (HQ) files through a BlackMagic Intensity Pro card. The Intensity Pro has a nifty, exploitable little option that allows 23.98 fps material to be run at 60i from Final Cut Pro. Last year, we had image tearing problems with the Canon projector while showing 23.98 material. The Canon can display it, but it just doesn't like it. By cross-converting to 60i, everything was silky-smooth with no image tearing. Best looking Open Show ever. (Give us 20 years, and we start to figure these things out.) It was a lot of work and a very long week leading up to Saturday. I got so tired and desperate for food one night (about 2:30 AM), I actually ate at a Denny's. The last time I did that was in 2004, and I got so violently ill from it (if the bacon is gray, just back away) I swore I'd never go back. But this time the food was decent, and I didn't get sick. So bonus points. Mostly though, I picked up food at El Pollo Loco, and usually ate at my desk while working. Maybe a half-dozen times, if I were to be honest. Good food though, especially for "fast food", but they're not open as late as I needed all the time. The latest I went home was about 4:15 AM. Typically, 2 or 3 AM. But the show was a success in the end, and the students had a blast watching it. That's what it's all about. It's an end-of-year release for all of the pent-up frustration, exhaustion and just plain hard work that it takes to make an animated film. So now, at 8:00 PM tonight (four hours away as I'm typing this) is the second show - The Producers' Show. We can't realistically expect everybody to sit through 5 1/4 hours of student films, so our faculty judges all of the films (which also happened on the day of the Open Show, so I had two screenings to run that day), and we end up with the best hour-or-so's worth to screen for alumni, industry members, students, family, and whoever else we can fit into a rented theater. For most of the last 19 years, we were at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theater, at the Academy of TV Arts & Sciences (the Emmys). Last year, we'd moved to a different theater - the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the Oscars). And while that was a bigger theater (1000 seats, of which we filled 850), logistically it just didn't work out for us to go back there. So tonight, we're back to our old haunt, and a "mere" 600 seat capacity. (We've been turning people away for weeks.) While it's nice to be back in familiar territory, this year, however, something new has been added - a DCP (Digital Cinema Package). The TV theater has a new DCI-compliant projector and DCP server, so we can deliver our show for the first time on a DCP. We wanted to do this last year, but just weren't able to do enough research and testing ahead of time to get everything done in house, and sending it out would have been prohibitively expensive, especially given the time constraints we were under. So we've spent the last year sorting this out, doing tests, trial runs, and working closely with a company (QuVis) that makes software for creating DCPs. Now, we still weren't quite able to make the DCP in house yet, but QuVis offered to make it for us, and turn it around in a ridiculously short amount of time. How short? Well, last week was spent having all of our students who were in the Producers' Show get a proper 5.1 sound mix for their films, so I wasn't able to even start editing the show until Friday evening. So I had to assemble it, layback the mixes, export it, convert it to 24 fps (for DCP conversion), re-layback the converted audio, export a new playback file, and watch it all the way through to check it. Then, I had to FTP the file to them over the weekend (a 25-hour file transfer), so they could convert it and FedEx it out on a drive Monday, so I'd get it in time for a test at the theater Tuesday afternoon. That's cutting it a little bit close. Complicating matters was the fact that FedEx actually showed up too early on Tuesday, and couldn't deliver the drive, because nobody was there yet to sign for it. So some consternation and angry phone calls later, the package was re-delivered about 11:00 AM, and we were able to make our test appointment. Fortunately, everything looked great. I actually slept last night. First decent night's sleep in three weeks. The big plus to a DCP is that it's an established standard. You meet that standard, and your DCP will play anywhere that complies to that standard. There are no proprietary monkeyshines going on. The drive carrier is standard. The formatting is standard. Color space, resolution, codecs, frame rates - all standard. I can take our show to any theater with a DCP server (which is most of them now - that's what you're watching at your local megaplex these days instead of film), plug the drive in, and it will just work and always look the same, regardless of the theater. Quite literally, plug-and-play. Our 1-hour show copied from our drive to the internal RAID on the DCP server in about 5 minutes. Once that was done, it just stays there until they need it, then delete it. I don't have to leave any media with the projectionist (although I'm keeping our drive on-site as a back-up... just in case). The picture looks amazing, too. There's no loss of resolution (as there was with our HDCam transfer last year), the JPEG 2000 compression scheme looks effectively lossless, and yet is very efficient. Our show ended up about 1/3 of the size of the original ProRes file. And full multi-channel surround sound is supported as well. DCPs also have a big advantage in assembling shows together. On the server itself, once your DCPs are loaded on it, you create a simple playlist: trailers, shorts, features, any delays you need between them, and even set up cues for lighting and masking. Everything is very flexible. We could even bring down our films as separate DCPs, and assemble the show at the theater. No pre-editing needed. This is really CalArts' first foray into DCPs. How well it goes will all be determined tonight. But it's certainly the future of cinema, and being a film school, it's the direction we need to be headed. A year from now, it will be interesting to look back and see how this process has evolved. Our goal is to be creating our own DCPs in house, and have our own DCI-compliant projector and playback system on campus. At the moment, we don't actually have any way to even watch a DCP. But that should change soon enough as software-based players come into their own. If you want to check out this years' work, our Vimeo channel for this year is here where you can see some of ours students' films. A couple have been selected by Vimeo as Staff Picks. Nice. As a starting point, here are direct links to tonight's Producers' Show films (links will be updated as they appear online): Tom Law (and many others) - Opening Titles Jacob Streilein - Punctuwool (2013 Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize Winner) John Kim - The Sugar Bugs (2013 Peers' Pick Award Winner) Jason Reicher - King Kababa and the Knight Tom Law - Eyes Sam Kremers-Nedell - redfishbluefish Sun Jae Lee - Timber. Janine Chang - SunBurn Matthew Yang - You Imagined Toniko Pantoja - Wolfsong Hyojin Bae - Puppy Love Benjamin P. Carow - Night of the Living Bad Brains Seth Boyden - Momma's Boy Cameron Hicks - An Old Dream Zhonghong Ouyang - Leaning Aron Bothman - Still Helene Leroux - Floating in my mind Charley Hodgkins - Seldom Seen Slim Melanie Atwater - Moon Goddess Solbi Park - Bon Voyage Sasha Schotzko-Harris - Portentous Madeline Sharafian - Omelette Tom Law - This Actually Happens A Lot Michael Piazza, Theresa Latzko - The Glitched King Enjoy! (I'll publish this when the show starts, so you can follow along.) Edit: Here's a shot from the theater, just prior to the show starting (click for full-size):

A few weeks back, I wrote about the death of animation news/opinion site Cartoon Brew, as one of its founders - Jerry Beck - left the site. Jerry returned to working on his own site - Cartoon Research - with several long-time contributors. Posting cool articles, oddities and rarities relating to animation history. But news? Not so much. I really didn't want to return to the smoldering corpse of Cartoon Brew, either. But now, Jerry & company have launched a new animation news and reviews website: Animation Scoop. For those of us entrenched in the world of animation, it's nice to have a place to call home again.

Just to provide a balanced counterpoint to yesterday's post, there is proof Disney isn't entirely evil. (And of course, there's always Wreck-It Ralph. Now on Blu-ray!) They're producing new Mickey Mouse shorts, and by the look of the first one... they've actually got it right. A funny Mickey Mouse short... who'da thunk?

If you've been reading my blog, you'll know I've been following The Clone Wars animated series pretty closely since it started. It's had its hits and misses over five seasons, but in practical fact it's been nothing short of a milestone both in terms of TV animation, and theatrical-level CG work in a TV series. It's also done something I didn't think possible - made me care about the prequel-era Star Wars universe and characters. At the end of season 5, Over the course of the series we've seen the fracturing of the Jedi Council, an increasing distrust between the Jedi, the Senate, and citizens caught up in the war, and the growth and death of many characters. We've gotten a better view of the future-Emperor's manipulation of the war, and often uncompromising looks at the consequences of it. We've seen more of the reasons that Anakin would eventually slide over to the Dark Side which were never really explored in the movies. Thanks solely to this series, his fall makes a lot more sense now (although it hasn't made the actual movies any better). They've managed over 100 episodes. Over 50 hours of Star Wars. That's more than 4 times all of the movies combined. And today, Disney canceled it. There are still some stories in production, so it looks like the series may get to wrap up existing story and character arcs. Maybe they'll be shown as TV movies, or get released on home video. But I'm sorry to see the series come to an end. I hope they get to give it a proper send-off. It's the best Star Wars we've had since The Empire Strikes Back. Now it's being pushed aside for Episode VII and some other new animated Star Wars series. They've also "delayed" Star Wars Detours. Jerks. I was looking forward to that. Star Wars needs a good dose of humor. I can't say I'm holding much hope out for the future of Star Wars at the moment. Admittedly, the last three movies under George were terrible, but at least with The Clone Wars they'd finally gotten something right. We'll get a glimpse of what the future of Star Wars might be like on May 17th. I'm not holding my breath. Not a big fan of lens flares.

Well, my U-Verse DVR was too stupid to catch the season five premiere of The Clone Wars in its new time slot last weekend. The show has moved to Saturday morning - because nothing goes better with a big bowl of Cocoa Puffs than lightsaber decapitations! So I had to watch the episode - Revival - online. The problem is that my internet is too sporadic to stream the whole episode without interruption. This despite it not even being in true 1080 HD. Time Warner is looking better all the time. Man... never thought I'd hear my self say that. Anyway, this episode had pretty-much everything you could want in an episode: flying saucers, pirates, Australian accents, Southern accents (possibly Star Wars' first good-ol'-boy alien), indeterminate Asian accents, Droid accents and oh yeah... action! There were Jedi a-dyin' and limbs a-flyin'! I think they should have used that line in their promos for the episode. Right. So, the Super Maul-io Bros. - Darth and Savage - have been chopping up the galaxy during the series' summer hiatus. That's what the Jedi get for taking vacations I guess. Anyway, Obi-Wan and another Jedi whom we've never seen before (trivia answer to the question: "What has a shorter life expectancy than a 'red shirt' from Star Trek?") followed the two boys as they tried to take over a pirate operation and build an army and put a base together for some sort of "plan". So of course, Obi-Wan had to put a stop to their shenanigans. Lots of people getting run-through with lightsabers, a really nasty head-first tackle from Savage, even more people getting shot, and a pretty incredible lightsaber battle later, and... well, that would be telling. Suffice it to say, Obi-Wan is a Jedi Master for a reason. It's a good start to the new season - starting off with lots of action, and wrapping up the episode with a decidedly sinister look from the Emperor, who has for the most part been pretty quiet during the series. Sure, we know he's pulling the strings behind the scenes, but the word is that this season we'll start seeing him take a bit more of an active role. Hey... I almost spelled that "roll". That would've been pretty funny. With him picking up an actual roll. Like a little talking Muppet roll or something. So he'd walk into his office, and say, "I'm taking a more active roll in things..." and then there's this cute little talking roll on the desk that he picks up, and it starts freaking out while he's eating it. "No! No! I'm actually a muffin! Stop it!" And then he gets eaten anyway, and you can still hear him talking in the Emperor's stomach, and he has to punch himself in the gut to get the roll to shut up during meetings and stuff. Sitcom hit of the year. Name the show "Roll it!" and put it on Disney XD. Comedy gold, I'm tellin' ya. But I digress. Anyway, check out the episode online, or if you have a smarter DVR than mine, maybe it'll pick it up in reruns. But I haven't seen any scheduled yet. Oh, and it looks like they've re-worked how they animate the dialog this season. The mouths seem to have different geometry. It looked out-of-sync a lot of the times, but that could be because 1) audio was drifting out of sync because of the web playback, 2) they may have re-dubbed some lines after animation was complete or 3) they just didn't do a very good job. But once I can watch on a proper TV next week, I'll have a better idea.

Let's see, what bad things have happened in animation recently? Well, DreamWorks is reportedly laying off 20 - 25% of their employees. Rhythm & Hues is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And the website Cartoon Brew is dead. Where did I read about all of these? Why, Cartoon Brew, of course! Cartoon Brew has been, for better or worse, a central source of animation-related news and opinion for the last nine years. Co-founded by animation historian and author Jerry Beck and some other guy name Amid Amidi, the animation industry has had a love-hate relationship with "The Brew" for years. Mainly, people loved Jerry, and hated Amid. Jerry is the quintessential nice guy, respected author, and his love for animation shows through his every writing. Amid, by comparison, is the very definition of an internet troll. I have yet to meet anyone in the animation world who likes or respects him. How he ever got work writing animation books is beyond my comprehension. If his typical self-aggrandizing, inflammatory blog posts are any indication of his writing "skills", why on earth would I ever want to buy an entire book written by him? Now Amid is the sole owner of Cartoon Brew. For whatever reasons, Jerry has left. Bought out by Amid. There is no reason left to read Cartoon Brew anymore, because the voice of reason of Cartoon Brew has left. And in typical fashion, comments for the posts announcing the buyout and Jerry's farewell have been disabled. Such a shame. The flame wars would have been most entertaining. Oh well - one less website to check. Saves five minutes out of my week.