I got the opportunity to take my family to see Wall-e on opening weekend on Friday. I’m a huge Pixar fan and we always try to go opening night. In fact, Pixar movies are what got me back into being interested in my own artwork. I even began training myself as an animator and did a really small short movie. (See embedded video below).

Ultimately it was going to be way too time consuming to become an animator, especially with a family to support. But I finally made my way back to comics. But I digress…

At Pixar they say “Story is King.” Yes they have wonderful animators and special effects, but it’s truly the stories that make it all shine. I’ve been so busy I haven’t really been following all the Wall-e hype, so I didn’t really know what to expect, which was great.

It really was nothing like I expected. Wall-e is truly an endearing character and the little romance between him and Eve is incredibly touching. I don’t want to give anything away, so go see this gem for yourself. It will be another staple in my movie library for sure.

It seems to me that the animators keep getting better and better, and the special effects keep breaking new ground. And as a fan of well, robots…ahem… the robots in the film were great. Go see it!

Here’s my little short I did a few years ago.

Here’s a couple of animated shorts for you to enjoy. First, by my buddy Steve Ogden of Croaker’s Gorge - a wonderful animated short titled “Flakes.” An extremely well produced piece that did really well, even winning some awards. Great script, design and execution!

Secondly, my own little foray into animation that I did a couple years ago titled “Meteorlogical Justice.”

Enjoy!

Some of you know I’m an animation buff (you may have seen my own little mini short I posted). A neat short called Big Buck Bunny was released by the Blender Foundation. Blender is an open source 3D package. Their site appears to be down now due to heavy traffic, but you can view it right here.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

They did a really nice job of telling an entertaining story while showing off what Blender can do. They stated the following goals for the film:

* Developing tools … for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass
* Improve character animation tools for cartoonish motion and deformation
* Test Blender with giant outdoor environments, with large grassy fields and many trees with leaves
* Further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite

And secondary:

* Create a great and good looking animation short, licensed freely as open content
* Provide content for other artists to learn from or to re-use, including documentation and tutorials
* And of course: Have lots of fun!

I think they did a fine job. I’ve got experience with Hash Animation:Master and Softimage XSI. I have been thinking about doing some things with the strip - like a poster of Asimov’s inner workings - in 3D for fun. I think I’m going to download Blender and give it a try. I’ll post anything I come up with (although it may be awhile).

Speaking of film, if you follow my twitter you may have seen me mention a Marooned trailer for the strip. My good buddy Steve Ogden of Croaker’s Gorge is doing the voice over, which I’m real excited about. I hope to get started on it this weekend.

I thought this little dot matrix animated film was really cool. It’s the history of the computer set to some cool music and animated in this “dot matrix” style. It’s done by superbrothers, who do some pretty neat stuff with pixel art. Check it out:

DOT MATRIX REVOLUTION from superbrothers on Vimeo.

Oh yeah baby - my White Sox pulled it out. A nail-biting, tense-ridden 1-0 pitcher’s duel with a bang-bang collision at the plate and a Jim Thome home run to win the Central Division. How sweet it is! Only a week ago, the Minnesota Twinkies celebrated a sweep at the Metrodome like they won the World Series instead of a regular season series. Oops! I guess you celebrated too much, too soon! Go Sox.

The Can by Carlos Lascano - for Red Bull

You know I love animation, especially interesting pieces. This piece done for Red Bull uses various types of techniques to portray a neat little promo story for Red Bull in a very interesting style. It’s short, check it out.

The Can from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.