The 11 Second Club is a great animation learning tool and a fun contest. Every month they post an audio file that is approximately 11 seconds long (it’s 12 this time) and the members create an animation to go along. At the beginning of the next month, the members vote on the entries and a winner is declared. The emphasis is on the acting of the characters and the backgrounds/props are not supposed to matter. I thought it would be a great thing to do so that I can work on my acting, especially emotions and lip syncing. When I saw this month’s clip, I knew that I had to enter for the month of November! It’s a clip from one of our favorite movies, The Birdcage. I will probably be posting my progress as I work on it. Look for my progress over the next few days.

We’re on the edge of the largest disruption in Tv technology since color Tv became mainstream. In 2009 all analog television transmission will cease. Although the two terms tend to go hand-in-hand that doesn’t mean that all channels will become HD. There just isn’t the bandwidth for that in the cable pipes right now. But it does mean that soon nearly everyone’s Tv will be obsolete. Sure, the government plans to subsidize at least one converter box per household, but by-and-large everyone is going to need a new Tv; and a new Tivo….

Ok, I got a better version uploaded. The video is MUCH better quality and the audio is better as well. However, the conversion to flash caused it to go a little out of sync. It’s still not as bad as it was before. Still, for someone like me who’s trying to share their creative vision, it’s quite annoying. Enjoy the improved version. To see my original version, just follow the Vimeo link and download the original .mov file. You’ll notice that the first part is a bit more in sync.

I’m not really impressed with the way that the audio was left out of sync when I converted my video to xvid as well as the strange artifacts in the videos. I intend to re-upload a director’s cut in the next week or so. When I do, I’ll announce it here.

I’m happy to announce that my third animation, and second micro-short, is now complete. You can watch " Trick or Treat" by going here.

Thanks everyone who’s helped out in various ways!

“That’s pretty fruity - you’d probably like that”

Context: T telling Lauren about fruity beer. Our boss just heard this part out of context and almost spit out his coke.

Another great comic brought to us by xkcd:

I decided to get a little more organized for this animated short, so I put my tasks into the Gnome Project Manager. (Similar to MS Project) I also figure this way I know how long it should take so I won’t rush myself and compromise in quality. I want this to be the best animated short I can create with my current skills. I don’t want to be rushing just to get it out there. I’ve already put a few out there and now I want to focus on making one I can really be truly proud of and perhaps enter into the Suzanne Awards.

I finally finished rigging up Nick’s body. His face is yet to be done, but at least I finished up this milestone. At this point I’m not sure if I’m going to start work on the facial rigs right away. I’m leaning more towards beginning modeling on my next character, Wallace. This is because at the NY Blender Conference (which was awesome!) I spoke with Bassam about how he handles facial animation and he told me he used latices in combination with shape keys. Every other book I’ve read uses shape keys exclusively or armature-driven shape keys. I figured that while I’m thinking about the type I’m going to use that I can hold off on that and make an armature that will allow me to achieve good results as well as not being a real pain in the butt to use. Also, I’ve done a lot of work on this armature and added a lot of constraints, which I’ve never done before. I think I’m going to make this my general purpose rig for human characters for a while, so I’d like to take the time to get it right - or as right as possible. Then, after a few shorts I’ll either refine the armature or create a fresh one.

We keep losing power around here. I’m not sure who’s to blame. This time even the server lost power. That means that the power outage lasted longer than the UPS could handle. That’s quite a few minutes, so it wasn’t just a blip in the electricity.

Sorry if the outage kept you from getting somewhere on the server you needed to get to.