"Trolls" at Cannes Film Festival

A whole bunch of clips from Trolls came out today from a showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

It's fun to see the Cloud Guy clip in it's finished form.  He was always a big hit back in the storyboarded screenings I saw about a year ago now.  It's just so damn weird, and gives a good idea of the sensibilities of this movie.  The fact that Cloud Guy is still in gives me hope that this movie has been able to keep it's weirdness intact.

Interesting to see the True Colors performance.  It shows the nice range of insane and poignant that the film is trying to balance.  Now, of course, last time I heard it with a slightly different pairing...

And finally a new song from Justin Timberlake for the film.  It'll be interesting to see how much more music he brings into the final film.

Student Animated GIFs

I teach an art foundations class called Electronic Imaging.  This semester I decided to try a new project - creating an animated GIF.  Most the students used Photoshop, although two of the examples below dived into After Effects to incorporate more video style work.  It was one of the most fun projects of the semester, and I thought it'd be fun to share!

Grant Winters

Peyton VanHook

Asher Hawkins

Henry Kilpatrick

Andrew Moyers

"American Idiot" Set Design for The Roxy

Had a great experience this semester getting to help out The Roxy Regional Theatre here in Clarksville with their production of "American Idiot"

They were looking for art students from APSU to help do the scenic design for the production.  Fellow professors Patrick Gosnell and Rachel Bush and I decided to team up and round up a team of students to tackle the job.  Having a background in theater design, I took the lead communicating with The Roxy, meeting with the director Tom Thayer and director of development Ryan Bowie.  They provided me with a rough set plan, which I mocked up in 3d on the computer and gave to a design student to do some concepts in photoshop.

We had hundreds of fun flyers and leaflets created by several design students to wallpaper the set with.  I supervised some scenic painting of bricks while we wallpapered and spray-painted graffiti on the entire set from top to bottom.  I came back a few days later to lay down some concrete floor painting to finish it all off.

It was a lot of hard work and fun, and I'm very proud of the awesome work from the students!  They all seemed very proud as well.  I think it was a great chance for them to work on a collaborative project and see their work in a new venue.

It was also great to get the chance to work with The Roxy and return to my theater roots again.  Hopefully this will be the first of many collaborations!

Student Short Film "Cacti"

I'm really excited to share with you the short film my special topics Animation Production class put together this semester.  We spent about half the class pitching individual story ideas, and then boarding them out.  Then we all voted for one to make into our collaborative short.

We put the whole thing together in about 8 weeks.  The first half was spent on pre-production - boarding out different beats, look of picture, full animatic, and animation tests.  From the first shot launch to final was about 4 weeks.  I'm really proud of my students pulling this all together.

I think they learned an appreciation for the collaborative nature of studio work.  We had highs and lows, fun laughs during dailies, and fears it wouldn't get finished.  Shots were handed over to others at the last min, a few continuity issues were fixed in post, and we were running a flash drive down the hallway to make it to the screening on time.  In other words, it felt like a full real-world production!

Heather's Workshop Begins

Excited for Heather to run another section of her class for CGSociety on Advanced Matte Painting.  With the new structure starting up, she'll now be running this four times a year.  She is an amazing instructor, and covers both the technical challenges and artistry of complicated digital matte paintings and projections.  Check it out at:

http://www.cgsociety.org/training/course/advanced-matte-painting

Bink First Look

Excited to see some initial renders of Bink!  I believe they're on track to wrap up the first episode by the end of the month.  As usual, one of my favorite moments is seeing the character lit for the first time.  After countless hours staring at a flat gray version of the character, to see them with all the extras like fur, shading, and a full environment is always thrilling.

During animation there's that moment when a character starts to come alive.  But at this stage, the character starts to become real.