The Pixar Story

A fellow graduate at AM (Boon) kindly directed my attention to a blog entry at CartoonBrew.com about a screening of "The Pixar Story" not too long ago. Caught it at the Laemmle theater in Pasadena and I enjoyed every minute of it.

It's a great documentary that goes over Pixar's very early beginnings to the present. Even though some animation geeks may know most of the story behind Pixar, I think they would still find it entertaining and highly enjoyable. It has interviews with a lot of people covering a lot of different aspects of Pixar's history (Brad Bird, George Lucas, John Lasseter, Steve Jobs, etc.). The director, Leslie Iwerks (yup, related to the same Iwerks that originally created Mickey Mouse), appeared at the end of the movie, thanked us for taking the time out to watch and, and even held a small QnA for the people in attendance which was a very nice surprise. I'm not sure if this film will get a wide release (it should!), if it doesn't be sure to grab a copy when it drops on DVD.

Graduated from AnimationMentor.com!!

Earlier this month, I graduated from AnimationMentor.com! After a year and a half, it's officially done. I've been done with school since April, but it feels complete now after the ceremony and reception. It was so awesome seeing old faces and meeting new ones! It felt like one huge family reunion, but not actually having met these people before, lol! The bond that brings us together is the journey we all took through AM. We might've been in "virtual" classrooms and such, but the community is as real as it could be. It felt like seeing a bunch of old friends again! Attending this school has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I can't thank the founders (Shawk Kelly, Bobby Beck, and Carlos Baena), AM Staff, and the community enough. I've made tons of new friends, was able to switch careers, and am hungry to learn more. AM ROCKS!

On the the flip side of things, I'm starting a few new tests that I'll be doing at home. The goal of these tests is just to get more practice in and learn some new things along the way. Hopefully they'll be good enough for reel pieces too. 'Till next time folks!

Back from the last frontier

Just got back from our vacation in Alaska. Yup, we bucked the warm trend this year and headed north to the cold. We've always wanted to go there for a vacation and we really enjoyed it. We saw all kinds of wildlife, witnessed glaciers calving, and saw some of most beautiful scenery. Check out some of the pics below:

Remember the 10 second club?

Do you remember the 10 second club? It was a monthly animation contest where people downloaded a sound clip and animated to it. At the end of the month, people voted and a winner was announced. It was a great way to practice your animation. Alas, sometime around last October they were hacked and the site was taken down.

Recently, a new site has popped up on the net from the minds of the super cool Aja and Mark Bogdanoff. It's neatly designed, quick, and the rating system strives to be as fair as it can for all entries. The site's named the 11 second club and it looks like what animators all over have been waiting for. A site to continue where the 10 second club left off.

They're going to be hosting a short 2-week beta competition starting midnight tonight. After which they'll start the month-long competitions.

Join up and get in the mix people! ;)

Link: 11 Second Club

New Digs!

Just finished redesigning my site. I didn't know how to import blogger posts into an existing web template so I kept blog the way it is and I just changed the navigation links to match. Feel free to check it out using links on the right. Hope you like the new digs! Enjoy! :D

Lessons Learned

Will yah look at that? It's already been a month since my last post! Crazy how time flies huh? Well, the apprenticeship wrapped up last week. I can say for certain, it was a great experience and I learned a ton about working in that type of production environment. I left there with some very cool notes on how I can take my animation up a notch and that's something I greatly appreciate and will definitely work on.

It was a pleasure working with everybody involved with the apprenticeship as well as the other apprententices. Hopefully I'll be able to work with these people again sometime in the future.

Well, it' s time to work through the notes and apply the lessons I learned. I'll try to post some progress clips up sometime this week.

First day and time flies

Just finished the first day of the apprenticeship at Rhythm & Hues Studios and it definitely was an awesome experience. I got to meet the rest of the apprentices and they're all very cool people. We all got along pretty well too. You can tell we were all pretty amped and excited to get started on this journey together. I think a few of us even had trouble getting to sleep the night before due to all the excitement, lol! A really nice surprise was running into some familiar faces like Rebecca, Anthea, and Ray during our first day there!

After today, I'm really looking foward to what we have coming up. This is gonna be awesome! :D