Check out this truly odd film pointed out to me by friend of the ARC MarkO. Its by a Brisbane bases studio called Bigfish.
For those of you who came to the Focus on Flash seminar last Monday night you may have recalled that I mentioned a rather handy plugin for flash called Animslider Pro. Basically it sets up a symbol with all your differant mouth shapes{or any body parts} into a numbered grid, you slide you cursor along the grid and can quickly select the shape you need. This is a huge time saver when you have alot of lip synch or you could insert diferant head angles or hand gestures.
Friend of the ARC MarkO sent me a link to this very cool cut scene from a game called Heavenly Sword.
had a bit of trouble finding a trailer that would work, but this one works. Not sure if I liked what I saw, but hey, I liked the ol' Alvin.....would be keen to hear what everyone thinks of new shiny 3d Alvin and the Chipmunks. Warning..there is a bit of toilet humour here :-) you have been warned. Also, they look ALOT different to the old (what was it) early 90's version we last saw.
http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/07/27/alvin-and-the-chipmunks-trailer-online/
hey guys, this is coming out in October..and the reason I'm mentioning it is that it comes with not only Half Life 2 episode 2, but also Team Fortress 2. There's some awesome character designs for this game floating about, so if you get a chance, check them out, it looks great. The animation is looking pretty good too, very cartoony in feel :-) There's a review with a movie clip here, for Half Life 2, and to see some of the designs from Team Fortress 2 including concept pictures, click here . Enjoy!
or tryi believe it is strictly a trade industry event, but sounds interesting anyway....
The man who created these cartoons is no other than Windsor McCay, one of the earliest fathers of animation, and the creator of good ol' "Gertie the Dinosaur", and the amazing "Little Nemo in Slumberland". Have a look at some of the same pages from the book (see link to website) to get an idea of what an amazing artist he was.
I'll definately be hanging out to find a copy of this!!!
A couple of pieces suggested by friend of the ARC Karl all the way over in South Africa. A series of shorts about long distance relationships called Tom and Lily, and another piece about a very strange dog. I don't know what its called because its on a site that 
is all dutch. Its an interesting piece though, elements are obviously hand drawn, but the camera moves around at times in a way that you would associate with 3D animation, tricky. Thankyou so much Karl for your contributions!
Blog-Friend Sam here. Aardman have a new short that's doing the festival rounds and it looks hot.
"But I don't like Aardman" I hear you saying. Be quiet. This is different I promise. This time the only characters that have sausagey fish-lips are the fish. And it's traditional 2D (i think - some of it seems to be 3D, but it's hard to tell from the small preview). Beautiful design, art direction and animation.
Friend of the ARC, KT from Liquid Animation sent me a link to a whole page of clips from the upcoming Sony release Surfs Up.
KT says . . . . .
"there's a whole heap to watch...both movie clips and behind the scenes interviews etc... and from watching the animation, i must say i am really really looking forward to this movie... by judging the character animation in these short clips, i can see that this is going to surpass happy feet by a mile!!!!"As with everything at Sony it dose look incredible, but after the enormous let down of Open Season (Shrek with fur), I'm not going to get my hopes up about the story. I read that this film had three different directors because Sony kept firing them, so it sounds like there is a high degree of studio interference in creative issues, which is usually a bad sign.
Friend of the blog Kristi found this funny clip making fun of all those Disney sequels. Cuts especially close to the bone for Kristi and I because we worked on some of the sequels they are mocking, but there's no denying that Disney went overboard on the whole sequel thing. Its funny cus its true.
I think this would be especially great for second years working on show reels, a month is a good time frame for a clip considering what you should be aiming to achieve in the rest of the year, and the deadline for the competition might give you some extra motivation. If you register you can watch the example entries on the front page. Check it out.
