Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

The Medical Illustrations CD-ROM which I had worked on for 6 months last year has recently been published by Purestock, a division of SuperStock. The CD-ROM contains 200 images that were rendered in 3-D using Maya software. The high resolution still images are based in part on previous 3-D bio-medical animation.

Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival has been at it for 20 years now. Animators can go where the camera of the mind takes them, and these independent animators go to some crazy, sick and twisted places. See their online galleries of really crude, rude cartoons.

Video presentation of Spore shows a procedurally animated game that allows you to build 3-D characters that possess behavior, such as “monkeys with guns” that wander around in procedurally generated 3-D worlds. Looks like way more fun and creative, faster and crazier than rotoscoping. Playing with artificial life, is sort of the opposite of tracing previously filmed live action. I guess if you generate a really great scene in Spore, you could record it and then rotoscope it, if you really enjoy doing that sort of thing.

Description from Google Video:

Will Wright talking at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference about ‘Spore‘, which looks like it could possibly be the best video game ever.

Further Spore threads:

• EA web site for Spore, funny flash trailer cartoon
• A related game, kkrieger
• Discussion @ CGTalk Forum
• Will Wright @ Wikipedia
• Karl Sims, long time mad scientist in genetic animation.

After the tedium of months of doing rotoscoping on Shrek 2, why on Earth would I imagine doing an even more extreme version of it in Austin, Texas on A Scanner Darkly? The thought did cross my mind. Doing a feature length rotoscoped movie requires a marathon runner’s mentality, and ideally a lot of weed.

I could have done it, but talked myself out of it. The idea of moving to Austin to work on a punishingly tedious test of patience seemed like a quest I could take a pass on. Good thing too. The current issue of WIRED magazine recounts in Trouble In Toontown the realities of coping with the super sluggish process of photo-realistically tracing every ding-dang frame of digital video.

The original Linklater groundbreaking, experimental rotoscoped film Waking Life was the beginning of something freaky, but with Scanner somehow being able to say, “Yeah we could do that,” came too easily. Perhaps as bad an idea as, “Let’s redo Fantasia! …again.” I’ve read a number of P. K. Dick’s books, and A Scanner Darkly was a bit too dark and introspective for me to care to finish. A creepy story about a paranoid narc becoming addicted while bumming around suburbia with his deadbeat house mates. The monk-like mind-numbing hours of rotoscoping in dark rooms is no far cry from the cold, dark world of P. K. Dick’s story.

Rotoscoping, the tracing of live footage to create animation, was done by Disney way back on Snow White and Cinderella, and then Ralph Bakshi did some awfully disappointing stuff in American Pop. Bob Sabiston and his crew at Flat Black Films deserve a lot of credit for Waking Life, but after A Scanner Darkly they should be ready to turn out the lights and wake up to a new life.

Congratulations to the little guys! John Canemaker and Peggy Stern won an Oscar for Best Animated Short film, The Moon And The Son, at the 78th Academy Awards last night, beating out the mighty Pixar’s One Man Band. The handwriting is on the wall that the psychological expression of hand drawn animation is the real treasure, since 3-D computer animation has become as common and all pervasive as video games.

Luma Pictures recently produced 200 monstrously realistic visual effects shots of vampires and werewolves for the recent horror movie UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION. Apple’s web site has a good write up of the software and visual effects techniques of Luma’s artists on Underworld, Crash and The Cave. The 3-D modeling, animation and compositing is very high end.

Luma’s work generated a VFX Forum discussion which includes an excited artist bubbling over his first film experience. Looking at the trailer I am too removed from the excitement. With all the real life horrors in the world, what is so scary about this old fashioned hocus pocus stuff?

Computer animation artwork based on fractal flocking logic by Spot Draves. From his Dreams In High Fidelity web site:

A Painting that Evolves:

Physically Dreams In High Fidelity consists of a small computer driving a large liquid crystal or plasma display. The computer creates a continuously morphing, non-repeating, abstract animation.

This work stretches the definition of “painting,” in this case, a computer rendering math logic onto electronic displays. I believe the legion of painters from Picasso on back to the cave dwellers might argue in favor of the hand rendered definition of painting, whereas this is a robotic automaton spitting electronic fire.

Hey kids, what time is it? If you’re an experienced animation professional, then it’s time to move up as a CG Supervisor all the way to Mumbai, India where the flattened world’s new “baby Pixars” are sprouting up. If you’re really big and smart, you can stay here in the U.S. and recruit someone to do this for you, like Alligator Planet is doing.

Idea merchants producing low cost fresh computer generated feature films are popping up like weeds. Threshold Entertainment with Foodfight! (fall 2006), and IDT Entertainment Yankee Irving (August 2006), who also appears to have bought a piece of Vanguard Animation Happily N’Ever After (fall 2006), Space Chimps (2007) and Ribbit (2008).

The bosses of these studios are lean and mean, reflecting the reality of the working animation professional. A few sample quotes from The Attack of the Baby Pixars article:

“What do we care if a guy is in Van Nuys or India?” says Kasanoff, Threshold Entertainment.

“The studios we deal with are like call centers but with very talented artists. The next Pixar isn’t going to be a big building in Emeryville. It’s going to be groups around the world, networked together.” – Ralph Guggenheim, Alligator Planet

The obvious trend is for less employment opportunities in the United States, especially of the high paying kind unless you start your own venture. Otherwise, better pack your bags and head to the new lands of opportunity: India, South Korea, Australia, Canada or any location where labor costs are cheaper than in the US.