shapes

I've been talking and thinking about shapes a lot lately. More in an abstract sense than in the literal meaning of "shape." Here's a couple That were doodled a few days back. TH added a lot of the detail work to the top-left shape. And Neil Young was playing in the environment, so that got doodled in a bit too.

burst!

just a quick burst of color! a one!

siggraph papers countdown widget

I was stumped on something for a moment, so I started this new Dashcode thing and made a Dashboard countdown-to-the-siggraph-deadline timer. Hour correctness is set to Pacific time, but it'll tell you how many days are left correctly. :-)

Here you go.

And I got un-stumped while I was working on it!

crowd on a carpet square

Nuit Blanche ("The New Blank") had an installation of a carpeted sidewalk, see (secretofthesyncope.com), from which you could take a piece of carpet home with the aim of photographing it and uploading it to a growing collection. You'll have to scroll through the next button to see it on their site, since whatever script generates their index seems to be curfuddled, but the local household creatures seem to be intrigued by it.

Natural outdoor light

Autodesk has a great article/tutorial on natural outdoor lighting. It's fun because it collapses a lot of observation into a short roundup for those of us who are too focused on being too busy elsewhere to notice what we see everyday.

Speaking and Rats and Posters, Oh My!

I just returned from what has to have been the busiest SIGGRAPH I've ever been to. I gave a talk on the last morning (how to chop vegetables when making Ratatouille), which was really well attended, considering the 8:30 time. A co-author was giving a talk in another room at the same time (hand tracked gestures to animate cameras and simple motions); he also had good attendance. We had a couple posters up as a result of the sketches and posters being clobbered together. They didn't seem to be all that rewarding for us as authors, in that we got very little feedback. They seem to be more unidirectional in that, as attendees, they're convenient to browse outside of presentation times when the area isn't crowded. Lots of parties, caught up with lots of friends. San Diego is also and amazing place for siggraph. The climate and atmosphere and location in the city all mix really well. And the conference content at both SIGGRAPH and SCA had a really nice variety and more novel ideas. Motion capture technology is all over the place. Pretty soon you'll be able to make you're own motion capture zombie films using only the camera in your laptop. Now to finish digesting all the information...

Abstract Swirly Things

Michel Gagné has a section on his website that describes the fun animation of flavor in Ratatouille. Traditionally animated motion graphics reminiscent of Fischinger. :-)

rat a too ee

Ratatouille opens today, somewhere close to you. A few years and many long hours in the making, it seems to be grabbing the imaginations of those who see it and pulling them gleefully along for a couple hours and leaving them full of wonder and that mythical thing called stuff. If you see it, enjoy. Don't forget, leave your ping pong balls at home. :-)

Recent sketches

Back into at the life drawing monkey business. It's a serious stint this time, as opposed to the intentionally experimental, all over the place drawings from the holidays (below). These are the better of the recent sketchbook drawings, as I try to gain a bit of control over the unforgivable gel pen. Larger drawings are catching up, with proportions still all over the place. Model names smudged for privacy, copyright me. don't redistribute, yada yada yada...

Make Your Own Gourmet Topless Pineapple (R)

Once upon a time, a friend and casting director of peeps related a handful of absurd farm market anecdotes. Among them was the tale of the gourmet topless pineapple, a sales pitch and a lie that has stuck in my head and developed into a recurring joke.

An improvisation, a three minute shooting schedule, and a couple hours of final cut later, we have a culinary documentary. Here it is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-lJ6RBcHQ