I spent a few hours today carving pumpkins. They turned out great, and a few kids have already been heard down the street screaming, “That house is scary!”  Lots of fun.

I love everything about the Walt’s People books series that Didier Ghez has put together over the last few years. Learning about the heated rivalries, the casual drinking, the extraordinary talents, the work place drama, and the famous studio strike, among many, many other things. I love Pete Emslie’s caricatures. I love the fact that I don’t have to spend so much time and money tracking down all these interviews in old copies of Funnyworld and other magazines on eBay.

After reading the first few volumes, I knew I had to be a part of this series in some way. I’m a nut for animation history. I didn’t have any interviews or stories to share with Didier, but I did volunteer some of my time to the cause. I’m just finishing up transcribing my second interview for the series about Ward Kimball’s space series, and looking forward to working on his new series entitled, “Bug’s Buddies.”

If you have a passion for animation history and can spare a few hours a week in order to help piece together animation history and, “unlock the vaults,” as Didier would say, send him an e-mail and offer to give him a hand. It’s a great experience!

I’ve been following Colin Jack’s blog for a while now, and I think you should too. He’s got a great sense of design, composition, and color. His work is playful, funny, and inventive. I love his rough style that calls attention to the medium. His work is a constant source of inspiration to me. The qualities I see in his work are the same ones I hope to one day find in my own sketch book pages.

I saw Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs yesterday. What a fun film! I can’t remember the last time I had that much “fun” watching a film. Lots of laughs, lots of great animation, and a fast paced story with never a dull moment. Yes there were cliches, spots of bad animation, and some character designs were not as strong as others, but on the whole it was a great film that the people at Sony should be really proud of. I would put it just below Kung Fu Panda on my scale of awesomeness for no other reason than I found the art direction and character design in Kung Fu Panda looked a lot better. But they were both just as entertaining to me.  Congratulations Sony, well done!

Highlights for me were:

• Flint’s hair
• Flint’s lab
• Tim”s eyebrows
• The animation of Earl (the cop)
• The Rat-birds
• The mayor
• The pilot/doctor character (Doesn’t he look like the guy from Pink Panther?)

The only thing that bugged me enough to mention were those gigantic power puff eyes. They worked a lot better in this film than I’ve seen before, but they’re still not my cup of tea. Well nothing is really, I don’t drink tea.

As for the 3D thing. I saw it in 3D, and like every other 3D movie I’ve seen, I really enjoyed it. It didn’t take away from my experience. It didn’t come across as a gimmick. Whether it added to my entertainment experience, I do not know. It probably did. The thing with the 3D is, I don’t notice it after a while, except in the really good parts where they push it. It doesn’t bug me or give me headaches like it seems to for everyone else. I’m tired of hearing everyone harp on about how unnecessary it is, and how they deliberately avoid it, every time a new animated film comes out. Give it a rest people. Please. We should be talking about the films themselves and how they affect us, not how the execs are gouging us for another $5. This film was worth my $10, and certainly worth my $15. So I’m okay with it. Everyone go see this film, in 3D or not in 3D, who cares!

On October 28th at 2pm and 7:30pm Chris Landreth, Academy Award Winning Director of, Ryan, will be in town at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Seymour Street to talk about his next film, The Spine, among other topics in an event titled, Get Animated 2009. Both sessions are FREE. I’m going to make the effort to be there, you should too!

Here’s the official gab:

No organization has done as much for animation in Canada as the National Film Board, which is why we at Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH are proud to announce that we are teaming up with the NFB to bring director Chris Landreth to Vancouver on Wednesday, October 28 as part of Get Animated. Mr. Landreth will be doing two identical talks, one at 2pm and another in the evening at 7:30pm after a 1 hour industry mixer at 6:30. He’ll be showing his latest short film, The Spine, and talking about what he calls “psychorealism,” a way of using computer graphics to show the realism of his characters’ complicated, messy and very human lives, and best of all, both presentations are absolutely free!

Chris will show how his team modeled and animated the complex, detailed characters in his film, he’ll talk about the challenge of the “Uncanny Valley” (the creepy effect of making CGI characters that are too realistic) and how The Spine attempts to avoid this problem. He’ll also be showing how his animators used a Method-acting approach to mimic subtle gestures, ticks and micro-expressions in their characters’ faces and bodies, and explain how his crew balanced realism and stylization to create characters that are Uncanny in a positive way.

Check out the Get Animated website to find out more about all the other events that the NFB is sponsoring around town that week, including three nights of speakers and films at Pacific Cinematheque and a fabulous family program on Saturday the 1st at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

Update – January 11th, 2009

The FAC Course PDFs have been removed from my servers at the request of the Famous Artist School. I have been informed that a new digital version of the course is in the works and is almost ready. After asking for more information on this new course so that I could promote it, I received this statement from the Famous Artist School:

The new Famous Artists Creative Art Course will incorporate the classic instructional materials from earlier editions of the FA Course, with additional demonstrations and examples from master artists, lots of color, and updated references.  This reorganized version will consist of ten Foundations chapters and Assignments, which all students will take; followed by a choice of three electives:  Painting, Illustration, and Design. These electives, with fourteen Assignments each, allow students to follow their own special art interest after having received a solid grounding in the basic foundations of art.

The Creative Art Course will be available for download and on DVDs.   We will continue to handle the Assignments in physical rather than virtual form, however.  That is to say, students will complete the Assignments and mail them to FAS.  Their individual artist/instructor will give hands-on personal attention to each lesson, creating overlays showing changes and improvements, and writing a comprehensive letter of explanation, all of which will be returned to the student along with the Assignment.  Digital images of the original Assignment and the corrections are made by FAS and kept in a portfolio which can be requested by the student at any time.

The following is the original post

The Famous Artist Course I am sharing with you today is the Commercial Art & Illustration course from 1960. The Famous Artist School, founded in 1948 by Al Dorne and Normal Rockwell, released updated editions of this course and other courses (Painting, Cartooning, etc) over the years. There are three other versions of this course that I’m aware of: a 1955, 1964, and 1967 edition, though I am sure there are many more than that. Over the years they changed the order of the lessons, added and removed lessons, and changed the format of the course from 3-4 binders. Serious enthusiasts should think about getting as many editions as you can, but for the struggling artist, they share most of the same information from course to course. And for that matter, a lot of the material from this Illustration course was used in the Painting course. Which makes this a tremendous resource to artists around the world that I am happy to share. Thank you to my friends in Brazil for convincing me to do this.

The Famous Artist Courses can be tough to track down, with eBay being your best bet. Walt Reed’s book, The Figure, contains a lot of the same material from the Figure Drawing sections of the Famous Artist Course. It is still in print today, and can be found on Amazon for less than $15.

Here’s some interesting information from Wikipedia:

For the founding faculty, Dorne recruited John Atherton, Austin Briggs, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, Peter Helck, Fred Ludekens, Ben Stahl, Al Parker, Norman Rockwell, Harold von Schmidt and Jon Whitcomb. All were making more than US$50,000 a year at the time, roughly equivalent to US$425,000 in 2006. Later faculty included cartoonists Al Capp, Milt Caniff and Rube Goldberg. Advisory faculty for the school later included Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Fletcher Martin, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee.

I took the liberty of tracking down some art from the instructors that wrote this 1960 edition because it’s good to get a feel for who your teachers are.

So without further adieu, here are the PDFs. I have uploaded them as individual chapters for convenient downloading. It’s not one PDF like I said before, but it’s all here! Please note that there is a good number of pages with a small warping effect in the top half -inch. This is a result of the ADF feature of my scanner, and varies depending on the resolution the documents were scanned in at. I’m a busy guy, and this is the best I could do for you. It won’t affect your ability to use the course, so please be understanding. You wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, would you?

Thank you all for your patience. Now enjoy the course!

[Download links no longer available]

There’s a nice animation desk available on Craiglist right now for a good price. Traditional animators in the Vancouver area without a full size desk will want to jump on this one. I picked up an identical one a few months back. They originally came from Studio B in Vancouver.  They do not come up online this often, so don’t be fooled into thinking you’ll just get the next one. I did that and I had to wait two years for the next one. If you do buy it, please leave a comment and say so. I’d love know I helped place it in a deserving home.

Matt Jones tipped me off to this amazing set of videos produced by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. This was an event he recently attended that I wish I could have also. I love these kinds of events, but they rarely show up on the Siggraph schedule. If anyone knows of other clubs in the Vancouver area that put on these kinds of events, please e-mail me.

Of particular interest to me was the analysis of my favorite scene from one of my favorite films, Good Will Hunting, the park bench scene.

I’ve always loved the slow pan that eventually spotlights Will Hunting realizing that Sean is no joke. The other videos are brilliant as well, and should be watched by all film enthusiasts. Gladiator is also right up there on my list of favorite films, and I was fascinated by how they dealt with the death of Oliver Reed midway through filming.

Mark Mayerson already posted this link, but I had to as well. It’s so trippy and rhythmic that I don’t know if I enjoy it or I’m being hypnotized. Is it wrong that it’s more entertaining than a lot of the actual film? Check it out.

I’m working on a hip new design. Please be patient as I work out all the kinks. The new look seems to work best in Firefox right now, followed by Internet Explorer, and it looks like crap in Google Chrome.

Looks like JG Quintel got his own show, and he’s used all his student characters. This is hilarious!