Disney’s A Christmas Carol trailer released
Disney just released this trailer for Disney’s A Christmas Carol on Youtube. Check it out:
[youtube]VZ3lr3urgDU[/youtube]
Xray Vision and other nonsense
Disney just released this trailer for Disney’s A Christmas Carol on Youtube. Check it out:
[youtube]VZ3lr3urgDU[/youtube]
Yesterday afternoon G. Scott Owen and myself gave presentations to the students and faculty at Shanghai Normal University. The talk was attended by a group of students as well as various Deans and Chairs of the univeristy such as Wan Qinghua and Lu Jianfei. We were inducted into the 2009 International Scholars Forum and presented with chops containing the Chinses characters for our names. Afterwards we went out with the faculty of the univerisy and publishers of Fantasy Art Magazine, Mr. Wang Wei and Ms. Ying Zhang for a wonderful dinner. Mr. Wang is an amazing artist in his own right and helps run an animation seminar for Chinese youth called the Asian Youth Animation and Comics Contest or AYACC.
I didn’t realize that Chinese kids were just as in to Cosplay at their Japanese counterparts. It’s a little different than the Harajuku scene, maybe a little less punk rock and more anime but still cool to see.
This is an embedded google map showing my trip through upstate South Carolina. I started in San Francisco, flew into Charlotte, drove to Winthrop in Rock Hill and spent the night at The Inn at Winthrop. The next day I gave presentations at Winthrop and Furman. I spent the night at the Westin in Greenville. The following day I gave presentations at Wofford and Clemson. Again, I spent the night in Greenville before making may way to Charlotte to catch a plane back to SFO. On the way back to the airport I stopped of at Cowpens and King’s Mountain to check out some American Revolutionary War history. It was a great trip!
CGTantra, the Indian computer graphics web portal, just published an interview I did with them while visiting Mumbai and Pune in September. You can check it out here:
You could also get to it from the main page at http://www.cgtantra.com
I just found Andi S. Boediman’s Blog site IDEONOMICS.  Andi runs the Digital Studio College in Jakarta and was one of my hosts while visiting there for SIGGRAPH 2008. While some of the blog is in the Bhasa languange I think it might be interesting for anyone who wants to track what’s going on in the burgeoning business of digital content creation in Indonesia. I’ll create a perma-link in the blog-roll.
There’s an AnimationMentor.com student named Chaitanya Limaye who attended my presentation in Pune, India. After the presentation, Chand and I viewed his work from the Mentor program. As it turns out, my friend Joe Mandia is his mentor. Small world!
This is an earlier short piece of animation from the team that’s working on Hey Krishna. It was done at AniRights before Reliance bought them and they became Big Animation. For a behind the scenes look at the production, check out the link over at CG Tantra
L to R: Chand, Kamlesh Pandey, Ashish S.K., Xray, Pratchi, Nupur
Chand took me to visit a really amazing animation studio in Pune called “Big Animation”. We were treated to lunch by CEO Ashish S.K. and I was honored to meet one of Bollywoods most well known writers Kamlesh Pandey. We had a spirited discussion about Indian literature, Joseph Campbell and Bollywood film making. They’ve really got it together. Big Animation is working on both 2-D and 3-D animation. They have several hundred employees and their studio is totally state of the art. They showed me some previews of their work on a project called Hey Krishna. There are two versions of it and both look very good. They aren’t cutting any corners. One is a 3D animation for broadcast televsion and the other is a traditional 2D version for theatrical release. The 2D animation looks every bit as good as Dreamworks Prince of Egypt. Big Animation uses Flash as well as several proprietary systems and according to Vikram, the director n of Hey Krishna, they are torturing Flash in ways it was never intended. The artwork is stunning.
Animation Express posted an overview of my presentation at Whistling Woods in Mumbai. A few things got lost in translation and it leaves the impression that Bee Movie was done with Massive while it was really done using Dreamworks/PDI’s “Mob” system but overall it captures the gist of things.
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