October 06, 2007

Two more They Might Be Giants animated videos!



"The Shadow Government"

The Muppet Show Live!

Here are the Episodes from “The Muppet Show Live!” During the 2001 MuppetFest celebration, The Muppet Show Live was staged at the Hollywood Palace in Hollywood, California.

Written by Craig Shemin and Jim Lewis, with stage direction by Bill Barretta, the program was a collection of onstage performances and classic Muppet Show clips projected on a large screen.

If you are a Muppet Fan you HAVE to check these out, there are some classic scenes!

Via Puppeteers Unite.

Potter Puppet Pals

Here is the new Potter Puppet Pals video called ” The Mysterious Ticking Noise”. In this episode they use a new updated theme song, and a special musical number which I think you’ll hear people humming and singing for a while. Real ingenious, entertaining, short and sweet! Check it out HERE.

Dirty Drawings

October 03, 2007

What can 40 Animators do with 1.5 tonnes of plasticine?

3 weeks.
189 2ft bunnies.
150 1ft cubes.
10ft x 20ft purple wave
30ft giant rabbit.
6 cameras.
40 animators working through 4 hours generated 4 seconds of footage.
40 animators working on the same scene had never been attempted before.
The 60 second spot will be constructed of approximately 100,000 stills.

Click here to see the preview.

Teaser Poster for 'Astro Boy'


Warner Brothers and The Weinstein Company had joined forces with Japan's ImagiAnimation Studios to distribute the film.
Astro Boy
is scheduled for release in 2009.

It's going to be the best movie ever... EVER... EVER!!!

nationa-treasure-book-secre.jpg

Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined

It's a classic tale of failure and redemption, the kind of story Hollywood loves to tell.

Fresh off his second successful movie, an up-and-coming director takes a chance on a dark tale of a 21st-century cop who hunts humanlike androids. But he runs over budget, and the financiers take control, forcing him to add a ham-fisted voice-over and an absurdly cheery ending. The public doesn't buy it. The director's masterpiece plays to near-empty theaters, ultimately retreating to the art-house circuit as a cult oddity.

That's where we left Ridley Scott's future-noir epic in 1982. But a funny thing happened over the next 25 years. Blade Runner's audience quietly multiplied. An accidental public showing of a rough-cut work print created surprise demand for a re-release, so in 1992 Scott issued his director's cut. He silenced the narration, axed the ending, and added a twist — a dream sequence suggesting that Rick Deckard, the film's protagonist, is an android, just like those he was hired to dispatch.

But the director didn't stop there. As the millennium turned, he continued polishing: erasing stray f/x wires, trimming shots originally extended to accommodate the voice-over, even rebuilding a scene in which the stunt double was obvious. Now he's ready to release Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which will hit theaters in Los Angeles and New York in October, with a DVD to follow in December.

See the full Q&A article here.

Via Wired Magazine - By: Ted Greenwald

Sad News: no more seasons/movies of Deadwood

Ian McShane Tells Ryan Stewart that HBO Has Scrapped Those 'Deadwood' Movies:
Earlier today, I got a call from Ian McShane to talk about his new family fantasy movie, The Dark is Rising, and I asked him the big question Deadwood fans have been wanting to know for a while now -- was HBO just blowing smoke with its promise to wrap up the series with a couple of made-for-TV movies? Well, the answer is yes, McShane revealed to us. "I just got a call on Friday from ... a dear friend of mine, who told me that they're packing up the ranch," McShane said. "They're dismantling the ranch and taking the stuff out. That ship is gonna sail. Bonsoir, Deadwood." He went on to say that even if the movies were happening, there would be the strike to consider, and on top of that, he's committed to a filming schedule that would prevent him from doing them anytime before late next year anyway.

I told McShane that as a fan, I felt completely cheated by this move on HBO's part. "You feel cheated? Imagine how I feel!" he replied. "We all do. We all do. It was one of those one-off jobs that you do which has got an extraordinary creative brain behind it, and it kept getting better, and the actors were great. It was a fabulous place to be and work. It was a workshop cum theater cum film. It was an extraordinary time. But everything has to come to an end, babe." So, there you have it.

By: Ryan Stewart - Via Cinematical

Iran So Far

Letterman Bashes Paris!

September 24, 2007

To Fly Free in Space


At about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was further out than anyone had ever been before. Guided by a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), astronaut McCandless, pictured above, was floating free in space. McCandless and fellow NASA astronaut Robert Stewart were the first to experience such an "untethered space walk" during Space Shuttle mission 41-B in 1984. The MMU works by shooting jets of nitrogen and has since been used to help deploy and retrieve satellites. With a mass over 140 kilograms, an MMU is heavy on Earth, but, like everything, is weightless when drifting in orbit.

Lapetus- 3D Equatorial Ridge

This bizarre, equatorial ridge extending across and beyond the dark, leading hemisphere of Iapetus gives the two-toned Saturnian moon a distinct walnut shape. With red/blue glasses you can check out a remarkable stereo composition of this extraordinary feature -- based on close-up images from this week's Cassini spacecraft flyby. In fact, the ridge's combination of equatorial symmetry and scale, about 20 kilometers wide and reaching up to 20 kilometers above the surface, is not known to be duplicated anywhere else in our solar system. The unique feature was discovered in Cassini images from 2004 (seen below). It appears to be heavily cratered and therefore ancient, but the origin of the equatorial ridge on Iapetus remains a mystery.

Masi Oka


Oka landed his first job after graduation at Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas's motion picture visual special effects company, with the hope of one day earning an Oscar for technical work on a motion picture. His first major project was co-developing a computer program to generate water effects, which was first used for A Perfect Storm but also used in later films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. He later created programs for computational fluid dynamics and surface-tracking, which also became used in multiple projects. He has also worked on the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

September 20, 2007

Taste Visualization for Pixar's Ratatouille

Click the image to see the full Michel Gagne article
on how the FX for this sequence were developed:
Thanks to Leisl for finding it!

Waterbed Testing