Inspiration Deja-Vu

Swifts: Paths of Movement
+ Dynamic Sequences
by Giacomo Balla - 1913

I had seen this before, I'm sure. But this time it struck me as a kind of inspiration after the fact for my Multidimensional Eye Virus animations. The visual similarity makes perfect sense: both trace movement by repeating time phases offset in space!

 

Too bad futurism is associated with fascism...

 

Did I mention that version 2.2 will be show during WPA|C Experimental Media Series - ColorField Remix in Washington, DC, this upcoming Wednesday?:)

Fair Use of Disney Animation

Received a great link from Rick Barry (ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee). It's a movie completely made up of fragments of Disney Animation, explaining Fair Use (the use of parts of copyrighted material for teaching, parody, news and critical comment), found on BoingBoing, originating from this page at Stanford University. It has also been posted on YouTube, let's see how long it stays up there...

Wide Wobbe

Did a bad, bad thing. No, I didn't Google myself, but to test a new widget I downloaded for my macbook (feedster) I typed in my first name and found the following:

• GE Energy Announces OpFlex™ Wide Wobbe

:)

Animators Boot Camp

Last Saturday I attended the "Animators boot camp and field manual workshop". As member of the board of directors of the organizing NYC ACM SIGGRAPH I was in charge of the Powerpoint presentations and DVD-video's, sort of like a stage manager sitting to the side of the podium with a laptop in front of me and an intercom set on my head.

David Levy (president of the NYC chapter of ASIFA) hosted a panel with the most articulate, eloquent and vocal animators I've ever seen, definitely not the stuffy attic types. It is probably hard to get those shy and timid starving artists to sit on a panel. The subject of the panel was "Attention-Grabbing Self Promotion".

Meanwhile I doodled this image on how to not think about networking if you want to make it in animation (or film for that matter).

Opening scene almost done

To the regular reader of this blog the image on the right may seem familiar. But this time it is close to final. The opening scene has been rendering for the last week. I'm rendering the frames at HDTV 720p resolution (1280x720 pixels) and each frame takes about a minutes, which is not bad. But that is for only one layer and I'm rendering about 5 layers. The opening scene has 665 frames, which makes the total render time approximately two and a half days. If only I had a render farm!:) Or an extra computer capable of running XSI. Oh yes, I might need another license then as well.

Here's another image, a bit later in the scene. Trying not to give away too much...

There might be yet another break in my animation progress. My in-laws are coming to visit from the Netherlands and they will be using my animation studio. I mean: our bedroom.