How did I miss this movie?

Terry Gilliam is one of my favorite directors, so how come I totally missed his last movie "Tideland"? According to an interview with Mr. Gilliam on NPR this morning, it might have to do with the bad reviews it got resulting in a short run. Or with the fact that the portrayal of the relation between the little girl and her heroin addict father in this movie is not as cute as "Little Miss Sunshine". Now that is released on DVD, I will put "Tideland" high on my "to see" list!

And now I should finally remember how to pronounce his name properly

Truck Dumps

Yesterday Google Video had the Hickups and I seemed to be unable to upload this video. Today I found that I actually uploaded it twice. Anyway, here's the Truck dumping it's load.

I'm thinking about adding some particles to suggest dust falling off. I will have to find a way to render these particles that will match the cross hatch style. Since we're only talking about a couple of frames, I can also add them by hand, draw them in using Photoshop.

Another childhood icon falls.

As a kid I loved science fiction movies like Star Wars and ET. And the music by John Williams that accompanied it. Later, listening to Prokoviews "Romeo and Julliet, I realised he owed a lot to the Russian ballet music of the early twentieth century. But what I heard today...

The presenter on WNYC-2, the classical station of our local public radio that is having a special week of film music in honor of the upcoming Oscars, gave due warning. "The music you are about to hear will sound eerily familiar". What followed was "Kings Row" by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, from 1941. Never knew plagiarism could get one an Oscar.

Truck

Ok, I'm cheating a wee bit on the progress of my animation here. I built this truck last week. I spent this afternoon texturing it. My animation software (XSI 4.2) crashed three times (rendering while messing with shaders: not a good idea) but I didn't loose too much work. And my friend Bart tells me it's always better the second time.

And I did our taxes!

Animation Progress

An article in the New York Times reports on how some people are using their blog as a way to eliminate debt. It works like a support group, a sort of spenders anonymous: every time the bloggers see something they want but do not need, the thought of having to confess to the shame of compulsive buying works as a deterrent to the needless purchase

I wonder if the same idea will work as a motivator to keep doing some of tedious work of creating an animation. I will start posting progress reports on this blog, maybe that will be an extra motivation to keep on animating

The animation I'm working on now (well, one of them... ) is "Seeing Red". The image that accompanies this post shows a testrender. A truck will be dumping stuff, so I did a test to see how I will make a pile drop. It is a one-off, so just using shape animation seems like a good idea.

Here's the test. Bit too jittery and looks like a dough ball. But it's a start.