Interviews: Text

An in-progress list of interviews you may wanna read. I'll be updating this post with new ones as I find them!

Featured Artists interviews @ strutyourreel.com
Victor Navone (Pixar)
Doug Bennet (Disney Feature)
Aaron Hartline (Blue Sky)
Bobby Beck (Animation Mentor, Pixar)
James Baxter (Disney, DreamWorks)
Jason Schleifer (DreamWorks, WETA
**many more interviews available at the Feature Artist page...I've yet to read all of them, I've fallen behind!**

CGCHAR interviews
Tim Johnson (Director, Over the Hedge)

Animated-News
Andreas Deja (Disney)
Eric Goldberg (Disney)

More!

Over the weekend and today my thoughts were near obsessive on this blog--and I haven't even really started it yet! I have no idea why. I started thinking about why I was doing it, what did I want it to be? I immediately thought about trying to teach what I know about animation through it, but I feel I'm still too inexperienced to offer much more than an honest critique to friends who ask. Besides, how many other places can you go online already to read great tutorials and lessons, that are far better than I could ever write? Someday I do want to teach animation, but there's still too much for me to learn. So I thought, why not use my blog as a forum, or place, where any readers and I can learn *together* about animation? Rather than pretending I know everything about the craft, I would rather share the learning experience with other people. Though I'm sure at some time I'll post some personal opinions about what I've learned so far, I hope to do it in a way of sharing rather than lecturing.

By organizing various links that I find interesting into categories on my blog, I hope to make a sort of online resource of where you can find information about animation in other places, but not so long of a list that you don't know where to start, or how to read it. I've organized my links section in the right column based on the categories of "Watch", "Talk, "Learn", and "Blog". Under "Watch more" are places you can go to watch cool animation (and a shameless self promo of my website). Under "Talk more" you can go to a couple of my favorite animation forums and podcasts, where you can listen, respond, and converse with the online animation community. Under "Learn more" I have posted some of the best places I know of to read some great lessons on animation. And finally under "Blog more" you can find some cool blogs of other animators. Of course some of these sites can fit under more than one category--Spline Doctors and Keith Lango's blogs have some great lessons and tutorials that would fit well under "Learn more". Maybe I'll do some re-arranging later, but I ended up just choosing which I thought fit best at this time.

So what am I contributing to this blog, besides organizing links? Well, I plan on posting my own opinions and personal responses to anything animation, of course! As I keep posting more content, I plan on utilizing the "labels" feature to organize my posts into categories much like my links. The two categories I most look forward to are "WATCH about animation" and "INTERVIEWS about animation". That way if you're up for seeing some cool animation, just click on the "WATCH about animation" label and see all of my posts of videos, links to videos, etc. "INTERVIEWS about animation" will have my responses and links to the awesome interviews at The Animation Podcast and Spline Doctors, as well as links to interviews I find online, so you can easily find reading material from some of our favorite artists. "LEARN about animation" will consist of posts where I (and you through comments) can discuss and learn about the craft we love. As I add more content, these labels will start popping up in the right column.

SO...yeah, that's my plan :) In all honesty it's a big experiment for me, but basically I wanted to make something worthwhile, that contributed to the animation community in some small way. My previous attempts at starting a blog failed miserably, but with these goals I hope this one gets off to a good start.

Enjoy!

Magnolia Pictures Animated Shorts Screening

Last night I went to a short film screening that turned out to be my favorite movie-going experience since seeing The Incredibles for the first time with a theatre full of SCAD animation/vfx students. Magnolia Pictures is showing a collection of 2006 Oscar Nominated and Shortlisted animated short films, I saw it at the IFC Center here in New York. Check out the playlist: The Danish Poet (Torill Kove), Lifted (Pixar), The Little Matchgirl (Disney), No Time for Nuts (Blue Sky), A Gentleman's Dual (Blur), Guide Dog (Bill Plympton), One Rat Short (Charlex), The Passenger (Chris Jones), Wraith of Cobble Hill (Adam Parrish King), and Maestro (Geza M. Toth). Let me tell you, nearly every single film was compelling and thoroughly enjoyable, and in my opinion beats Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeld's "Animation Show 3" by a long shot. Don't get me wrong, there were some great films in The Animation Show 3, but there was also some that just weren't my taste--your sort of grotesque indy 2D animated films. That shouldn't be a surprise coming from Judge and Hertzfeld though.

In all honesty I went just to see Rats again on the big screen and see some of my Charlex friends, having no idea what else was showing. To my surprise the Pixar logo shows up at the beginning and "Lifted" starts playing! Film after film surpassed my expectations, most surprisingly "The Passenger" by Chris Jones--a practically one-man film that I had not even heard of, that presents a visually stunning, while funny and engaging horror story of sorts. (One of my friends told me it took Jones 6 years to make it!) "A Gentelman's Duel" was also a nice surprise, since I didn't know when I'd be able to see Blur's new short, but had seen some images on CG Talk.

If anyone has a chance to see this traveling exhibition, it is well worth your time and money! Check out the playdates/locations, and other information here. There is also a screening of live-action shorts by Magnolia that I was not able to see, but if the animated selections are any proof, I bet the live action selections are great too.

By the way, I have updated the look/template of this blog, and hopefully will be using this more often! I know I've said that before, but I think I have a plan this time. I've also transferred all the previous posts from my website homepage to this blog, so there may be some strange references to updates that don't make sense anymore :P

Picasa is awesome

Okay, I know this picture is kinda boring. But I never blog here anyway, so if you're reading this...wow. Anyway, I'm just trying out Google's Picasa 'blog this' feature. If you don't use Picasa and you have a ton of digital pictures on your computer, now is the time to organize them! Picasa is great, I hear it is very similar to iPhoto, except it's free. You can email photos, upload them to free web albums, and order prints all from your photo library in Picasa! It rocks :) 

"One Rat Short" on Sundance Website/iTunes

Hey everyone, I wanted to post the link on here to Sundance Film Festival's website, where you can view "One Rat Short" in its entirety, for free! I've been told that it will also be on iTunes as part of Sundance's release of their selection of short films, but as of today I have not seen it there yet. (*update* It's now there! Buy it for $1.99 on iTunes!) My demo reel pretty much shows the shots that I animated, but to sum it up, I animated nearly all of the labrat crowd cycles (in the cages and running on the floor), as well as a handful of the shots of the main characters, Cagne and Audrey. It was such a great experience, making a film is such a team effort, and I had so much fun with everyone there!

Things at Framestore have been going very well, and I am continuing to enjoy working there too. We're wrapping up animation on the Geico Gecko spots, not sure when they will be airing yet.

I'm also desperately trying to finish a 2 character acting piece that I've been working periodically on for a while now. It will be done soon, and hopefully up on my Animation page soon after that! I still have a bunch of drawings I'd love to upload to my Artwork page, but first I need to get to a scanner. In additon to these website updates, I'm starting to think I may need to turn this homepage into an official blog format...this page is getting rather long!

I suppose I should call this the end of my post before I get long winded...oh wait, am I too late? ;)
Later,
--Kyle

Freelance has been good to me

Three weeks ago I started a freelance gig at Framestore here in New York, working on Geico Gecko spots! It's an animator's dream to go into work everyday, working on full character animation with dialogue! It's been so much fun this far, I'm really looking forward to the next few weeks. This is the great thing about working freelance in New York--getting to work at all sorts of places on all sorts of projects, and experiencing what different studios are like. Had I gotten a full time job out of school, I may be more financially stable now, but I feel like I've learned so much about the industry by freelancing than I would have otherwise. I think that knowledge will help me if and when I finally accept a staff position somewhere.

In other news, I've been told that "One Rat Short" has made it into Sundance Film Festival! It's still kind of surreal to think of all the attention that film is getting. When I was working at Charlex I was just happy to finally have landed a job! It truely shows how unpredictable animation/vsfx is, and you never know where it's going to take you, especially when freelancing. I'm very grateful for the opportunities I've had so far, because I know that I didn't get there on my own.

Take care folks,
--Kyle

an update??

Hey everyone, sorry it's been so long since the last update. It's been kind of a weird fall. I've got a few drawings I'd love to upload, but I don't have a scanner. And my most recent animation isn't quite finished yet, but hopefully that will be done before too long!

Where to start? Let's see, I finished the gig at Tronic about 2 weeks ago. There I worked on an M&M's project, making content for screens on the new M&M's World store in Times Square. It was a pretty challenging schedule, but I learned a lot from it. I'm lucky to already have another gig lined up, this time at Framestore, where I will get to work on a new bunch of Geico Gecko ads! That gig is supposed to run through the end of January.

So that job starts soon. I'm also looking forward to actually going home for the week of Christmas through New Year's! I haven't been home since May, so I can't wait to get back there to see my family, and also hang out with my friends at Camp Wyoming.

I guess that's about it for now. Hopefully I'll have that new acting exercise up in not too long, but I don't make any promises :-P Take Care everyone! I hope the Christmas season is good to you.
--Kyle