alexiss dawn

Another round of visitors at the studio today. Blue Sky brought in Seth Green and Matt Senreich, creators of Robot Chicken featured on Cartoon Network. They brought the new Star Wars episode to show us along with a behind the scenes snippet that will be on the dvd….whenever that manages to come out. So it was pretty cool to get to see that early. They took some time to answer questions and talked about how fun it was to get to play with toys all day and get paid. Yep, big animation geeks like the rest of us there. Then they were pretty anxious to get back to the studio to see our place. We got back to work and they got to walk around the studio. At one point I caught them firing story’s nerf guns in the middle of the hallway. Brilliant.

A new trailer for Ice Age 3 is showing with Bolt, in theaters this Friday. If you go to the 3D-gotta-wear-the-fancy-glasses version of Bolt, the IA3 trailer will be in 3D as well. There’s a little article about it this morning on the USA Today site. It’s a pretty dang awesome sequence so definitely make sure to check it out!

It is upon us officially. We worked several, several overtime hours last week, including Saturday. Things are getting busy at work and will be like this until we finish the movie in a few months. Buuuuusssssy. Lots to do but the shots are getting cranked out and people are doing some great work. For now, I’ve been adieu to society for a while and am ready to dig in even further.

The treehouse guys at work have been putting out episodes of Treehouse Studios over the last few weeks. This last week’s episode was perfect all things considered so go check it out!

Yet another wonderful guest visited Blue Sky today. Brian Henson came today! We all gathered in a theater at the local cinema and listened to him talk about puppetry, watch clips, and even see some live puppet action for a good two hours. Pretty crazy.

He talked a lot about how puppetry has evolved for the Jim Henson company — from simple plain ol’ puppets, to animatronics, all the way up to CG puppetry. Lots of behind the scenes clips and stories. He pointed out how puppetry is loose and sloppy and improvised a lot of the time, where as traditional animation is planned out and solid. Neither is bad, just different styles. I’ve always been amazed at how much a simple puppet with an open-close mouth and solid eyes can emote so much.

He brought out a puppet throughout the afternoon. It was pretty cool to see him on the side of the theater acting with the puppet and seeing it alive on the giant theater screen. It was pretty hard to watch him instead of the seriously alive puppet on the screen.

It was interesting to see and hear him talk about how they do their puppetry. They don’t look up at their puppet while acting, but instead are looking at a monitor that shows them what the audience is seeing. So they have to constantly be focusing on the staging of the character.

Oh, and his advice for wannabe puppeteers? Get a puppet and start practicing! FAO Schwartz has Muppet Whatnots for sale now. Make your very own puppet. The tree house guys at work got theirs when the store first opened, and a few of us got ours this last week. Super great quality puppets if I do say so myself.

Overall a great speaker and a great guest to have at Blue Sky. The timing couldn’t be much better as we dig into crunch now.

Remember in my top 10 list from Siggraph I mentioned crowd surfing Shawn? Well Bobby just posted video of it! Sweet. HA!

I forgot to mention one of the incredibly awesome events in my Siggraph top 10 list…so how about a top 11?

#11: Eating Chinese with a ton of animators, reading fortune cookies (oy! John!), and suddenly breaking out into everyone singing 80s and 90s cartoon theme songs. And the outcome of it all was all of us randomly singing parts of the themes throughout the rest of the week! (Cartoons from our childhood rocked!)

Oooo oooo OOO!!

2nd runner up:

It was late, we were in a private room in the restaurant, we stayed late enough that they were closing, and the waited kept coming in to check that we were “alright”. We laughed till we cried, ordered way too much Chinese food, had fun with the food turn table thing, and made fools of ourselves in the best possible ways. It’s such an incredible thing to let loose and be yourself….and laugh, laugh, laugh.

Animators are awesome people.

Ok, ok, I’m a few days late in posting this, but hey, it’s still just as good! It’s the brand spankin’ new Summer 2008 Animation Mentor Showcase!

They showed this to us at graduation and had it playing all throughout Siggraph. Totally inspiring stuff in there from my classmates! And you just might recognize a certain piece in there that I did — crazy to have it in there amidst the pure awesomeness people have done!! There are so many seriously talented people at Animation Mentor! It’s been so great to see friends’ work on there and celebrate with them! AM rocks!

…and an update is coming soon. It’s tough to sum up 9 days of pure awesomeness so I’m just trying to wrap my head around all of my thoughts. Exciting stories and plenty of stuff to tell so stay tuned. I just need another day to take it all in.

An early update here as I’m off to California tomorrow. It’s been a pretty dang good week. I spent most of the week on my first production shot, tweaking, polishing, all that jazz. And I got my first final on a shot! That’s a pretty good feeling. Man alive did I learn a lot from working on it. So now it’s on to the next and I’m way excited about it. WAY. So much that a bit of me doesn’t want to take off for California.

So tomorrow after some time at work and some more time on NY transit, I’m off to California. First stop is San Francisco for my Animation Mentor graduation!! I’ve been to the last two, but I’m pretty sure that this one is going to beat them all — it has to! I’m incredibly excited to meet some of my classmates from around the world that I’ve been working along with over the last year and a half and to celebrate with them. It’s going to be an amazing celebration and I cannot wait!

Then it’s off to LA for Siggraph. It’ll be great to spend some time with all of the AMers in town and get to know some more people. Last year was a blast, this year I expect no less.

So that’s it for me for now. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with pictures, stories, and plenty of energy as I’m clawing to get back to work! If you’re down at Sigg next week, totally try to meet up — chances are I’ll be at the AM booth a bit. Chao!

Sid has definitely come to be one of my favorite characters from Ice Age. He’s such a crazy character and has so many quirks. One of the things we’ve noticed from watching the Ice Age movies after work is the way his hips shift as he walks. He actually does the opposite sometimes — instead of lifting up the hip opposite of the foot rising off the ground, he’ll lift the same hip. Crazy, right? There have been many times in the last couple of weeks that crazy animators have been walking down the streets of New York impersonating his walk. Try it — it’s a good time.

So week 2 is done! It’s been a great week. Challenging, very challenging, but great. “Finished” up on the test shot I had been working on and got assigned my first ever prod shot. It’s pretty intense stuff but it’s been a blast so far. It’s a lot of work but it’s a great time. We’re all feeling a lot better now that we’re getting a hang of the tools.

One thing I love: We sit around so many times at work/home/lunch/everywhere and are just amazed how freaking cool our job is. We’re excited to go to work every day and don’t want to leave at night. That’s awesome. In the middle of quiet as we’re working someone will just spout out “I love my job”. It’s truly a blessing to be here.

Working with amazing people is also a bonus. Another week means more time getting to know people. That has been one of my favorite parts so far. You honestly can’t run a business well without good people — and Blue Sky seems to have it going on. Oh, and this last week we got to attend a master class with Sergio Pablos! That was an awesome day — listening to him and watching examples. Animation is definitely lifelong learning and it’s so incredibly great to be learning from so many talented people.

This weekend we went into the city and got to wander around a bit. It’s definitely a different experience wandering the city and not being on vacation. Vacations mean you have to see everything possible as you only have a few days. We got to mosie (does anyone use that word anymore?) around the city casually as we have months and months here. That was awesome. We ate Lombardis — if you ever come to New York, you have to go there. Best…pizza…ever.

Tonight we had dinner together and welcomed another BS noob that’s starting tomorrow. I have lots to say and plenty to type but the process of organizing those thoughts doesn’t work out too well lately. But more to come. It takes a few weeks to settle in and just as I’m about to, I’m taking off to California this weekend for my graduation from Animation Mentor! Just know things are going great and I can’t wait to be able to tell you guys more.