alexiss dawn

It’s been a busy few weeks! We’ve been crunching at Blue Sky as I’ve said and that’s pretty much consumed 90% of my time. HA! Last Friday though was our last day at Blue Sky Studios in White Plains and we ended up leaving halfway through the day for a snow day. Craziness. It was a start to a great weekend for us and a really enjoyable break. Now we’re in Connecticut. We checked in at the new studio yesterday morning and set our stuff up so we’re ready to rock ‘n roll come January. It looks super nice and it’s a big improvement for the studio.

I’m back in Utah for the Christmas/New Years/Holiday break. It’ll be nice to have a break to get recharged for the final push on Ice Age 3. So go enjoy the holidays, and have a Merry Christmas!

And for some holiday cheer, check out this video: http://www.joytoeveryone.com/en/

Things are definitely busy here at Blue Sky. Long weeks, long hours, very little free time. But we’re getting it done and things are looking good. I’m just MIA lately everywhere but work.

Yesterday after work I went into the city for a couple hours to try and do a little Christmas shopping. I have never seen so many people in Manhattan before! It was definitely a cattle herding event. I swung by FAO Schwartz (a mad house) and the Disney store before getting to Rockefeller Square to see the tree. It was great to see as it’s so, so big and sparkly, but the downside of it was what I had to go through to get there! Throughout the night in the stores and on the streets, I was yelled at and then purposefully hit by four adults throughout the night in their frustration to grab a toy or if I stopped short as to not run into a child. It was madness with several people being frustrated and angry. Crazy. I left the city and on the train home sat by a happy, friendly lady visiting a friend from Florida. We talked the whole train ride and laughed quite a bit. A much better ending to the night.

So the point in saying all of this is to remind everyone to enjoy the holiday season. Be patient and be happy. It’s not worth it if you’re frustrated and getting upset with total strangers. It’s definitely easy to get frustrated but why don’t we make this an enjoyable holiday? And above all else, remember the reason for the season. No matter your religion and the holiday that you celebrate, there is a solid reason why you celebrate, and my guess is that it doesn’t revolve around getting the best deal on the hottest toy.

For the last five weeks the guys at work have been looking more and more scruffy as they’ve prepped for the dude challenge. They each had styles assigned (with many free stylers) and today was the day to show off what they had. I have to say…. there were some really great ones. Last night laughter was erupting in the hallway at our apartment building. The shaving…the missing spots… laughing till we cried multiple times… it’s all golden. Check it out on the Dude Challenge blog! Love it. Gotta do something to keep ourselves laughing during crunch!

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!