behind the scenes
Theatrical shorts at the NFB: Cornet at Night
Once upon a time in movie theatres across North America, a short film (or 2) would precede the main feature. Sadly, this practice has gone the way of the dinosaur. The screening of shorts in Canadian theatres existed as late as the 1970s. We...
Heat-sensitive: a behind-the-scenes look at our thermal 3D film ORA
This morning on the bus I found myself reading an argument by a Hindu scholar, somewhere online, about how some people are poets and others scientists. According to this man, it is strictly impossible for one person to be both. He argued that even...
John Law and the Mississippi Bubble: The Madness of Crowds
When most people think about Richard Condie’s films, his classic Oscar-nominated short The Big Snit (1985) immediately springs to mind. While I agree that it is brilliant, I prefer his earlier film John Law and the Mississippi Bubble, released in 1979. I love the...
Hothouse 7: Evolution of a Shot
Now that my film has been Picture Locked I thought I'd take this moment to explain the process of shaping a scene as experienced through NFB's Hothouse. There is so much value in working rough, and as I discovered, it leads to better ideas....
Hothouse 7: Rabbits Fuel Animators
Here's some rough animation from the fantasy sequence in my film, Missed Connection. It was done basically straight-ahead with a few key poses that I wanted to hit to the beat of the music. For a while I had this section blocked out as...
Hothouse 7: Photoshop vs Hand Drawn
I've been working a lot in Flash over these past few weeks, but I thought you might be curious to know what my film is actually going to look like! In the early stages of production I did a bunch of fiddling with Photoshop...
Hothouse 7: Rough Animation
At this point in production I'm juggling several things at once. I've started to roughly animate my locked scenes in Flash while I also continue to work on editing the Leica! This isn't typical for a regular animation pipeline, but in Hothouse we need...
Hothouse 7: Be a Better Man
As part of story development I have become engrossed in the study of all things Manish and in doing so have discovered the strange and enlightening world of “Manly Mags”. Do you install kitchen shelving like an urban pansy? Wanna dress super-sharp like Paul...
Behind the scenes: Hothouse 6
oehttp://www.onf.ca/film/hothouse_6_behind_the_scenes/
A while back I published a series of interviews with this year's 6 Hothouse participants. As much as I believe in the power of words to evoke, I was a little dismayed we couldn't show you the films they made during the program. (They...
Pixar holds masterclass in Vancouver, Sept. 24 – 25, 2010
On September 24 & 25, vanarts will be presenting a Masterclass in Animation and Story Development, led by story artist Matthew Luhn and animator Andrew Gordon, both from Pixar Animation Studios.
How cool is this?
This class has toured the world, and the Vancouver stop is...
How to create sound for a 1-minute animated short
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9dWrWyJG4I
The sound composition for my Hothouse 6 film, Marvin Parson’s Inner Wild Wilderness, has always been a huge component, but in my mind it was never one specific aesthetic or approach. My inspirations were definitive, but flexible in its application which I felt was...
