tobinjim

Let's all be very honest in answer this question: How many times did you have to watch it before you noticed her arms go through the purple headdress on several occassions?

can't view your site, as there's a coding error somewhere in your browser check on frameset compatibility. My browser, Safari 1.2.3 handles frames fine, but your site is apparently trying a redirect to http://grandal.net:84 doesn't have port 84 open. The result is a white page, and an error ("Can't connect to host http://grandal.net:84"). But good luck with whatever you're working on!

Ken: Go read the April 2004 Scientific American article, "Tyranny of Choice"

Looking super silky smooth now! I'm not sure I'd worry any more about the actions. We're all too focused on such minute things in a short clip. My wife and children have watched it and not one of them has caught nor felt any unsmoothness! You had written earlier about about 20 extra frames of preroll to give Kevin some time at the lecturn. If you were to do that (or longer) from a camera angle that gave us some sense of the audience he's addressing, then we'd have some visual anchors for where his eye movements fixate. My personal choice would be the camera pulling forward in the space between the shoulders of two people (if that's appropriate for you scene), such that the shoulders are very out of focus because depth-of-field is centered on Kevin. It'd be short and subtle. I sure wish I could animate emotion the way you do! Is there a bio-wet chip I need to buy for my brain stem?

This is such a good piece it feels wrong to nitpick on it! There's one combination of eye and head movement that seems repeated... less so in the latter versions. Right at the "like this" which follows "try your patience" his eyes move up and to his right the same way they did just a little bit earlier. I think what caught my eye was the uniformity of the movement both times. Since there's less of it in the more recent versions, I'd guess you see it too and are tweaking it out. That said, this is awesome work.

Very cool! Since you're compositing, you might consider duplicating the grayscale and offsetting it about 3 frames to give a ghostly trail behind him. Perhaps this would be cliche-ic, but if one of the lights passed through the wall just shortly after Thom did, you could end up with that "pop" of light that so much sci-fi uses to indicate removal of the paranormal from the scene.

William, that's amazing. So well defined, and yet so economical on splineage. What's next? <hoping the answer is: Jessica Lange?

It's hot out here at LegoDude's college summer camp, so I made this little fan to keep him cool. Set the movie to loop and you too can stay cool! (Unfortunately for LegoDude, when the conference ends, and he goes on stage to close things down, he's going to be melting in the heat, lose his footing, and get sucked into the fan... sort of a LegoDude meets Mr. Bill ending to a fun debut of LegoDude! ) If anyone wants the project, I'd be happy to share. Need to zip together a package so you'd get the decals (cookie cutter and transparency map). This represents about two hours of work, so things like on/off knob and (d'oh!) electrical cord are left to you to do! For my needs this fan is 'good enough' for the size and focus of the closing piece. CoolMeOff.mov

Hi all, Thought I'd share my first public animation with a purpose! This is a short opener for a conference I'm helping with next week. LegoDude walks across the campus and enters the arts building (20 seconds; top frame is towards the end of that), then he enters the auditorium and walks down the aisle (a walk cycle down auditorium steps was fun!), climbs up onto the stage, then waves each arm to open each side of curtains (second image). After the curtains are open and the opening slide is onscreen behind him, LegoDude takes a bow (three different cameras capture this moment) -- last image. Thanks for the help of all those who worked with me on the walk cycle learning. Jim P.S. I would post the animation, but I haven't come up with a good compromise between file size and lossy compression of what is some highly detailed imagery.

OR he was so insane that he was didn't comprehend what just happened. Then the gun took control of his hand and started shooting. So many iterations. That's rich! You could see his other hand coming over to grasp the gun hand, trying to regain control... at which point the inevitible struggle ensues as the gun hand begins to slowly, inexorably turn upwards towards his head... Oh wait, that's been done before. Nevermind.

Yup: Cool, eh? Now you can start making cracks in the ground that swallow up whole groups of bad guys! Oh, sorry, in your world it'd be bad robots

Can't "mad" be taken in the sense of "insane" or at least a little odd? This animation was about a video-game generation of shadow boxing. How many awards did some of those great old comedic routines about shadow boxing garner? I was laughing the whole way through! Watch it again and consider it in the light of NOT angry but CRAZY! In that context, I don't think the caveman should have ducked on that first shot at him -- he was living his on little fantasy and didn't expect real-world interaction! So I suppose if the charcter was meant to be mad in the crazy sense, we should have been given more visual clues (the crazed look, etc.) to clear up the confusion. But I'm still going to go watch it some more and keep chuckling!

Cute! The one in the middle has nice lag in the bill movement. Did you animate that by hand or is that a lag property or some secondary motion?

John, are those capsules playing soccer? I ask because I was just reviewing the pictures I took tonight of my daughter's soccer game, and I can't help but notice the similarities... hmm... where's that one photo.....

That's not a blink! She's batting her eyes at me! The longer I drag the playhead back and forth through the first quarter of the .mov, the longer she bats her eyes at me! I like it! (Is her head mostly grey, or is that shadow behind her face? Very nice... thanks for sharing... now back to my/your adoring lady friend....