07/01/2009

After reading about it on the blog at biteycastle.com, I went out and bought this fantastic new book, Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Effects Animation, by Joseph Gilland, who worked on the visual effects for a bunch of Disney's more recent animated movies like Lilo & Stitch and Tarzan. And I say this - anyone who's even remotely interested in animation - be it hand-drawn or 3D - should go buy this book right now. I'm honestly not much of an artist or animator myself - but even so, I'm one of those people who's incredibly anal about not cutting any corners in my attempts to get better at the craft (well, sometimes...) - and this book really reinforces that to a T. I've barely begun reading this book - but one of the first pages shows how the natural shapes of the peaks of a snow-covered mountain range uncannily mirrors the shape of menacing waves in a rough ocean storm - something I'd never even noticed or would have thought about before...Blew my mind. It's already deepened my respect even more for the people who worked on the many animated TV shows and movies I've enjoyed (especially all of the people who did the element-bending effects on Avatar: The Last Airbender.) Seriously, in case I haven't praised it enough yet - all people who call themselves animators - even those who want to focus on just character animation, or are just casually interested in animation - should buy this book and keep it right next to their copy of The Animator's Survival Kit.

-RavenStar

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06/16/2009

For those who haven't heard about it yet (somehow, since this journal entry's like 2 weeks behind as it is...): Comedy Central's ordered 26 new episodes of Futurama! Whoo!

http://news.toonzone.net/articles/30091/new-episodes-of-futurama-coming-to-comedy-central

-RavenStar

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