Category Archives: events

animation, events

Upcoming talk: MadinSpain

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I’ll be doing my “Animator as Designer” talk this June in Madrid, at a design event called MadinSpain. The event grew out of domestika.org, an online community for designers, architects, illustrators, animators, typographers, and other creative types based primarily in Spain. The video below gives a nice sense of the flavor of this event. I’m really looking forward to it. If you’re in that part of Europe the weekend of June 27th, come on by and say hello!

MAD 2012 – Making of from MADinSpain on Vimeo.

animation, events, travel

More about Rio Design Week

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Here’s some more nice press about tonight’s talk at Rio Design Week.

Tecnologia e desenho unidos pela diversão (O Globo, Oct. 17)
Criando mundos que se mexem (Secretaria de Cultura, Oct. 22)
Rio inspira olhares estrangeiros que veem arte por todos os lados (O Globo, Oct. 26)
Uma viagem ao mundo da animação na Semana Design Rio (O Globo, Oct. 27)

A panoramic view of the venue by day. Rio de Janeiro's Jockey Club is, as the name implies, also a racetrack!
A panoramic view of the event venue by day. Rio de Janeiro’s Jockey Club is, as the name implies, also a racetrack. But a racetrack with quite a view!

I also did an extra run-through of my talk Friday morning for a small private group, composed of designers from the Rio de Janeiro Creative Club, and publicists from O Globo newspaper. They were a great audience, and asked really interesting questions!

A nice, intimate audience for my first run-through of the talk.
A nice, intimate audience for the practice run.
The view from the stands at the Jockey Club by night. We saw a few horse races go by while we were setting up for the talk.
The view from the stands at the Jockey Club by night. We saw a few horse races go by while we were setting up for the talk.
A much bigger, sold-out crowd on Saturday night.
A much bigger, sold-out crowd on Saturday night!
animation, events, travel

Upcoming talk: Canterbury Anifest

Later this fall, I’ll be speaking at an animation festival in England. Canterbury Anifest is the weekend of October 5-6, and my talk will be Saturday morning at 9am. If you’re in the UK and yearning for nerdy discussion and pretty pictures, stop by!

My talk will be a variation of the “Animator as Designer” talk I gave at Animasyros last year. If you’ve already seen that talk, you should probably just sleep late and have a long breakfast. You look so tired, so skinny! But do come after lunch to see the other presenters from Aardman, Double Negative, and Pixar. Or watch a great selection of animated shorts. Or do one of the hands-on animation workshops. Really, it’s hard to go wrong. The whole event should be a lot of fun.

You can read more details about the event and the other speakers over at the Canterbury Anifest blog.

events, fun

Ready for the solar eclipse

Ready for the solar eclipse by otherthings

Getting ready for the solar eclipse… I bought some 0.2mm silver mylar, which is practically opaque, but lets a tiny bit of sunlight through (like, about 1/160,000th by my seat-of-the-pants estimate). One layer of it makes the sun seem about as bright as the moon. Two layers, and you can’t even see the sun at all.

THIS MAY NOT ACTUALLY BE SAFE AT ALL. I don’t honestly know, because I have no way of knowing how much UV light gets through this stuff. But I did use mylar to look at the last solar eclipse several years ago, and I haven’t gone blind yet, so there’s anecdotal evidence at least.

Here’s a good article explaining when and where you can see the eclipse. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, it should start on Sunday afternoon (May 20th) around 5:30pm, and reach maximum occlusion (about 90%) by 6:30pm.

animation, events, travel

Getting ready for Animasyros

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Two Saturdays from now, on September 17th, I’ll be giving a talk at Animasyros 4.0, an animation festival on the island of Syros, Greece. The festival will also be screening How to Train Your Dragon, as well as our short film How to Make a Baby. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hi!

Many thanks to my friend Gesine Krätzner for connecting us with the festival organizers!

animation, events, timelapse

Our Baby’s fall festival circuit

The “How to Make a Baby” festival tour continues, starting this coming Saturday with the first annual Stop Motion Film Festival in Los Angeles. This is the first festival I’ve heard of that’s dedicated entirely to stop motion animation. It’s in a tiny venue (55 seats!) in Echo Park, so if you’re in LA and love the medium, be sure to get there early! Here’s the whole schedule for the next few months:

As always, you can see the rest of the schedule on the festivals page.