Okay, one more update for those of you in New York: we will also be doing the first ever live public demo of Patrick Osborne’s Spotlight Story “Pearl” in full 360° at Tribeca’s Interactive Playground on Saturday, April 16th. We’ll be there all day.
Here’s where you can find tickets to the event. Hope to see you there!
News is finally starting to come out about the project I’ve been working on for the past year at Google Spotlight Stories. It’s an interactive 360º story, directed by Patrick Osborne, called “Pearl”. We’re simultaneously making a 2D film version of the story, which will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, April 17th at 6pm.
It’s been an amazing experience so far, full of exciting artistic and technical challenges, and it’s opened my mind to some astonishing new things. I’ll post more about it when we’re done, but in the meantime, Cartoon Brew has a nice writeup with some images from the show. And if you’re in New York that weekend, swing by and say hi!
Making of MAD14 by Domestika from MAD by Domestika on Vimeo.
Here’s a cool making-of video about the design event I spoke at this past summer in Madrid. It was such a great experience. The organizers made a point of creating opportunities for the participants to really get to know each other, in keeping with the event’s theme of “connection”. I learned a lot, had tons of fun, and made some great new friends from halfway around the world. If you ever get the chance to go to this conference, don’t hesitate, just do it!
How to Make a Baby has been selected for the Kyiv International Film Festival‘s “100 Films in 100 Minutes” program, a collection of short-shorts that will travel to various cities throughout Ukraine from October to December 2014. The program looks amazingly diverse, and we’re delighted to be a part of it!
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.
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)
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!
On October 26th I’ll be giving my “Animator as Designer” talk as part of a new annual design event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here’s an article about the event in the Brazilian newspaper, O Globo. (Or see Google’s English translation of same.) If you’ll be in Rio that week, stop by and say “oi”!
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.
Solar Eclipse May 2012, a set on Flickr.
What a great eclipse! We made makeshift safety goggles out of the Mylar I’d bought, some cardboard, and whatever was kicking around the house. The goggles worked like a charm. For shadow projections, a simple kitchen colander turned out to be the perfect device.
Reminder for next eclipse: must shoot some timelapse of those crazy shadows.
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.
