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.
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!
Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to take a look through the Telestereoscope, but didn’t want to get rust and playa dust all over your fingers, I’ve got good news: we just installed a shiny (stainless steel!) new one at CuriOdyssey, a very cool science museum in San Mateo! Click through for more photos of the work in progress.
Well that was fun! A bunch of us won an award from the Visual Effects Society for our work on the character of Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon. Go Toothless!
And here’s an uncut video of the award ceremony. Our part starts around 11 minutes in (and at about 14:40, you can see Raquel in the audience looking very chic!)
