Okay here’s something fun: this goofball will be speaking at the THU Main Event 2024 in Tróia, Portugal! For those who don’t know it, THU is an annual gathering of artists working in film, games, comics, and more. Or, as the organizers describe it: “a 6-day event designed to be a transformative experience filled with innovation, genuine connections, and a creative mindset. It’s the perfect place to take some time for yourself, reset, and fill your mind with innovation and creativity. THU2024 marks the 10th edition, and it promises to be an epic event with an unbelievable lineup of artists and the ultimate creative reboot!”
I’ll be giving talks about animation, non-photorealistic rendering, and my recent research, and (if all goes as planned) also a live demo of Big Wet Pixels with audience participation!
Image excerpted from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (1993)
Here’s something new! A group of researchers from MIT, Stanford, Cambridge and UW Madison have put together a new interdisciplinary workshop “at the interface between cognitive science🧠 and computer graphics🫖“, aptly named COGGRAPH. I’ll be on a panel about non-photorealistic rendering, next Tuesday, July 16th, at 11am Pacific (2pm ET). It’s virtual, free, and open to the public. If you’re interested, you can sign up here to see it!
It’s not every week you have to fly down to LA twice, but what a great reason to do it. “Age of Sail” was nominated in a bunch of categories, and won Outstanding Production Design at the Annie Awards, and Outstanding Visual Effects in a Real-Time Project at the VES Awards. I’m so grateful to have worked with this amazing team of artists, and and so proud of what we’ve accomplished together!
Jasmin Lai, Céline Desrumaux, Sikand Srinivas and Neth Nom at the Annie Awards.John Kahrs, Kevin Dart, yours truly and Theresa Latzko at the VES Awards. (Apparently I still don’t know how to keep a bow tie straight.)
For the first time, the Annie Awards will honor animated VR productions. Vying for the prize are “Age of Sail” by Google Spotlight Stories and Broadreach Pictures; AtlasV’s “BattleScar”; “Crow: The Legend” by Baobab Studios; “MindPalace” by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg GmbH; and Polyarc’s “Moss.”
In addition to the VR bid, Google Spotlight Stories’ “Age of Sail” came away with three other nominations, including character animation in an animated TV/broadcast production (Sikand Srinivas); character design in an animated TV/broadcast production (Bruno Mangyoku); and production design in an animated TV/broadcast production (Celine Desrumaux and Jasmin Lai).
Gnomon released the video of the making-of talk that John Kahrs and I did. (John’s part is not to be missed: a life lesson in thoughtful, personal filmmaking.)
And AWN just ran a nice interview with me and my partner-in-crime, Chromosphere’s Theresa Latzko, about the art and tech challenges of the ocean, the look, and more.
Still reading? Really? Well, here’s some other nice press, about both VR and cinematic cuts:
For a few weeks last spring I had the tremendous pleasure of working with my dear friend Eric Rodenbeck on an amazing project: an Atlas of Emotions. Commissioned by the Dalai Lama, and based on decades of scientific research by Paul Ekman and his colleagues, the project aims to help people find a path through the complex landscape of their feelings toward a state of calm and happiness.
This was such a fresh and exciting experience. First, because Stamen is an absolutely lovely place to spend time for any reason. (Seriously: pineapple plants and bubble machines!) Second, because it forced a connection between parts of my brain that had never met before: emotion brain, meet design brain. Well, hello! My time on the project was brief and my contribution very small, but will that stop me from kvelling? No it will not! The rest of my feelings can be found right here.
Here’s something different: I have a new job! Today was my first day at Google Spotlight Stories. I’ll be working with some amazing filmmakers and technologists who are busy inventing a new kind of narrative visual storytelling uniquely suited to handheld mobile devices. If that sounds crazy, that’s because it is. It’s my kind of crazy. It’s exactly the kind of wild, inventive, “let’s try this and see what happens” attitude that got me interested in computer graphics in the first place, all those years ago. I couldn’t be more excited.
The video above really does a great job of capturing the delight of experiencing one of these stories for the first time. It’s almost impossible not to grin like a ninny. There’s not much more I can say about it right now, but there’s been some terrificpress about the projects they’ve created so far. I’ll share more when I can!
In the 1990’s, it was typical for production companies to start their demo reels with a clock-wipe countdown. Some companies would use this as an opportunity to say something about their style, and do custom animation. (Will Vinton Studios, I remember, had a particularly cool stop-motion countdown at that time.) I thought it would be cool for Xaos to have a countdown that reflected our particular style of work, so I created this drippy ink effect counting down from 10 to 1, and a drippy version of the Xaos logo, which we put at the beginning and end of our demo reel respectively.
Some time after this, our producer got a call from MTV. They had this show called “Top 20 Video Countdown”. They wanted to use this effect for the bumpers and interstitials. Could we add the numbers 11 through 20? Our producer said “of course”, and charged them a lot of money. But it didn’t really take me that long.
Here is my first short film. I made this at PDI in 1995, during a gap between commercials. I modeled and rigged the characters, did most of the animation, and developed the wobbly ink-line look.
The pigeons’ torso was a metaball surface driven by a series of spheres along a spline between the head and the body, which were both separate IK joints (so I could easily get that pigeon-head movement style without counteranimating.) The eyes, beak, legs and wings were separate objects, each of which got rendered in its own separate pass. Each layer had its vector outline traced (using a tool originally written for scanning corporate photostats for flying logos!) I processed the curves using a procedural scripting language to give them some physics and personality, and then rendered them as black ink lines with varying thickness (using a tool written by Drew Olbrich). Finally, I ran the rendered lines through some image processing filters to get the edge darkening effect, and did some iterated stochastic silhouette dilation to add random ink blotches where the lines were thickest. Simple, really! ;-)
After a long hiatus, Joseph Robertson’s excellent LAB magazine is back, and it features an interesting three-way interview he conducted with me and graphic designer Ian Lynam (author/editor of Parallel Strokes) over five years ago. It’s a fun meander through many of my favorite alphabet-related topics. The rest of the magazine is gorgeous and stimulating, as always. You can download the whole thing as a PDF for free, or buy a hard copy via print-on-demand. (I already have two earlier issues, and they’re handsomely bound and printed, well worth the cover price.) Or, just go straight to our interview. Enjoy!
