It was an entertaining seminar, and was great to talk to the guy that brought Australian kids like us those Kraft peanut butter man commercials. This guy’s hung out with guys at Aardman, Pixar and Dreamworks. Awesome to see Australians still kickin’. Go check out his workand love the wonderful old art of stop motion. NOW.
Torsten Reil works with NaturalMotion (creators of Endorphin) to create a blend of amazing animation simulation based upon biological models and behaviors in conjunction with human intervention in animation. The result? I’m guessing more believable organic motion within rigs for animation. Something this responsive could assist in gaining finer control of deformation in computer graphics.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with AI with endorphin and found it ridiculously fun. Not just as a tool for animation, but even as a fun toy to test and play with neural networks in a realistic physics environment. I think it’s ridiculously cool to mess with, because it’s almost like being able to direct your own virtual stunt actor. Of course- you are never going to be able to draw that empathy through motivation as you do in true character animation, but it’s certainly very exciting to see its application over the past few years as a tool for developing cg body doubles.
Of course, this video was made in 2003, and Endorphin has really taken off. You should see what they are doing with it now! Don’t take my word for it though, watch this video!
When I saw leaked Dreamworks concepts for this film, I was really excited. Pandas! Probably one of my favourite bears (actually, they are more closely related to racoons). Luckily I managed to get on an advanced screening to get it out of my system! The only doubts I had about this film was the ability to translate the amazing 2d concept designs by Nicolas Marlet (also worked on Monsters Inc, Madagascar, and Over the Hedge) For those who’ve been lucky enough to see it (or even trailers), you’ll appreciate how amazingly clean and rhythmic the shapes are within the character design. They did a really great job pulling the clean shapes into 3d, volumetric designs. Even still poses were very dynamic, because of the natural flow in design and solid posing. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen designs which have made me want to catch an animated flick. What’s more is that you’ll even get to see the designs animated in a really organic and stylised 2d sequences (which I loved the most) as well as a treat in the credits.
On a technical standpoint, the effects were not overwhelming, but complemented the designs so well. The fur’s stylised application kept it from distracting (which is such a common annoyance in more recent production) and the lighting was crisp enough to clearly highlight silouhettes in those amazing action sequences. If there was anything to dislike compositionally, I’d say that a some of the backgrounds had too much detail, and caused action to be lost amongst it all.
With a cast of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Lucy liu and Jackie Chan - you’d think you might find the familiar voices annoying, but they seemed to work naturally as the voice cast. The story was pretty solid and dorky, but it’s allowed to be! It is a kid’s film. The character acting and timing was brilliant. The audience I was with ranged from 6 to mid 50’s and everyone got good and clean laughs out of it (which I think is an amazing feat in this current age of filmmaking). I think the theme of self value really held the film together well, and wrapped up really tidily but in a manner that remained warm and thoughtful.
Was surprisingly enjoyable and I absolutely recommend that you see it. I may be a biased animator (:P) but it’s super fun and worth your money!
Still a lot of things that I would like to fix with timing, and follow through, as well as a few acting subtleties, but it came out pretty neat! Some people were interested to see my work flow in producing a piece like this (who are not animators), so I thought it might be neat to roughly break down the process!
