Digital Delineations of an Aspiring Animator

Tomorrow is Another J

jay — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:51:13 +0000

Jay’s blog is now at Tomorrow is Another J

http://anotherj.blogspot.com

Come by and say hi!

And on to the new year…

jay — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:49:55 +0000

Here’s to year full of animating and entertainment. ‘09 here we come!

A box is a box is a blur

jay — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:30:14 +0000

So the Ratatouille DVD/Blu-ray is out now! I’ve scoured the disc (Blu-ray version) and love all the extra features. I briefly appear in the “Good enough to Eat” documentary when though show Michael Walsh cooking food for the staff which is more than I expected. The box with my name on it also shows up directly in the background seconds before Remy is trapped but it is blurred out too much to read (look for the “Barrett” logo). The box literally takes up 1/3 of the screen but the camera’s depth of field is shortened to only show the rats. Oh well. It was still an amazing movie to work on and I loved every minute of it. I still can’t believe my name is in the credits, it is surreal. One of these days I’ll have to share some cooking/photography adventures that I experienced! Let’s just say the cooks in the Pixar kitchen got used to stepping over me…

Movin’ right along

jay — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:27:27 +0000

Hello once again my friendly blog!

As previously discussed, we (as in you and I) are slowly rebuilding our once-spirited communicative relationship! A lofty goal that I started mid-way through an extended bachelor period which was rife with free time and boredom. Yet, once that bachelorhood ended with the return of my wife and daughter and new task reared its head: moving to a new house!

Writing blog posts while sitting alone in an semi-organized apartment? Superbly easy!

Writing blog posts while transporting a disassembled computer to a box-filled, sans-internet, disaster zone of a house? Not so much!

You never know how much stuff you can accumulate over time until you are forced to box it up and move it. But fear not, for while the boxes remain the computer has been reassembled and the internet has returned. And thus my first post-promise post has appeared, albeit lacking solid info.

So until I have rectified my minor box infestation, further information will have to wait. But I shall leave you with this last tasty tidbit: My new house has stairs, a first for my dwellings! As such, the first thing I did was re-enact the famous Robin song shown below!

Toodles,

-Jay “I shall never say toodles again” E.

.
Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t include the video of this post’s namesake.

Rubik et al.

jay — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:07:56 +0000

Ah, my sweet little blog. How I miss thee. Much has transpired since we last spoke: My family grew by one just a few weeks after our last meeting, and soon after you were placed in a dark digital corner while your more family-oriented brother took over the oft-neglected reporting duties. But I have returned, my precious blog, renewed with vigor, passion, and a perplexity caused by a newly-purchased-yet-two-decades-too-late Rubik’s cube (as well as a temporary bachelorhood created by the vacation of 2/3s of my family to the ancestral home of Arkansas). As I have recently cast my colored cube aside, I am now ready to begin the renewal of our relationship.

But let us not get too hasty. The flame of our relationship is one that should not be rekindled too fast; for I fear it may burn out all-to-soon . In previous times, a return from blogging neglect was succeeded by a torrent of information pertaining to the recently-transpired key points of my life . When said torrent ran dry, the dark silence of neglect crept back into our relationship. Alas, nothing remained but the awkwardness of two once-fiery spirits coldly staring at each other, longing for fuel to revive their passionate pyre yet fearing the resources were permanently exhausted. As such, I will not extinguish our reborn flame with a deluge of information. Instead I shall carefully drip delicate drops of my life over a carefully selected set amount of time! Doing so will allow this blogging phoenix to grow and return to the magnificent creature it once was: strong and elegant; vivid and informative; a fiery behemoth able to to defend against the onslaught of the icy leviathan of apathy and neglect!

Thus my Homeric metaphor of fire and water concludes and I vow to return with less elemental (and somewhat sophpmoric) posts!

Truly yours,

-Jay

(In other words: I had a baby, forgot about the blog, 1 year has passed, the blog is now reopened, and I will post about the past 15 months over time so I don’t run out of things to say)

Pixar Interns: Hard-core

jay — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 20:35:42 +0000

Pixar Interns

Woohoo, baby Raeleigh is due any day now! And preparing for a baby means less time for blogging. But fear not, there are a few things I can post in the mean time! Check out this story about Pixar interns and their “hazing”. While nothing like this happened to me while I was there I am not surprised that it does happen. It just adds more fun to the place! I mean, come on, dodgeball! How great is that?!

Today’s short film is called “Tim Tom” and while the plot of the short still confuses me (what is the antagonist’s motive?) it is beautiful and has an ingenious way of showing character emotions.

Tim Tom

Myths of Internships

jay — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:44:57 +0000

This is the article I wrote for the Animation Mentor newsletter which was released last week. If you don’t get the newsletter I highly recommend it, it is chock full of great tips and interesting reads about the movie industry. You can find it at the Animation Mentor website under “Resources”.

I had a blast writing this and what originally started out as a single “tips and tricks” on internships exploded into a 3 part series overnight. When I was interning I received so much great advice (which also contradicted what many “prestigious” schools told me) that I realized I couldn’t put everything I had learned into one article. I’m super excited about writing the rest of these articles, it is just too bad that they won’t be released for another 2+ months since the newsletter team wants to spread out all related articles for variety.

I wrote article to be a general help for getting into the industry and not a specific company. Because of this I did not mention the company at which I interned because I did not want readers (or that company’s employees) associating everything I said with the company instead of taking in the general ideas of internships. It was mentioned that I use the company’s name as much as possible for credibility and personally I feel like that would detract from the piece. Anyways, I don’t exactly hide the name of the company on this website/blog so if someone really wanted to know they could probably find it. But that shouldn’t change the ideas of the article, regardless if it is referring to ILM, Disney, Pixar, Blue Sky, or any other major studio. From everyone I spoke to I discovered these common themes occur in many studios, not just mine.

Anyways, let me know what you think in the comments section below and if you think I have something completely wrong don’t hesitate to contact me!

Today’s animated short is:
Burning Safari!
The exaggerated poses, beautiful colors, and hilarious ending of this short help it stand out above the rest. I can’t believe it is a student film!

The Rat, the Badger, and the psuedo-Spaniard.

jay — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 18:59:50 +0000

Friday has come upon us and once again I find myself trying to squeeze in some extra animating time on my project before the weekend’s activities begin. My piece is coming along fine. I’ve noticed I have a tendency to overdo the switch from blocking to refining (aka stepped to linear) so what should take 2 weeks of work to complete (in school-assignment time, not real-world-professional time) I try to fit in one week. So now that we have two weeks left to work on this project I find I really don’t have two weeks worth of polishing to do. Not that the piece is perfect, far from it actually, I just feel that I should learn to turn in a piece that is half linear and half blocked rather than try to convert everything to linear at once.

The Ratatouille trailer is out and ready to be downloaded at a glorious 1080p resolution. I love the amount of detail in this trailer and I am quite happy with the overall look of the movie. The main rat’s (I don’t think his name has been officially released yet) run through the kitchen is beautiful and the squash and stretch used really looks like a rat’s body. I scoured rat documentaries (and Willard) for animators’ reference so it is good to see the reference was used!

I’ve been watching a lot of student films and animated shorts recently and I thought it would be fun to link to a new short with each post. For this post I offer you “Badgered“. The water color backgrounds and fluid body movements create one entertaining piece. It just goes to show you that you don’t have to have a lot of fast paced action or movement to keep the audiences’ attention. I’ve seen a few CG movies recently where the characters all had ADD and moved around the screen waaay too much. Sometimes we just need to slow things down.

Now that I’ve ended a paragraph with a preposition I think it is time for me to call it quits. Hope you have a great Friday!

P.S. Shawn Kelly imitating Carlos Baena critiquing Shawn Kelly is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I wish it could be linked but unfortunately it’s one of the AM things. If you are a student, check out Shawn’s overall critique for this week and prepare to laugh!

Animator vs Animation

jay — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:33:28 +0000

I found this quite humorous: what happens when your animations start to fight the software that created them?

While the concept is not new (I’ve seen some decades-old animations that had animated figures fighting the artist’s hand and pencil) it is fun to see it update with a “modern” twist.

Plus it is cool to finally see some Animation news on Digg.

Cars! Plus all of the coolest links…

jay — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 04:04:43 +0000

… are not found here. But boy, I have seen many links over the last few hours. Today I started sorting through some of the replies to AM’s Getting to Know You survey and sorting all of the favorite websites is going to be fun but will probably take all day tomorrow.

Anyways, this past weekend I saw Cars for the first time(?) and it was exactly how I remembered it. Its very good, very entertaining, and the only real complaint I have is negated by the fact that the the movie intended for it to be that way (more on that later). As for the whole ambiguous “seeing Cars for the first time” thing, I actually watched the movie 14 months ago before I left Pixar and it was 40% complete. Strangely enough, the movie changed very little from the version I saw then to the final version I saw this weekend. I think only 30 or so seconds were added here and there for comedic effect (either that or I forgot about those specific jokes). My biggest “complaint” about the movie is it gets a bit slow in the middle, but thats the entire point of the movie so I guess I can’t really complain. The ending is still one of the best I’ve seen on any sports movie.

The credits were almost more entertaining than the movie itself. I was very happy Pixar gave Joe Ranft a co-directing credit, and also dedicated the movie to him. Since most families will stay for the entire credits watching the extra scenes they will probably see dedication which actually gives it meaning. It bothers me when movies are dedicated to someone but they hide the dedication in some really small text towards the end of the credits that no one will ever see.

Also, I want the soundtrack to One Man Band, but that is a rant for another day.