Lovecraft Student Competition

Through the ASIFA Hollywood Educators list, I was alerted to this:

Get student work on the screen before it is completed
Call For Student Animations in Progress
Just 90 seconds of animation and a title card!

The Los Angeles H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Sep 27-29, 2013 - Warner Grand Theatre, San Pedro, CA) is looking for festival bumper films.

No entrance fee. Bumpers are guaranteed to screen at the festival and each Student Filmmaker gets one free festival pass and a discount on other festival passes. Student retains copyright. All bumpers will then "live forever" on the HPLFF's YouTube channel.

APPLICATION AT: http://www.hplfilmfestival.com/webform/application-student-bumper-competition

Final Projects

A reel with final projects from last semester is up on youtube. Next to a short version, I also uploaded this extended version:

 

Rendering Animators Obsolete

Now that the semester is over I can safely tell you that in Maya you can actually have the computer do everything for you. Just watch this tutorial (via the Hollywood ASIFA Educators Mailing List)

Power to the Cores!

If you think the machines in the lab are rendering slowly, look at the task manager. You will see that Metal Ray is only using about a maximum of 25&perc; of the power: two out of four CPU cores

Googled for a solution, found one on Creative Cow: Go to the Batch Render Options (hit the box) and under Parallellism, turn off Auto Render Threads and set Render Threads to 8. Turning off Render on network machines may also be needed.

Happy Rendering

Atomic Movements

If you think animating in Maya is tedious, consider this:
 

A Boy And His Atom - The World's Smallest Movie from Nico Casavecchia on Vimeo.

This movie was actually made by moving individual atoms. Here is a "Making Of"
 

Blinky! Louis taking over Jimmy's account!

Blinky™ from Ruairi Robinson on Vimeo.

Look what I found!

Rotoscopes from Disney animated films superimposed with their real-life models  <-- Click here for website