Behind the Scenes - League of Legends Cinematic: A Twist of Fate

Awesome cinematic from Blur!



Behind the Scenes - League of Legends Cinematic: A Twist of Fate 




League of Legends Cinematic: A Twist of Fate

[OBLIVION] Interview With Animation Supervisor Steve Preeg

 Simon Preeg, Supervising Animator at Digital Domain, talks to ART of VFX about the animation in OBLIVION. An Academy Award-winner for best visual effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Preeg’s work can also be seen in Tron: Legacy, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Flags of Our Fathers, I, Robot, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and King Kong.




Also check out // Behind The Scenes of OBLIVION
 

Concepts by Daniel Simon

The State of the VFX Industry and where do we go from here (NAB SuperMeet 2013)

Scott Ross and Scott Squires speak about the Past, Present and Future of the VFX Industry and potential solutions to the myriad of problems facing us all.

Effects Corner - Scott Squires blog

VFX Business - Scott Ross blog


The State of the VFX Industry and where do we go from here from Rick Young on Vimeo.

Leaked: Disney's 'Frozen' Featurette

Speed Kills - Why You Can't Outrun a Cheetah

Great reference footage here!

Cheetah running full speed - Running slow motion (1,200 FPS)

Free SIGGRAPH 2013 Guest Pass From Pixologic

 
If you're planning on going to SIGGRAPH this year be sure to register for your FREE guest pass to the exhibit hall thanks to Pixologic!

The Anim Hot Seat

New dailies/review chair for the anim dept. here at Framestore

Autodesk: Pixar Animation Studios, The OpenSubdiv Project

Join special guests, Bill Polson, Dirk Van Gelder, Manuel Kraemer, Takahito Tejima, David G. Yu and Dale Ruffolo, from Pixar Animation Studios' GPU team, as they show how real time display of subdivision surfaces helps artists be more productive, and how this code is open source and engineered for ease of integration.

OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high-performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. The code embodies decades of research and experience by Pixar.

Join us for this informative webinar and see how Autodesk and Pixar are working together to build technology with stunning real-time results.

Animation Reference Of The Day! (from back in the day)

Some great dance footage here to the song Give Life Back to Music from the new Daft Punk album.

7 Hidden Patterns of Successful Storyboards

A great video by Sherm Cohen! Check out more of his instructional videos here

// Storyboard Secrets

Also check out

//Storyboard Secrets YouTube Channel

The Don Bluth Collection of Animation (SCAD Digital Collections)

Check out this great collection of Don Bluth animation material over on the SCAD Digital Collections website!

The Don Bluth  Collection of Animation via SCAD Digital Collections

Finally the first trailer for GRAVITY

First trailer for Gravity is out! It's been a longtime coming! Pumped for all the Framestore artists that worked on the film! Proud to have been apart of the super talented animation team! You all rock!

Plymptoons! Bill Plympton Talks About Drawing At the 49th New York Film Festival

Bill Plympton talks about his career as an independent animator and demonstrates some of his work.

RIP Ray Harryhausen 1920 - 2013

Amazing artist, animator, and filmmaker.  A legend in his own time. He will be missed.














The Harryhausen Chronicles (1998)

An Evening With Jim Henson and Frank Oz (1989)

In July 1989, Jim Henson and Frank Oz made an appearance at the Puppeteers of America national festival at MIT in Boston. The event was documented and added to the Puppeteers of America audio-visual archive with a special introduction by Frank Oz made in 1993. Throughout the one-hour discussion, Henson and Oz perform Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog, Cookie Monster, Animal, Fozzie Bear and Grover. Some of the topics include the history of Henson Associates, research on Sesame Street, and behind the scenes info about the Muppets, The Dark Crystal, The Jim Henson Hour, and Little Shop of Horrors. Frank Oz also demonstrates how they perform the Muppets on film and television.

ILM - Realtime Facial Animation With On-the-fly Correctives (SIGGRAPH 2013)

More info here: Hao Li -  Realtime Facial Animation With On-the-fly Correctives

 Published on Apr 19, 2013

SIGGRAPH 2013 Paper Video: We introduce a real-time and calibration-free facial performance capture framework based on a sensor with video and depth input. In this framework, we develop an adaptive PCA model using shape correctives that adjust on-the-fly to the actor's expressions through incremental PCA-based learning. Since the fitting of the adaptive model progressively improves during the performance, we do not require an extra capture or training session to build this model. As a result, the system is highly deployable and easy to use: it can faithfully track any individual, starting from just a single face scan of the subject in a neutral pose. Like many real-time methods, we use a linear subspace to cope with incomplete input data and fast motion. To boost the training of our tracking model with reliable samples, we use a well-trained 2D facial feature tracker on the input video and an efficient mesh deformation algorithm to snap the result of the previous step to high frequency details in visible depth map regions. We show that the combination of dense depth maps and texture features around eyes and lips is essential in capturing natural dialogues and nuanced actor-specific emotions. We demonstrate that using an adaptive PCA model not only improves the fitting accuracy for tracking but also increases the expressiveness of the retargeted character.:

Interview with Charles Schulz

More about Charles Schulz and the Peanuts cartoons here:  PEANUTS

A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

This is awesome!

Moving Atoms: Making The World's Smallest Movie

Check out more great behind the scenes science goodness here  ATOMIC SHORTS