Astronauts watch 'Gravity' in outer space

This made my day! It's pretty surreal to see our film being played in space, in the real ISS and watched by actual astronauts! Amazing! Also an interesting fact - Astronaut Scott Kelly and I have a Tennessee connection! He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and my hometown is just 20 miles east in Jefferson City, TN.  Small world! Wish the One Year Crew all the best!

 // Astronauts watch 'Gravity' in outer space

Behind The Scene: Edge of Tomorrow

Here's a short behind the scenes vid for Edge of Tomorrow featuring a  sequence we worked on at Framestore. I animated a couple of shots in this featurette. The shot where the mimic slams into the cars in the car park and the crash scene where the dropship smashes into the Louvre with the digital body double take over for Tom.

Disney Research: Visually Consistent Acoustic Redubbing

This paper introduces a method for automatic redubbing of video that exploits the many-to-many mapping of phoneme sequences to lip movements modelled as dynamic visemes. For a given utterance, the corresponding dynamic viseme sequence is sampled to construct a graph of possible phoneme sequences that synchronize with the video. When composed with a pronunciation dictionary and language model, this produces a vast number of word sequences that are in sync with the original video, literally putting plausible words into the mouth of the speaker. We demonstrate that traditional, many-to-one, static visemes lack flexibility for this application as they produce significantly fewer word sequences. This work explores the natural ambiguity in visual speech and offers insight for automatic speech recognition and the importance of language modeling.' via youtube

Lecture: Creature Designer Terryl Whitlatch

The Brave Locomotive - Opening Sequence Work In Progress

Very nice work in progress sequence by Andrew Chesworth!

Big Hero 6: Behind the Scenes

John Lounsbery Animation Drawings from Lady and the Tramp

Beautiful set of drawings by John Lounsbery (one of the nine old men) from Disney's Lady and the Tramp. They're up for sale today here: Heritage Auctions

Never-Before-Seen Color Production Slides from Star Wars (Lucasfilm / ILM)

These ILM slides are great and the images are huge! Wish we could get all 550 slides scanned ha ha

Heritage Auctions
A Large Collection of Never-Before-Seen Color Production Slides from "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back." 20th Century Fox, 1977, 1980. Approximately 550, all housed in a black binder, all with various stamps and dates and photo credits such as "Photo By: / Joe Viskocil" on the cardboard frames, depicting dozens of great behind-the-scenes shots of the two now classic films being made, emphasis is on both the outdoor and indoor sets as well as on the various spaceships, a few of the characters (like "R2D2"), and the production crew -- really compelling and detailed images that must be seen in person to appreciate the scope!
Each Slide: 1" x 1 1/2"; In Cardboard Frame: 2" x 2" Estimate: $1,800 - up.
Internet Bidding Ends:     Apr 18, 2015 at 10:00 PM CT

\\ Making The Millennium Falcon Bonus Clip

Your Creative Bank Account and Drawing a Drone Racer

Here's a great vid by Jake Parker. He packs it full of advice on drawing, inspiration and creativity. Gold!

Model Sheets: Lady and the Tramp

Check out these fantastic high-res model sheets from Lady and the Tramp! I downloaded them from the Heritage Animation Auction coming up this week. A couple of us from the anim dept here at Reel FX are planning on going to the preview showing tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Troglodita: Animation Rig by Sergi Caballer

Nice rig by Sergi Caballer for SPA Studios (Sergio Pablos studio)

Easter Yeggs

Belated Easter fun

Mediobanca - Institutional Video by Dadomani Studio

This is a beautiful project by Dadomani Studio.

Stromae - carmen // Animated Music Vid

Here's an excellent animated music vid that doesn't pull punches on social media. Directed by Sylvian Chomet (Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist).  More info over on CartoonBrew