Ballet Dancer's Pantomime Performance of A Fight Between Two Kids

How amazing is this performance -- great physicality, timing and illusion. Love it!

Fargo: Framing Relationships

How Stanislavski Reinvented the Craft of Acting

Goodbye Uncanny Valley?

Matt Williames CalArts Lecture 2017

 Here's a great lecture by animator extraordinaire Matt Williames at CalArts.

Check out his blog here:

// Hand Drawn Nomad

Interview with Legendary Artist Jules Engel

Nathan Fowkes and Bobby Chiu Talk Composition

Eric Goldberg's Advice for Young Animators

DuckTales - Animation Breakdown

I'm a BIG fan of the original show! This new reboot definitely has potential. Looking forward to catching some of the new episodes. The animation looks great!

// Watch the Entire Rebooted ‘DuckTales’ Pilot Online for Free

Unity - Real-time Cinematics & Storytelling (Siggraph 2017)

VFX of “Attraction” Motion Picture from SIGGRAPH 2017

Some nice vfx work in this show! Really liked the creature design and animation -- great!


VFX of “Attraction” | Mikhail Lesin | Houdini HIVE at SIGGRAPH 2017


Cameron Fielding Anim Reel

Interview With Composer Thomas Newman

Writing With Light Vittorio Storaro (1992)

Interview Artist Albert Handell

Andrew Lloyd Webber in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda

Change The Way You Think

This is such an inspiring uplifting personal story by renowned photographer (and fellow Tennessean) Jeremy Cowart. His journey through early academic/life struggles, art school discoveries and unimaginable commercial success is EPIC!  The world needs more artists like Jeremy Cowart.






Check out more of Jeremy's remarkable work at his website:

// Jeremy Cowart

10 Most Effective Editing Moments of All Time

Interview With Legendary Cinematographer James Wong Howe (1974)

A Study of Comedy: Aki Kaurismäki - Hopeful Cynicism

This is an in depth video essay by Lewis Criswell focusing on the 'Hopeful Cynicism', comedy and psychology in the works of director Aki Kaurismaki. Excellent reference!

Boot Camp: A Best Fiends Animation

This was a super fun project I had the pleasure of animating on at Reel FX. I had a couple of shots with the main slugs and the end shot of the slug smashing his face on glass. The characters were great to work with and the voice talent rocked!

// With Animated Shorts, ‘Best Fiends’ Mobile Game Startup Seeks to Follow Flight of ‘Angry Birds’ (via Variety)




Behind The Scenes //  Boot Camp: A Best Fiends Animation

The Dolly Zoom: More Than A Cheap Trick

Beauty and the Beast: Stories From the Animator's Desk

Cornell Univ: Powerful Image Morph Technique (SIGGRAPH 2017)

// Visual Attribute Transfer through Deep Image Analogy

Jing Liao, Yuan Yao, Lu Yuan, Gang Hua, Sing Bing Kang

'We propose a new technique for visual attribute transfer across images that may have very different appearance but have perceptually similar semantic structure. By visual attribute transfer, we mean transfer of visual information (such as color, tone, texture, and style) from one image to another. For example, one image could be that of a painting or a sketch while the other is a photo of a real scene, and both depict the same type of scene. Our technique finds semantically-meaningful dense correspondences between two input images. To accomplish this, it adapts the notion of "image analogy" with features extracted from a Deep Convolutional Neutral Network for matching; we call our technique Deep Image Analogy. A coarse-to-fine strategy is used to compute the nearest-neighbor field for generating the results. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed method in a variety of cases, including style/texture transfer, color/style swap, sketch/painting to photo, and time lapse.'

Reference: NASA Image and Video Library

// NASA Image and Video Library



Great reference material here! More about the collection below:

// From the stars to the cloud—NASA image and video library comes home

Bill Nighy On Acting

The Power of Sound and Sight

Here's a powerful video essay breaking down the important storytelling element of sound and the profound enveloping nature of cinematography in Elem Klimov's film Come and See. Amazing!

The Matrix: A Lesson in Effective Scene Transition

Interview With Animator and Filmmaker Felix Colgrave

Thinking, Indecision, Emotion Reference: Ten Meter Tower

There is some great performance reference in the is short film. The fear, indecision and waves of emotion that the jumpers deal with is very genuine. The focused thinking, gestures and micro expressions are fantastic. 

// Ten Meter Tower: Would you jump? Or would you chicken out?

Star Wars Archaeology Panel 2016

John Knoll, Chief Creative Officer, Doug Chiang, Vice President Executive Creative Director and Kevin Jenkins, Supervising Art Director take attendees on a journey through amazing stories and rarely seen imagery from the Star Wars films.

Interview With Animation Director Rob Coleman (AWN 2014)

Viola Davis on Acting

Steve Williams: Re-visiting CG Jabba 20 Years Later

Has it really been 20 years since the release of  Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition? Hard to believe! Here's a great article featuring an interview with Steve 'Spaz' Williams explaining how he animated Jabba in a restored (previously deleted) scene with Han Solo for Star Wars Special Edition.

// You’re a wonderful human being: re-visiting CG Jabba 20 years later

Recent Work: Sky & Lego Batman Movie Commercials

Just finished up on a series of Lego Batman commercials. It was so refreshing to animate in this style! To kick off the project we had to shoot two of our own Lego stop motion shorts using real Legos. The animation director brought in some large boxes of bricks and characters for us to work with. We had a blast shooting those tests! I'll find mine and post them along with the other commercials when they're released.



// Ad of the Day: Sky Broadband's Tech Team lend a helping hand to Lego Batman