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