A while back I posted about a wonderful children’s book app based on a short film. Now you can watch that short film! It’s lots of fun.

Check out this amazing talk by Jason Schleifer!

If you haven’t heard our interview with him yet you can listen to it by following this link.

I had a chance to check out this past weekends animation offerings and I must say that I was thrilled with both.  First was the Toy Story short Small Fry that is playing in front of The Muppets.  This is the first animation I’ve seen from Pixar’s new studio Pixar Canada.  It came out great and for a short the quality was right up there with the film.  The story was fun and very entertaining.  I can’t wait to see more out of that studio.

I then went and saw Arthur Christmas.  From what I’ve heard the production wasn’t very smooth (what ones are) but you couldn’t tell, the film was fantastic.  The word sincerity kept coming to mind.  The story and it’s characters, especially Arthur, were very endearing.  I’m a big fan of holiday specials and films around the holidays, and animation has always lead the way in bringing the holiday magic to life.  Arthur Christmas does just that and I can’t wait to add it to my holiday collection when it comes out on Blu Ray.

Let us know if you had a chance to see either of these two this past weekend and tell us what you thought in the comments below.

Thanks,

-Steve

The documentary The Human Animal can be seen for free on DocumentaryStorm.com (all 6 parts of it!)

It’s a fascinating documentary about our species. PART ONE focuses primarily on body language across all cultures.  Really interesting stuff.
Fair warning though, the first few minutes features naked people.  Just sayin’.

|Jacob

Thanks to Eric Buescher of BGSU’s Computer Art Club for the link.

It’s called Leave Me the White ( LeaveMeTheWhite.com ) and they store countless screen captures from LOTS of films and tv-shows.  Including seasons of Battlestar Gallactica, all of Firelfy, comedies like Arrested Development or 30 Rock, films like The Usual Suspects, Pirates of the Caribbean, Fight Club, the list goes on and on and on.  The actual amount of images is quite mind-boggling.  For a random example, there are over 2,100 images captured from the film The Departed, and between 600-1000 images per episode of Firefly.  Wow.

“Why is this relevant?” you may ask…
Well, this can be a great source of inspiration for staging ideas, color keys, lighting concepts, facial expressions, posing, etc.

Random screen capture of screen captures from a random episode of Firefly.
(The above sentence actually makes sense. Honestly.)

I suggest you bookmark it.  You never know when you might want to reference a film/show for inspiration.  A series of still images forces you to see composition and color far more than when you’re distracted by movement.  Note that in the image above there are 10 pages containing over 900 images.  It’s almost too much.  (almost.)

|Jacob