What makes a good film

I feel the need to clarify some points that may have caused my feud with Sally. My thoughts on a good film:

A good film should flow and give viewers something to latch onto. Its characters should be rich and varied. This is the advantage that audio brings to the table. When characters talk, we understand them better, the movie flows better.

On under- analyzing cartoons

I guess I am the culprit that Casey was naming without naming in his last blog post. For those who do not know the backstory, I suggested making our cockroaches silent, as they are in real life. I thought this would be a metaphor for the realism we are trying to bring into cartoons. Casey thinks I’m over-analyzing the cartoon which should just be for fun. But this is a dumb thing to say… all I’m trying to do is put some flesh on the weak bones that is our story.

Overanalyzing cartoons

I though about our tendency to over-analyze our story after our last group meeting and after reading this recent post on Cartoon Brew. Amid discusses an entire journal devoted to over-analyzing cartoons. Ultimately we are just seeking to entertain and many viewers may not care about some of the details we discussed.

Looping through an array in Flex

I’ve been trying out the new Flex development environment. But I get erroneous behavior when I try to loop through an array. I get an error in the following code:

var cockroachNames:Array = ["John Cockroach", "Simian CockRoach",...]
for (var name:String in cockroachNames) {
    hashMap.put(name, new CockRoach(name));
    hashMap.get(name).generate();
}

Horton Hears a Disaster!

This movie was not as well received as it should have been:

From We Love Movies: If you’re hoping for another ‘Finding Nemo’ or ‘Ice Age’, this won’t compare. I had high expectations that the wit of Jim Carey and Steve Carell would make this a non-stop laugh – in fact it was a long bore. This movie will make a lot of money as parents look for a 2hr babysister over the school holidays.

Mentoring and Inspiration

From Thinking Animation:

Angie here, I sat here this afternoon folding laundry, while listening to the Glen Keane Podcast Part Two on Animation Podcast and I caught myself nodding over and over again. Part One is interesting, but Part Two really gets to the heart of things. Glen talks about his experience mentoring under the greats at Disney and how welcoming those people were. He talks about how sometimes he would just leave the studio when he would get stuck and go to the library for inspiration. Finally, one of the best points he brings up is in reference to his film Rapunzel. He speaks on his direction with this CG animated film as “being informed by hand drawn principles.”

All of these points were what had me nodding my head. Our book Thinking Animation is written to do just this! Our book helps the 2D animator understand how to translate what they know about hand drawn animation into using the tools for CG and shows CG animators how to apply traditional principles to their animations using the machine. We even have a chapter called the “Thursday Animator” that deals with exactly what he describes when he gets animator’s block on a shot. Booo-yahhh!