Few more great shot animations of this year and already nominated and awarded.
Short movie about Garry at mental institution who is afraid to go through doors. Number of details in this animation is just great.
It tels story about old lady ready to die and how grim reaper fight with doctor.
And a bonus short clip from upcoming animation “Where Dream & Day Collide”. This looks promising and music is great too. Produced by Toxic.
So lately I was working on some test short animation rendered in Maya and composed in After Effects, just to learn some new skills. Here is one test scene not final but some progress 
. It took about ~1000 frames rendered in Maya, at ~1 minute render time per frame in Mental-Ray and 5 h composing. (I should have added some music ).
Short film “The Silent City”, written & directed by Oscar nominated director Ruairi Robinson. It tell story about 3 soldiers traveling at post apocalyptic world, on the outskirts of a once great city.
Beautiful short film animation about one men who is scarred to go through doors – door phobia.
Very good looking a full-cg animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.
Watch it in full screen HD and remember it is not real .
If you want you can download good quality video from torrent:
temporarygate.com/TheThird&TheSeventh.mp4.torrent
Here is video of post production in steps:
James Cameron "Avatar"
So James Cameron “Avatar” is being showed here for one moth already and still keeps cinemas sold out. It is one of the best movies of 2009 end. It tells story of paraplegic marine Jake Sully who steps into his killed brothers shoos for Avatar program. All action is placed in planet Pandora, which is very blue , same as native humanoid – cat like tribe “Na’vi”. Avatar is artificial “Na’vi” grown from native and human DNA and controlled by humans remotely, by brain signals. As basically CG movie it should set new standard for later movies and it has provided great views, but I was still disappointed by little details like wind. It was only added there some machinery created or it was important to show how flying mountains move and that created quite static jungle. Story in some places had glitches and in many ways was already told in other movies just using different environment.
Lately I have find out this article about “Avatar” being racist, but how can you call science fiction movie with alien races – racist. I really hate it people searching for racism in every place and I find it people who do this are the biggest racist of them all. No one cares about this in entertainment, because it is created to entertain.
And finally it is worth seeing just to know how good CGI should be created, compared to “Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” I have to say it is 80% better at least it does not feel so CGI.
So finally I have finished programming my Picasa integration into Wordpress plug-in to generate galleries with Shadowbox automatically. This is early beta, but at least it works and now galleries page is generated automatically. I can also insert galleries to news post like this:
Description: My 3D renders created with Maya.
Contains 15 photos.
Published: February 20, 2009 Updated: December 21, 2009
It allows to expand gallery in post, so you are not redirected to galleries page and still can see related text. Now just need to add ability for single images.
If you saw ET and Aliens movies you will see a lot of references and hidden jokes. Planet 51 is like reverse story of ET with Astronaut from Earth, called Chuck, on alien planet. While he expected to find deserted planet, he finds himself in alien planet at 50’s timezone, but with floating cars, little alien pets and some floating barbecue. For animated story it was quite fun to watch with all the references to sci-fi, ET and Aliens. Sound track was quite fun too with good old music tracks. You can read more on official site.
And I would say it was much more fun than “The Up”.
2009 year was really good year for stop-motion animation in my view . I was hooked on this type of animation after I saw Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. This year it gave two great stories “Mary and Max” and “Coraline”. Here are my favorites containing mystery, fantasy, dark theme and quite funny with proper understanding.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
“Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” was released in 1993 by Tim Burton and Henry Selick. It tells the story of Jack, who lives in “Halloween Town” and one day opens a portal to “Christmas Town”, there all the fun begins as Jack tries to re-create Christmas at Halloween. It has very defining style of Tim Burton with slim figures, dark theme, sarcasm, other jokes and singing. It was nominated for Oscar, won 4 awards and 5 more nominations. Here is short clip:
Corpse Bride
This was my second encounter with Tim Burton’s production on stop-motion. It was released in 2005 by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. “Corpse Bride” tells story of Victor and Victoria who should get married, but while Victor practices his vows in forest and gets them right for the first time, he finds him self married to Emily, the corpse bride. It features almost same style as “The Nightmare Before Christmas” but a bit lighter. It was nominated for Oscar, won 5 awards and 14 more nominations.
Coraline
It was released in 2009 by Henry Selick. “Coraline” tells a story about young girl, witch finds a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternative version of her reality, there things seems much better. But later she discovers that not everything looks as it appears. I really liked what one of the creators has told: “If it was movie it would be too scary to watch for children, but stop-motion animations allows to tell this story”.I also really likes sound track of this animation.
Mary and Max
This is the latest of stop-motion and probably best I saw. It already has won 3 awards and it was released 2009 by Adam Elliot. It’s a tale about pen-friendship between two very different people: Mary Dinkle, living in the suburbs of Australia and Max Horovitz, severely obese, atheistic Jewish man with Asperger syndrome who lives in New York City. Story mood is quite dark, but animations are full of sarcasm and jokes, witch for some people could be hard to understand and insult. Soundtrack is very light compared to images, but just great. It is also stated that it is based on true story. Recommend to anyone who likes good stories, but sometimes complicated.
So today is the day I finally created displacement map in ZBrush and successfully rendered in Maya. This was a test only, so I used very basic model in Maya contains 120 faces or 240 triangles here how it looks.
This is same model in ZBrush divided into almost 500000 polygons and modified to create some cracks and heights.
And here is final result rendered in few seconds in Maya using Mental-Ray rendering engine, not counting ~1h of doing all this 
. It could look nicer with more tweaking but I wanted to see it works.
Now moving on to creating something more interesting and fun.
Here is guide on how to do it: link.
