I will be attending the Irish Businesswomen’s conference in Mullingar on Thursday so if anyone is going along I’ll be the one blinking as if she hasn’t seen sunlight for awhile.

Canon 10D 28mm, f3.5, 1/45, ISO 400

This is Bryan, one of my animation students and the creator of the excellent film I’m linking to below. He animated this on paper, scanned it into the computer and animated it using Flash. Funny stuff:

via Drawn is the latest animation by Graham Annable. Wonderful timing in this short, such simple animation but the facial expressions, looks between the characters and the music are all so well done. Very impressive when you know that he put it together with iMovie, the free software that comes with Apple Macs.

Oh, and of course, there are zombies…that always adds points in my book.

Via Drawn! and Kean Soo is this latest short by Blur Studios in California. They’re the same studio who did Gopher Broke which I linked to before as one of my favourite animated shorts.

I would love to see this on the big screen or at least at a better resolution because the details are just beautiful. I love the lighting and the fabric when the giant machines first step out of the forest. Interesting tidbits…the female character and her “assets” are down to a female character modeller and lead, Sze Jones. Also, Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob Squarepants lends his voice to the English gentleman.

Update: Aww, it seems the content has been removed. If I find the clip anywhere else I’ll replace it…sorry if you missed it.

Update 2: Thanks Dave for the new You Tube link!

From Ian Benny Kenny, the same guy who did the fantastic animation for the Garda Prank Call recording, comes this latest short. Ian, you’re a master of Irish facial expressions, I love it!

“…stuck it in the back of the net!”

Love this! (Click the picture to watch)

Found on Motionographer via Drawn! this is the title sequence to the Platform Animation Festival in Oregon this weekend. Created by directing duo Smith and Foulkes using a Canon DSLR:

Smith & Foulkes used a Canon Digital SLR camera linked up to a laptop allowing them to capture frames and play them back checking the shots as they went along. By shooting digitally Smith & Foulkes ended up with a much larger image size to work with when compared with the normal 35mm motion picture frame. These frames were then taken into After Effects and Photoshop for a clean-up where people and rigs from shots were removed. A final grade was then added in Flame.

Other little gems from this duo are the excellent Robinson’s ads that are running at the moment (Raise them on Robinsons):

and the classic “Hate Song” ad for Honda:

In honour of International Women’s Day the image above is a link to English animator, Joanna Quinn’s short film “A Girl’s Night Out” from 1986 (might not be suitable for work). This was her student film and since then she’s gone on to animate many other short films and she’s also the creator of the Charmin toilet paper ads. I wanted to post one of her other films, “Body Beautiful” but unfortunately couldn’t find it on the internet. There are clips of it as well as of her other work on her studio’s webpage Beryl Productions.

In my experience of the animation world, women animators are in the minority. It’s getting better but in any of the studios I’ve worked at before now the women have been few and far between. There are plenty of women in production, marketing and HR positions but animation positions are almost always held by men. This gets even more apparent when it comes to animation directors. In fact, I’d never met a female animation director or supervisor until I started working here in Brown Bag where there are two…Bronagh O’Hanlon and Cat Little.

When I first went out in the 1990′s with my portfolio under my arm to try and find someone to hire me I did encounter some attitudes that I thought would have been consigned to the dim and distant past. In one of my very first interviews I was told by the person interviewing me that they didn’t like to hire girls because it was distracting to the almost exclusively male artists and programmers.

I persevered and eventually got to work as an animator (although it took another three years but that’s a story for another day) and over the last eight years I’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of women I get to work with.

I’m not sure why there are so few of us in this business, although reading the infamous letter about Disney’s old policy on not hiring women shows why it might have started out that way. There is the opinion that women are only interested in making artistic films about social or personal issues whereas men are more likely to go for entertaining films which are always going to find a wider audience. I don’t like those kind of generalisations though mainly because I don’t think it applies to me or many of the women I’ve worked with.

This year’s Oscar for Best Animated short was won by a woman, Torill Kove, something that’s happened maybe only six times in the history of the awards. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come.

A comment left by Kris here led me to go looking for this film and I’m not sure if it’s the one Kris was asking about but I can’t think of any others that fit the description. It’s “The Man Who Planted Trees” a Canadian film by Frédéric Back from 1987. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated film and is widely considered to be one of the best short films ever created.

Thanks for reminding me of it Kris, even if it’s not the one you meant, I’ve not seen it in years! If I’ve got the wrong one let me know.

Link to Google Video page in case the embedded one doesn’t work.

Yesterday afternoon I got an email from an Irish animator, Ian Kenny, who funnily enough I intended to post about as part of an update to an earlier post. Last week, totally unrelated to that, he had been sent a link to the Garda Prank post and thought it would be a great clip to animate. The result can be viewed on his site HERE and it’s absolutely brilliant, he’s captured the expressions and timing perfectly. Great work Ian!

And while you’re there why not check out some of the other short films on his site.

NOTE: It would seem that Ian’s getting some heavy traffic to his site so it’s down at the moment. I’ll leave the link pointing to the YouTube version for now.

Update: The site is back up and running so you can now watch the animation in high-res, non-YouTube, niceness.

Here’s the link to the YouTube version as Ian’s poor site is obviously buckling under the stress of all that lovely traffic

This is the last of the body mechanics animation exercises that I did for my course. I posted this one when it was at an earlier stage and this is it all cleaned up. There is an acting piece to follow…at some point…after this NaNoWriMo craziness is over.