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Another collection of great shorts by Gobelins for 2009's Annecy Animation Film festival.

A couple more great student films from the 2009 Cal Arts Prudcers Show.


A Werewolf Film by Noel Belknap

Study Hall by Jeff Liu

When thinking about animation exercises and films that you would like to do at home, it's easy to limit yourself to pieces that don't offer many technical roadblocks. But you typically end up limiting the degree of creativity and freedom that you could put into your work.

And then you see something like this.






"This one time..." by Nelson Boles

Gary by Clément Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sébastien Eballard & Quentin Chaillet - gary-lefilm.com




The students at Supinfocom sure are flexing their muscles this year with original films that are really pushing great new styles for CG animators.

Yankee Gal by Antoine Perez, Celine Desrumaux, Francois Pons, Gary Levesque - yankeegal.com

Love the look of this short film by Bertrand Piocelle and Marco Nguyen of "le building" fame. Just turn down your speakers before hitting play!

Galactic Mail, from the guys that made Sigg Jones. It is another action filled short film with some fantastic cinematic shots sprinkled throughout the piece. Looks like the whole thing was rendered on 2's and 3's which gives it a more classic 2D feel.

Check it out.


Galactic Mail from Asterokid.

I picked up Far Cry 2 on PC last week and to be honest, I am having a hard time playing past the 50% completion mark. What I see here is a game with a lot of promise, amazing tech and art backing it, but the final product falls flat due to odd design choices.



First off is the total lack of persistence in the game world. A lot of time and money was put into the fire simulation in this game. If I toss a molotov into a bush near a guard post, the fire will spread through the grass and tree's and if it can find a path, eventually burn down most of the guard. Ammunition caches will explode like fireworks and vehicles get destroyed. It's a lot of fun. Problem I have with it is, I can burn a guard post to the ground and then come back 5 minutes later and it has completely reset to default with guards waiting to take pot shots at me as I pass by.

There is a system in place that remembers which guard posts I have explored, why can't it set a flag to keep these posts in disarray? Fallout 3 did a great job of this, you could pass through area's of the game that you hadn't seen in hours or days and there would still be destroyed vehicles, buildings and bodies left over from your rampage through. Made the world feel much more immersing.

This lack of persistence also takes a toll on any attempts to siege the large towns that harbour the main warring factions of the game. Buildings just won't catch fire and enemies never cease spawning. I understand that they don't want you to be able to break off quest lines by completely annihilating these warring factions at their home bases, but it ends up making your character feel utterly powerless.



I also have some major issues with weapon handling and combat. For a game that is striving for this level of hyper-realism, there is a real disconnect when shooting enemies. Enemy soldiers can take a lot of bullets. Having to put 4 or 5 shots into an enemies torso when firing an AK47 really makes you feel like you're using a cheap energy weapon from a run of the mill space-marine FPS. Unless you're using a rocket launcher or sniper rifle, the weapons in this game feel gutless and as a result, aren't that much fun to use.


I also have to wonder about the lack of "Gibs" and damage effects in the game. Why take the time to implement the ability to shoot the leaves off of trees but have no interactions of that sort when firing on enemies?

Having a damage system should be a requirement these days. It's an immensely powerful tool for giving players a response to their actions. See Left 4 Dead or Gears of War for some great examples of what I mean.

My last points of contention are with the general flow and pacing of the game.

I am at the point now where I don't have the motivation to load this game up and to keep playing because I have just finished a mission in the far corner of the map and have a good 5-10 minute drive back to town where I can continue the games storyline. Does this make the game world more realistic and immersing? Perhaps more realistic, but the immersion factor isn't working for me seeing as I don't even really want to play now. The game has a transit system with 5 or so bus stations on each massive chunk of map that allows you to basically teleport between the corners of the levels or back to the center where the main "cease fire" town is located. Why not extend this transit system to the safe houses that players unlock? I don't quite see the point of having a safe house every couple miles if it's just for saving your game (which i can do at any time through the menu) or 'sleeping' in order to change the day/night cycle. Allowing me to travel between safe houses would streamline missions and actually give me some motivation to 'unlock' these shacks in the backwoods.

Interacting with NPC's is also a painful experience. Whenever I pick up a new mission, there are long lag times between the NPC talking to me and when I can interact with them again to accept the mission. I also have to press the interact button several times to both trigger the mission briefing and accept it. This makes it a chore to continue the storyline and turns the gameplay into: 5 minutes listening to NPC's spout their rushed dialogue, 10-15 minutes of travel time, 5-10 minutes of combat and exploration followed by another 10-15 minutes of travel time to start all over with a new mission briefing.

There are also your sidekicks/teammates/buddies that show up on missions or when you're dying to help you out. A few times these NPC's have been injured and I've made the mistake of trying to revive them. This locks me into a horrible sequence where I must either give them medicine or drag them to safety. While I'm bent over dealing with them, I am completely helpless and cannot break away from the act of helping them in order to defend myself. After mashing buttons to try and survive these frustrating interactions a few times I just decided to give up on ever helping downed teammates.



In closing.... Gorgeous looking game with some amazing tech behind it. Unfortunately the victim of some design choices that really sucked the enjoyment out of the game for myself.

These are all my personal opinions and may not reflect your own experiences playing the game. I have several friends that love the open world exploration aspect, which I can understand. I just cannot get around the chores that I am forced to do which end up being 70 or 80% of the gameplay.

After years of hearing about this show and never bothering to catch an episode on TV or rent one of the season's on DVD, I have finally taken a dive into Battlestar Galactica.





I'm still working my way through Season 1. The religion that the Cylons have adopted is a really interesting twist on the old "race of machines threatening to wipe out humanity" pitch.

Decided to open up maya over the weekend and tackle a few shots from the Mass Animation competition.

Voting in the contest is pretty aggressive so far, but after doing nothing but animating realistic humanoids for games for the last year, it was nice to do some cartoony stuff.

Feel free to toss me a sympathy vote if you're bored ;)

I really enjoyed this short film by Carlos Lascano. The whole thing has a really fun and beautiful vibe to it. I was also fascinated by the way he did the eyes on the 2D characters.


A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

My vice for the last couple weeks has been Valve's latest masterpiece, Left 4 Dead.

I can't recommend it enough, Valve's new game is a great ambassador for what I believe will be the next hot gaming genre, Co-op Survival games.

Gears of War 2 was also released just a few weeks ago with a similar multiplayer feature called "Horde Mode", where you and a team cooperatively play against waves of locusts. Horde mode in Gears 2 has also been the most popular online mode of play for that game in regards to total hours played. Seems like there may be a lot of demand for more games like this in the future.

Catch me online for some co-op action, Zooob on Xboxlive or Zoober on Steam.

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Peter Crafts, a good friend of mine has submitted his student film to the Aniboom Awards 2008 Animation Competition.





Pete is also currently looking for a new gig. Feel free to give him a shout.

Came across this video over on Keith Lango's blog. It's Ralph Bakshi explaining why how he got through the collapse of theatrical animation and what he thinks of the current state of the industry. I don't agree with everything Ralph says, but I love his point of view.

This was recorded in during the summer of 2008 at SDCC.

Things are still kicking up in Edmonton at Bioware. We're hard at work trying to wrap things up on Dragon Age: Origins.


Despite all the time that I have been putting in at work, I managed to get married back in August and we'll be heading off to Italy next week for the old honeymoon. I should have lots of photos to share when I get back.

Stay tuned.

Great mashup of 2D/3D.

Claymation animators are violent...

One of the teaser trailers for the game that I'm working on up at Bioware, called Dragon Age: Origins.

Another trailer was just released for the new "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" series. Looks like things are really coming along and I'm looking forward to seeing these episodes later this year.


A friend of mine, Kiaran Ritchie is over in Singapore right now doing some rigging for the series. He sounds pretty excited about it, so I'm hoping for the best.

Great comic....

Mass Effect was released last week. Even if you're not really into RPG's, I think most people will really enjoy the cinematic experience that the game has to offer.

Check it out.

Good ol'Conan.

By the Power of Grayskull!! See this movie.

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Spent most of last week flying around Canada and I am now happy to announce that I have just signed on with Bioware Corp. as a Cinematic Animator. I will be relocating to Edmonton, Alberta in a few weeks.

Bioware is known for their epic RPG games and have some impressive titles in development, inlcuding Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

Immigration: The Human Cost


"Until you live through it you have no idea how bad it can be......... Living in your summer home year round."

I hadn't done a walk in a long long time. So I decided to whip one up this week for some practice.

I attended this latest Vancouver ACM Siggraph event last night at the Vancouver International Film Centre.

Henry LaBounta and Eric Armstrong from EA Games gave a presentation called "Athletic Performance: Intelligent Believable Characters" which basically covered some new procedural animation technology that they have developed in house. This new tech handles blending character animation clips in games to give you a more believable and responsive on-screen performance.

As you all know, animation in games is generally different motion clips (walk/run/idle cycles) that are blended together as you tell your character to move around. Due the the fact that we want the characters to be responsive to the controls, the animation clips are often violently cut together as a character switches direction or action (run to slam dunk. etc.) which creates fairly obvious popping and feet sliding on screen. For the most part, you can't do much about this. Having a character instantly turn or stop when you give the command is needed for the gameplay to feel right.

However, with these new tools, blending these motion clips through procedural animation is getting quite a bit more efficient. They gave us a demo of their proprietary animation toolset to show us how animators could now tweak their cycles and actions while viewing the results in realtime. Their software essentially breaks the clips up into smaller chunks that are procedurally blended together.

This allows animators to slip in those actions involving characters planting their feet and pulling back on their center of gravity to slowdown and turn instead of jarring to a stop and returning to a fullspeed run cycle in another direction.

The results were quite impressive and definately added a lot more weight and believability to the characters on screen. While I don't see much of this being put to use outside of their sports titles at the moment, I can definately see it's implementation in other genres in the future.

Hopefully soon the days of floating characters sliding around the ground and popping between animation cycles will be gone from FPS and Fantasy titles as well.

Overall, good show. I belieeve that they will also be giving this presentation at GDC next week in San Francisco.

I recently came across this hilarious series of shorts called "Purple and Brown" on youtube. They were produced for Nickelodeon UK by a few of the folks over at Aardman.

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Just got home from seeing Night at the Museum. I liked it. One of those family friendly adventure/comedy films that I haven't seen much of in the last few years.



3 monkey slap fights out of 4.

Went to see Pan's Labyrinth tonight. It was a good movie overall. Not a "must see" in my book, but definately worth checking out if you enjoy a good fairytale thriller.