jeffmilner.com

Lego Matrix Trinity Help is a fantastic stop motion video that’s been making the rounds lately.

From the creators at LegoMatrix.com:

After around 440 hours of work, and just in time for the 10th anniversary of the original movie release, we are pleased to present to you our Lego version of the famous Bullet Time dodge scene from The Matrix.

Enjoy:

[Lego Matrix Trinity Help]

(via)

This made me laugh. It’s an animation about Dock Ellis’ “legendary LSD no hitter”.

YouTube - No Mas Presents: Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No by James Blagden.

(via)

Originally intended for educational use, this “5th-grader-friendly” collection of clips combines notable visual effects of the past century.

[Visual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration | YouTUbe]

Disney has released the trailer for its newest full length feature animation, The Princess and the Frog. It will be the animation studio’s 49th animated feature and the first traditional animation feature since Home on the Range — my least favorite Disney animation of all time. I’m hoping things have improved…

[Princess and the Frog Trailer - YouTube]

The new movie will add to Disney’s profitable princess franchise, and, more importantly, with directors John Musker and Ron Clements at the helm, I suspect it will have the kind craftsmanship and story that will make it worthy to become part of the Disney Classics canon.

Ron and John’s directing credits include: The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, and Treasure Planet. These guys have worked with the masters and, of course, are masters in their own right.

The Animation Podcast has a great interview with Ron and John in three parts.

Back in the early days of Disney animation, it was not uncommon for animators to cycle animation forward and then backward, repeat action more than once, or use a cross-over technique in which two or more characters do the same action.

From The Illusion of Life:

Sometimes an action could be repeated just as it was in a second scene, but more often a new beginning or a different ending were called for. In these cases, the animator could repeat part of the action by borrowing drawings from the earlier scene. In other cases, there would be an action that could be repeated intact in the same scenes—a character climbing a slippery pole, or sliding down an incline, or being knocked down by a mechanical device.

I remember watching the Disney classics as a kid and thinking some of these scenes are very similar to other Disney movies. I never realized that this type of repeated action was so prominent between films until seeing this YouTube compilation:

[Youtube link - Resemblance]

Having said that, I don’t considering this to be as big of a cheat as to deserve a flippant “fail” tag so indiscriminately handed out by the pharisees of the net.

The copying done here, is not tracing, but transferring poses from one character to another, perhaps even from Disney’s large collection of reference footage. As anyone that’s done any animation knows, putting any animation onto a new character is still a very difficult task regardless of where you get the poses.

(via)

This hilarious Jack Kinney style Goofy short, “How to Hook up your Home Theater”, isn’t new — it was released in 2007, shown in theatres before National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, but it is significant because it recaptures the spirit of Disney in the golden era of animation. It aims particularly at recapturing the Jack Kinney classics like Hockey Homicide or a Goofy Gymnastics with a modern twist.

It’s available in the iTunes Store. Search for “How to Hook Up Your Home Theater”. It think it sells for around $2.

(via)

As I post this, I should actually be working on remodelling my bathroom. How apropos…

Procrastination, a short animation by Johnny Kelly of the Royal College of Art.

[Procrastination - Youtube]

Oktapodi, a short CG animation from the students at Gobelins.

[Oktapodi - YouTube]

I’ve played around in the open source 3D modelling software Blender a little bit. It may not be as fancy as the retail software on the market today, but if you compare it with versions of Maya or MAX from just a few years ago, it blows them out of the water.

A team of creative folks used the free software to make a short animated cartoon, Big Buck Bunny. They were funded by Blender foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community.

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so it’s free to watch and distribute so long as the credits are attached. Theoretically you could even download the source files, remix the movie and then sell it for a profit. Here is the original movie via YouTube:

Watch Big Buck Bunny now on YouTube or one of the many other official viewing options.

Competing in Ze Frank’s Color Wars, people have been recreating their childhood photos and posting them to the youngnow gallery. Here are a bunch that I animated using a morphing program:

[Color Wars Young to Old Morph - YouTube]