NEW LOOK TO OUR SITE

We have a new format for our website. Please send us comments about everything. It can be viewed at

www.splinedoctors.com

Please update your links. Thanks for the support and stay tuned for more Spline Casts and info.

-Andrew

New Blood Coming Soon

Yes its been a while since I have posted anything. I am sorry to say that Adam Burke, will be taking a break from Spline Doctors. The good News is that we possibly will be getting 3 really great new Spline Doctors. They are:

Mark Walsh - Mark has been working at Pixar a little longer than me (almost 11 years) He was directing animator on Finding Nemo and Supervising Animator on Ratatouille. He also just finished up some amazing animation on Doug Sweetlands new Short film. He is currently teaching animation at the Academy of Art

Travis Hathaway - Travis came on around the time finding Nemo and has become one of Pixars best animators. He did some of the best stuff on Ratatouille and is a great teacher. He and I ran the Pixar intern program last year. I am really happy that he wants to post on Spline Doctors.

Michal Makarewicz - Michal started on Incredibles. He then did some really great work on Cars and most recently Ratatouille and Wall E. He won an Annie award for his work on Ratatouille. He was one of my best students at the academy of art in San Francisco. I am looking forward to reading some of his posts.

Some other stuff thats going on

New Site Coming soon. We have a redesigned web site that is being done by Ben Lew. Its looking good. We may even get sponsored by someone. Anyway, hopefully it will be easier to find old posts and have a better overall look. Suggestions will be welcome. We will go live within a month.

Spline Casts:

I am going to get the ball rolling again with a fresh batch. Hopefully the next big one will be with Doug Sweetland.

Over and Out....

Andrew

John Kahrs Spline Cast - Polish

This may be the first interview I did. Its with animator John Kahrs. John Worked here from 1997 to 2007. He was nominated for 2 annie awards for his work on Monsters and Incredibles. His work on the films was always among the best. It had a great sense of weight, physicality and a high level of polish. I thought it would be good to interview him to help with teaching and just to talk to him about his process. John recently left Pixar and is now working at Disney Feature Animation.

Enjoy. Again, sorry for the lack of sound quality.
It was recorded directly onto an ipod

John Kahrs Spline Cast

Coming Soon.... Spline Cast Vault - John Kahrs

Its been a while since we have done any podcasts. In the next few days I'll post some or all of an interview I did with former Pixar veteran animator John Kahrs. The interview is focused mainly on polish. Its super ghetto quality, recorded directly on an ipod. Look for it soon! Sorry for the time its taking. We don't have any fancy sponsors.... :)

-Andrew

Class Posts

I've been trying to write posts on the class Andy and I teach at the Academy of Art, over on my personal blog. I didn't want to clog up this blog talking about our class, but if you would like to follow along and read about what we teach and the problems most students run into then give it a look.

Click here to read along.

--Dr. Stephen G.

Sack, Sack and more Sacks....

I challenged my class at CCA to take a piece of music and animate flour sacks to it... If they wanted to they could also pick a favorite sequence from a film they love and animate it with flour sacks. The purpose of the assignment is to explore staging, acting, cutting and most of all, Straight Ahead style animation. Here are a few of the Sack tests the students did...

Great job to everyone! Expect the other students films soon.

Note: These will play from Safari but need to be downloaded on Firefox

Daniel Gonzales
Nadan Pines
Kyuhee Lee
Bessie Chiu
Grey Jenkins

Fun Micro Expression Test

A while back we had a great Facial Reading expert come to pixar to help us understand more about the face. We learned about something called micro-expression which are expression we make very quickly that can reveal how we are really feeling. It is very useful for people trying to spot lies and so forth. Its also great to try and put into our work, especially the work of a computer animator, who can get lots of subtle stuff into their work.

Here is a Micro Expression Test. Click on the number, then whet micro expression flashes by.

Expression test