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