So my little dog Annabelle has engaged in a little side project. Apparently she enjoys buying and selling real estate in the Seattle area. Who knew?

Some guy took one of my older concept sketches off of my blog a while back and stuck it on his site. I did ask for the image to be removed, but it seems that Annabelle is still there… It’s a buyers market right now you know…

Chad Udell points us to a cool little mashup that generates a “tag cloud” from a collection of text or an R.S.S. feed or Del.icio.us bookmarks.

I used it on The House of Move website. Its a neat little waste of five minutes.

(It’s rare that animation and LEGO come together so nicely, so this post has me excited!)

If your looking for a slightly different take on Wall-E, The Brothers Brick (one of my favorite sites on the net) has a nice interview with Pixar animator and LEGO fan Angus MacLane.

Mostly I build with LEGO as a way to unwind from a day spent in front of the computer. The tactile nature of LEGO can be much more satisfying than working in the often intangible realm of the computer. Also, a large part of an animator’s job is to clearly communicate an idea through the pose of a character. I think this is similar to building with LEGO where part of the goal is to sculpt clear shapes that communicate the purpose of the creation.

He also has some very interesting thoughts on the popular LEGO video games. So go check it out!

UPDATE: The Brothers Brick just posted a Wall-E Round-up of all the cool LEGO Wall-E creations they could find.

B.J. Aberle, good friend and Sound Designer on Annabelle’s Bistro has recently entered an online competition to remix a Glen Phillips song. He is currently doing very well in the competition, (Seriously, I listened to about 50 entries and his remix is by far the best.) but he needs your help to win!

Check out his blog for details on how to vote.

Did you see Wall-E yet? Did you love it? Was it a great movie? Or the greatest movie? Sound off with your opinion!

“My hats off to anyone that can write a Dreamworks Animation film. They have a unique process. ” -Dan Harmon

(Note to reader: The views expressed in this post do not nessicarily reflect those of The House of Move. It should be said that Kung-Fu Panda has received very glowing reviews and is currently doing quite well in the box-office.)

Wow. You don’t always get insider dirt like this. Dan Harmon, who co-wrote the Widely acclaimed film Monster House was hired to help write Kung-fu Panda And guess what? It didn’t go well.

What follows are my favorite bits from a nice long rant about why Dan Harmon Hates Jeffrey Katzenberg

First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.

Then Katzenberg watches an animatic of the boards and says, surprisingly, “this needs a lot of work. You have a month.”

I came in about four writers into the process. It’s kind of hard to write a “better” scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.

They do this cycle like 30 times and the end result is a movie created over three years by 7 terrified directors and 20 pissed off writers, none of whom get any back end because it’s an “animated” film, therefore no matter how bad it is, it turns like an 8,000 percent profit, and they make another one and another one and another one until Katzenberg is finally dead at the age of 117 because he uses all the money he saves to rejuvinate his body with the blood of poor people who die at the age of 50 because their hearts got clogged while eating Lion King Meals.

In the last post, I talked about how important the script witting process was to the success of a film. This rant just solidifys the importance of a strong script. We all like to poke fun at Dreamworks movies, but the thing of it is that taken the proper steps up front could solve many, if not most of the perceived issues that people have with their films.

via: Cartoonbrew

Ok, I am sitting here and watching South Park, drinking a nice glass of wine, and revising my treatment…again…

I showed it to my boss and friend Jim Ferolo and he came back with a few suggestions. Mainly that my main characters motivation for his actions later on in the piece were pretty vague. Which sucks because its SO important to the story that the audience gets whats going on in the mind of the Man right away.

It is absolutely necessary to get this moment right in the film. And its tough, because conveying to the audience that the main character wishes to be left alone is more difficult than it sounds. I had been using his interaction with the waiter as the moment to reveal this character trait to the audience but its a brief moment that can easily be missed, miss-read, or simply ignored. Whats more, It’s a moment that relies so heavily on subtle and well-executed animation, that its really quite scary to consider the consequences should I get that moment wrong.

So, to solve these problems and solidify the Man’s desire to be left alone I needed to re-write a couple of the characters introductions a bit. I needed to give the Man an opportunity to engage in a conversation. An opportunity which he so rudely chooses to ignore. Which lead me to re-consider how I am introducing the Old Woman. Continue Reading »

First Showing has an interview with Andrew Stanton about Wall-E. And its not the typical fluff that your likely to find when it comes to animated feature interviews.

The only thing I did that was a little unconventional, is the manner in which I formatted the script. I was very inspired by Dan O’Bannon’s script for Alien. His description paragraphs were not your typical paragraphs, they were actually small phrases that were all left justified, almost like a haiku, and they created this rhythm of just being in the moment of quiet and visual. And you found yourself reading the descriptions much more than you normally do a script because of that form, instead of just skipping to the dialogue. It really kind of paced you as a reader and gave you the much more visceral feel of what it will be like to watch that movie. So I used that for Wall-E — it really helped.

The article brings up an excellent quote that Andrew Stanton is known for saying: “The day we start thinking about what the audience wants we’re going to make bad choices.” I love this quote, and it is so true.

When working on a piece, you want to always put yourself in your audiences shoes, but you never want to let your audience dictate what you will present to them. I think that is where so many films fail these days.

As Andrew puts it:

we were so driven on Toy Story, we just knew we wanted to make this kind of a movie and nothing was going to stop us no matter what anybody said. When the dust settled and the film came out and it was so well received, we realized so much of that was because we listened to our gut, and I would say the filmgoer part of our gut, not just the filmmaker…

…I don’t go to see another filmmaker’s movie hoping he’s guessed what I want. I go to see it because I like his sensibility and I want to see what he wants to do next, or she wants to do next. Because that was such a direct reason Toy Story worked, because we just finally got to this point of crisis and said, let’s just go with what we want, we’ve been trying to please people for all this time, that we just know that that is the way to stay from here on out, no matter what people say or do.

Stan Winston, one of the true visionaries of our time, passed away on June 15th 2008. Stan Winston is responsible for some of the most iconic movie creatures in the last 30 years and his work in the realm of special effects make-up and animatronics have pushed the artform forward in a way that we would never have seen had he not been around.

His work has played such an important role in my life and I feel very blessed to have been a child in the 80s and early 90s and having had the opportunity to grow up watching his work on the screen. His spirit will live on in the great films he brought his passion and expertise to. Stan will be missed, but never forgotten.

Perhaps the best way I can honor his memory is to post some pictures of his fantastic work. It’s really great to look back and marvel at his creations.

I wish I had better examples of some of these guys (the T-Rex especially) because these pictures don’t do them justice. They just look fantastic moving around on screen.

Pixar keeps bringing the goodness, Here is a preview of Presto! A short film set to release with Wall-E. The rabbits facial animation is hilarious. It seems that CG animation has made huge leaps in recent years. The characters are starting to feel much looser, more organic, and much more alive. (something that 2D animation has benefit from for 80 years or so.) Which is funny considering that Pixar’s next big release stars a robot.