Ravensbourne Animation Hub

Let’s presume that everyone who reads this blog has the good sense to choose Firefox as their browser, but, if you’re still using Internet Exploder, here’s a very compelling reason to switch.
It’s a Firefox extension, or add-on, called Zotero. What does it do? Look at the video on this page, which will show you just how amazingly useful this FREE add-on is. If you’re writing anything that needs bibliography and accurate referencing, this is the dog’s dangly bits. For added integration coolness, it can feed text directly into Microsoft Word documents and Open Office documents. Lots of stars!
This works with FireFox 3, too.

10 minutes of classy hand drawn animation telling the story of, well, classy hand drawn animation.
Here’s the link.

See how many historic references you can spot….

And do you agree with Tony’s implied conclusion at the end?

Thanks to Daryl Rhys Jones for the suggestion

You will notice a new page in the navigation bar (above), called LINKS. It’s just the start of a collection of weblinks chosen because they might be useful to animators.
The first batch of links concerns Jobs and Employment. Please feel free to add your own links by sticking them in the comments box at the bottom of the page, and they’ll be added quickly. The same goes for your suggestions for new sections, like Film, History, Animation Blogs, etc., etc.

Cassidy Curtis organises and manages a site devoted to recording graffiti. You can see graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present.

The majority of the work consists of tags, with an occasional picture.

Cassidy is an animator at PDI/Dreamworks. Link to Graffiti Archaeology. Link to his Flickr page. He has Grapheme-colour synesthesia.

* Look it up!

You only have a couple of days one more day before have now missed this 30 minute radio documentary from the BBC Radio 4 Listen Again pages. So go grab it! If you have no audio recording software, I recommend Audacity - be sure to download the latest beta (1.3.5) for the best quality (FLAC) audio.

‘Lost World’ by matte painter Tiberius Viris. His work is featured in the current 2D Artist magazine. There’s a free sample issue download here. (16Mb dl)

This header image is a cropped region of a test render from the Aztec Escape blog. The house plants have taken over.

What might this little chap be advertising? Click to reveal>> Keep reading →

(Or-jess-tick-you’ll-ann-is-muss) This is a celebration of the ability to move.
The animator Mathieu Labaye’s father, Benoit, had been a wheelchair user for 15 years before his death in April 2006
A slowish opening shifts into some amazingly fluid animation…. Hand drawn.

Watch it here. More>> Keep reading →

Continuing in a series of random selections of painters, I offer you the work of Joseph Sharp, an American plein-air painter who enjoyed a very long and fruitful life. Enjoy. (Click to embiggen.)

One more reason to visit Animation World Network aside from their archive of 2,586 articles on animation, is to sign up for their weekly newsletters and stay up to date with events in the larger animation industry. Here’s a small part of their latest e-mail newsletter that outlines Disney’s planned animation feature film releases… Keep reading →

This springtime inspired header image is titled “Parkland”, by the Swedish painter Arvid Lindstrom in 1881. The whole image is below. (Click to enlarge)

This panning shot was lovingly recreated from the 1937 Disney short, “Hawaiian Holiday” by Rob Richards, whose blog is filled with backgrounds (OK, environments!) from classic animated films that he has recreated from DVD by removing all the pesky characters who normally obscure the scenery. For this BG he’s left the three main characters in shot, because they were in fixed positions throughout the shot. There’s a close up available if you click here ->> Keep reading →

The Los Angeles animation industry has a trade union called The Animation Guild (TAG), also known as Local 839 IATSE. Every year their president, Kevin Koch and the Business Representative, Steve Hulett organize an earnings survey of their members salaries.
This year, the median wages (in US dollars) for a 40 hour week averaged : Directors (theatrical) $3,005. Directors (television) $2,400. Story Artists (feature) $2,250. Staff Writers $2,344. Production Board (television) $1,900. Visual Development $2,125. Background Layout/Design $1,800. Technical Directors $1,885. 3-D Animators $1,745
Here’s the link to the complete 2008 survey (Acrobat PDF File). In the UK the animation industry is represented by BECTU, whose own wages survey can be found on this page.
Update: The page has been pulled since this post but you can see a pdf here.2007 - 8 Bectu Union Rates for Animators

SW Screen, Skillset and Aardman have organised 3 animation masterclasses: - ‘Visual Structure’ with Bruce Block on the 10th of May in London, ‘Visual Language and Story Structure’ with Frank Gladstone on the 17th of May in Bristol, and ‘Comedy Intensive Course’ led by Steve Kaplan on the 31st May in Bournemouth.

Read the full announcement on the Festivus website…