Animating Fast to its own home

With the beginning of this spring's Animating Fast class, I'd like to introduce a new blog: Animating Fast. The class members and others interested in the search for faster ways of working can use this as their home.

Dynomix

Evan, Bishop, and I felt like stars on Wednesday and Thursday. Took a trip down to NYC for a Tower 37 celebratory dinner and, more importantly, an audio mastering session at Gary's Chop Shop, during which Gary took the audioscape of the film to the next level.

The mastering itself was more of a behind-the-scenes kind of thing; to wit, when we visited Gary on Wednesday night he had already located most of the sounds in space (surround is awesome) and Evan's soundtrack sounded all the more magical for it. We spent most of Thursday working on leveling and adding a bunch of Foley, not to mention laughing and hanging out and generally enjoying the feeling of being in some very capable hands. Gary dug into his libraries for sweet glass cracks, wood splinters, and sloshing water sounds. Oh! And the breathing. Op has come alive with the subtlety of that brilliant addition.

Can't figure out how to share the results of the session with this audience, at least not yet. But hopefully the festivals will respond positively and you'll get a chance to hear everything as it sounded when we left.

counting on two hands

Had a fun time last night teaching my son about non-base 10 counting. After he learned that counting past 10 on your fingers requires some form of external memory (you know, some reminder that you've counted this many 10s before you start over on the fingers), he figured out that we could count base 5 (he meant 6) and use two hands. Neat idea.

We played this one out a little bit. Your right hand represents the 1s place, and your left hand the 6s place. Once you've exhausted the five fingers on your right hand, count one finger on the left and go back to a fist on the right. Keep going, and you can count up to 35 on two hands.

So then we took it to binary. Each finger is a bit and they have an order, least significant on the right (your right pinky or thumb, depending on how you hold your hand), most on the left. If you're careful about it, you can count up to 1023 this way.

Night of the living geeks.

Anyway, if you find yourself with just your hands and you need to count higher than 10, try one of these methods!

the trailer for 9

Relatively recently, the trailer for Shane Acker's 9 went live. I just love the story behind this film being made, at least the little bits I've gleaned from the web. A young director rides a short through the festival circuit, gains a fair amount of notoriety, and catches the attention of Tim Burton. Without any perceptible delay, they've got a feature going! There's a nice interview here though it's a little old.

Here's hoping it will be as exciting as it looks. And if so, that will be marketed better than Delgo. Anyone know what it will be rated?