THE ART OF KUNG-FU PANDA

Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary and she surprised me with this freakin' awesome book on the Art of Kung-Fu Panda. DreamWorks does a great job promoting their animated films, but some of their movies I feel have failed to deliver. Regardless, I have crazy high hopes for this film. I absolutely love the character design and art direction and from what I've seen in the previews the animation looks sweet! I'm definitely going to see this at the IMAX when it comes out. I just hope the film is as awesome as this book. Thanks Sweets!

*UPDATE* This book is even sweeter now because Kung-Fu Panda is easily my favorite animated film of the year! I even got to see it in IMAX!!! Skdooosh!

PRESTO!

Pixar's new animated short film Presto is inspired by Warner Bros. and Tom and Jerry slapstick, so you already know how awesome this is going to be. Doug Sweetland's directorial debut and these two pics have me super hyped!!! Can't wait!

*UPDATE* Best. Pixar. Short. Ever. Period. I am so inspired! Very rarely do you get to witness an instant classic. I'm not ashamed to say I enjoyed this short 100 times more than the film that followed.

BLINKING IS NOT JUST SOME RANDOM OCCURRENCE

Okay, okay... so the Suns and the Mavs lost in the first round of the playoffs and what Steve Nash and Jason Kidd are saying here seems pretty irrelevant at this point, but that has nothing to do with why I am posting this. After seeing these commercials a few times I began to notice something. Not only are the two players saying the same words at the same time, they are also blinking at the same time! It doesn't happen just on this one. There are a series of these commercials and as far as I can tell it happens in all of them regardless of which two players are speaking. You can check them out here.

Alot of times as an animator, you never stop to think about when your characters should blink so you randomly throw them in. Shawn Kelly calls this "Randomblinkitis." What's the cure? Well he says it's observation. We blink for a lot of reasons but according to Shawn the most important ones to remember when animating are:
1. When we shift our thought process
2. to show or hide our emotion
3. in the middle of a fast head turn

If anything these commercials have only reinforced what I have learned. Blinking is not just some random occurrence.