Today's News

There's a plethora of news abound! Apologies for the stinginess on posts lately, a computer at home that I use to post got hacked and the hard drive doesn't boot anymore! I'll try to post as often as I can nonetheless.


First up is 'Le Bon Roi' (The Good King)- a student film from Supinfocom. I can't believe how long it is for a student film! Anyways, enjoy!



According to Animated News, Jan Pinkava is now co-director on Ratatouille. It was previously thought that he was taken off the project and replaced by Brad Bird, and would be co-directed by Bob Peterson. Now it looks like it's a team-up of Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava. For those of you that don't know the name, he directed Geri's Game.

For those of you who like paying to have a iPod-playable version of Pixar shorts, One Man Band can be bought off the iTunes music store for around $2 Canadian.

AWN have posted some really cool stuff on the making of Cars. Check out the post on Character and Lighting Innovations as well as Creating a Complex World. One of the craziest parts that absolutely killed me in the first article is the fact that early on in the production of Cars the rendering time "approached 17 hours per frame." Per frame!? Another cool techie thing that they made is "ground locking" - a tool (presmuably in marionette) that makes cars automatically stick to the ground so the animators could focus on expression. Apparently Pixar has 200 times the computing power that they did in Toy Story, but with all the extra detail and lightning settings (occlusion and raytracing), the images still take the same time to render as they did back then! Something in the second article that I did happen to notice was their use of color - that Radiator Springs starts very pale and slowly begins to become more vibrant as Lightning warms up to the place. One point that I want to make as well is that Sophia Wong, a relative of a friend, was the head of layout on Radiator Springs. Wow! (Or should I say - Kachow?)

Also, Check out the Cars Die Cast Toys. They're really spiffy! And they have a set that has Guido in it. Mattel has my money.

For those of you that liked Way of the Pyrats, the fab team that made the short have posted a pretty cool website to tie in with the film. Check it out here. Also check out the making of shorts by Yves Bigerel, Bruno Dequier, Ben Fiquet, Nicolas Gueroux, and Julien de Rolland.

One last thing - for those of you wondering who got the Pixar Story internship, I know of three Calart students who got the nod. They are: Jennifer Hager, Adrian Molina, and Steve Macleod. I believe they got 6 people in total this year, but I'm not entirely sure who the other 3 are. To my knowledge no one from Sheridan, but I could be wrong. I'll get back to you guys when I find who else did get in.