The San Francisco Society of Illustrators is letting everyone know about the event PIXAR UNDER THE HOOD: The Making of Cars happening a week from Friday at Morgan Auditoruium.PIXAR UNDER THE HOOD: The Making of Cars (and a few other things)
Friday, December 1, 2006, 7PM
MORGAN AUDITORIUM
San Francisco, California

Dan Hollis has been working in radio for the past 10 years as both the sales manager for Hackettstown, New Jersey radio station WRNJ and co-hosting a radio program with his colleague, Jeff O’Boyle. The show is called Time Travel and it’s dedicated to pop culture and nostalgia. The show is primarily interviews with celebrities, with the focus on television, film, old time radio, comic books and of course, animated cartoons. Recent guests have included: Paul Winchell, Katie Leigh, Mel Stuart, Noel Blanc, Lee Mendelson, George Carlin, June Foray, Scott Shaw, Micky Dolenz, Marty Krofft, Robert Sherman (Allan’s son), Phil Vischer, Joe Kubert and others. The good news is that Dan has posted many of his previous interviews on a work-in-progress website entitled Time Travel Is Possible. Good stuff.

After old comic books and classic animated cartoons, the number #3 most influential art to aspiring animators has to be on cereal boxes. Especially old cereal boxes from the 1960s. The whole design of the packaging itself was/is inspirational. Just ask Thorsten Hasenkamm or Dan Goodsell or Ridd Sorenson. Their blogs are filled with modern interpretations of old packages (or the actual old boxes themselves).Bob Staake is an incredible commercial artist and children’s book illustrator with an obsession: breakfast cereal. To him, it’s not what the flakes taste like, it’s the box design and the groovy prizes inside. Bob is proposing his own line of cereal, centering his efforts around his iconic product characters. Check out his website for Freebies Cereal.

And what ever happened to the project Von Kreep (of Kreepsville.com) was doing called Cereal Killers. He had asked illustrators and animation artists to do box covers of “scary” cereals. It was supposed to be out this past summer and I don’t know what happened to it, but a lot of the art is online on various artist blogs, like: Rob Lilly, Johnny Yanok, Ben Balistreri, Kevin Schmid, Gabe Swarr, Brandon Scott, Saxton Moore. This stuff is mighty tasty.UPDATE: Bob MacNeil sent me a link to a list of all the Cereal Killer artists and their contributions to the project.

If you watch just one animated short this week, make it POTAPYCH: THE BEAR WHO LOVED VODKA by Darren Price.

Produced as part of Channel 4’s Mesh program, POTAPYCH is a wonderful little short that works on every level. The film’s style is a delight - a combination of cel-shaded CG characters with painted backgrounds - though what impressed me most was the elegant storytelling, which is fast-paced but never rushed. Price manages to tell a great story with heart in under three minutes - something much harder to do than it looks. (Sidenote: After watching the film, be sure to click on the “Learn More About The Bear” link.)

I believe this is Darren Price’s first personal short, but he’s also the head of 3D at London’s Nexus Productions, where he’s worked with Smith & Foulkes on numerous spots including Coke’s “Video Game”, Honda’s “Grrr”, and Motorola’s “Grand Classics.”

“A girl finds some soap in the woods that turns her into a slut.”

That’s the description I found for this risque Lux Provocateur soap commercial on No Fat Clips and it does a pretty good job of summing things up. The stop-motion spot, which definitely wasn’t commissioned for American TV, is directed by Chel White at Bent Image Labs. Designer Jim Clark recently posted some of the spot’s conceptual work on his blog.

Does that creepy guy on the far right look familiar?Yeah, it’s me. You never know where you’ll end up if you let Evan and Gregg Spiridellis take your picture. But I couldn’t be more honored. Al Yankovic is an old friend and the folks at JibJab are my heroes. So when they asked if they could use my mug in the latest Weird Al music video, “Do I Creep You Out”, how did I know they’d actually use it as a mug shot?The video is hilarious - and I’m a star (for about six seconds). Check it out for laughs!

Who needs DANCING WITH THE STARS? EN TUS BRAZOS is a new French student film from Supinfocom created by Edouard Jouret, FX Goby and Matthieu Landour. I had some issues with the design and animation, but the stylish dreamlike atmosphere makes this film worth checking out.

(via Fous d’Anim)

What’s the most popular piece of animation on the Internet right now? How about KIWI!, a Master’s thesis film by Dony Permedi of School of Visual Arts. The 3-minute, dialogue-less short became a “Featured Video” on YouTube’s front page a few days ago and it connected with audiences in a way that nobody could have expected. It is currently the most linked-to video on the blogosphere according to Technorati.com, it’s in the top 15 all-time favorited videos on YouTube, and it’s racked up nearly two million views in the past week.

That last number is particularly impressive. It’s one thing to talk in the abstract about the Internet and the potential it offers for animated shorts, but KIWI! offers clear proof that an online audience exists for animated shorts. When was the last time anybody heard of a piece of student animation being viewed two million times in a week? Even if the film had screened at dozens of film festivals or been released onto a compilation dvd of shorts, it’s unlikely to have ever achieved such a sizable viewership through traditional short film distribution channels.

KIWI!’s success is part of a much bigger story, which is how the Internet is making animated shorts accessible to mainstream audiences, something that hasn’t happened in the last thirty or forty years. It’s going to take some time until filmmakers figure out models for generating revenue from their shorts online, but with a worldwide audience thirsty for fresh animated content, making money from animated shorts has finally become a matter of when and not if.

Watch KIWI below: