This is the poster (designed by Jeff Turley) for Paperman, a Disney short that’s been generating buzz for its distinctive melding of CG and hand-drawn animation. It’s the directing debut of veteran CG animator John Kahrs (Toy Story 2, Tangled, The Incredibles). Paperman will debut at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in June. It will be distributed more widely in November when it plays in front of Wreck-It Ralph.

The synopsis below is from the film’s Facebook page:

Using a minimalist black-and-white style, the short follows the story of a lonely young man in mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a chance meeting… with a beautiful woman on his morning commute. Convinced the girl of his dreams is gone forever, he gets a second chance when he spots her in a skyscraper window across the avenue from his office. With only his heart, imagination and a stack of papers to get her attention, his efforts are no match for what the fates have in store for him.

I post films for many different reasons on Cartoon Brew. Laissez, Laissez Entrer Le Soleil merits a post mainly because Charles Lemor added a butt to a house. Perhaps it’s funnier if you’ve been up all night (as I have), but frankly, adding asses to inanimate objects always helps. Besides that bit of whimsy, it’s your typical short made at Supinfocom, which means it has above-average production values for a student film.

There’s a price to pay for working in visual effects, and we’re not talking about the money that students need to pay John Textor to work at Digital Domain. Many artists are faced with paying the ultimate price—a matter of life and death.

The LA Times published an important article yesterday by Richard Verrier about the health problems faced by visual effects artists and how they’re fighting back. The stories aren’t pretty:

After midnight, when the coffee and Red Bull had worn off, Sari Gennis and her co-workers would take a brisk stroll to make it through their graveyard shift. For four months straight, often seven days a week, a team of visual effects artists worked 12-hour shifts to complete the 3-D conversion of movie blockbuster Titanic. Gennis said the long hours aggravated a severe arthritis condition. She’d already had both knees replaced, and needed a third surgery, but couldn’t afford to take time off for the operation.

or:

The matte painter, who asked not to be identified for fear of damaging his career, said he nearly died when he fell asleep at the wheel after working 75 consecutive days, up to 17 hours a day, doing visual effects work on National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The money was good — $1,000 a day — but the long hours were taking a toll. Three months after his car accident, he began experiencing chest pains and was rushed to the hospital. He said emergency room nurses initially didn’t believe he was having a heart attack because he was only 37. As a freelancer, he didn’t qualify for the company insurance plan to cover his $100,000 in medical bills. His employer, the now-defunct Asylum Visual Effects, refused to hire him back.

Meanwhile, on Friday afternoon, union representatives hosted an information session for Sony Pictures Imageworks artists who are pushing to unionize the studio, a story that we covered last week on Cartoon Brew. The Animation Guild reported that the meeting was a success with over 75 Imageworks employees attending.

So will this turn out to be the VFX Spring as some are suggesting? There’s a lot of positive sentiment right now, but no one is under the illusion that working conditions will improve overnight. Animation Guild rep Steve Hulett noted on his blog that the Imageworks meeting was “only the first few steps of a long hike, but we’re going to do whatever it takes to reach out and get visual effects artists and technical directors under the big union tent.”

The documentary above offers a fascinating look at the Key Frame animation system designed by Marceli Wein and Nestor Burtnyk at the National Research Council of Canada. Besides the impressively futuristic vibe of their hardware setup, it’s also amazing to see the sophistication of their software. It may come as a surprise to many that shape tweens had been figured out as early as 1971.

The Key Frame software was used in Peter Foldes’ pioneering vector-animated shorts Metadata (1971) and Hunger (1974). Here’s my question for the CG historians: what happened to vector animation between 1974 and the early-90s? After the films by Foldes, were there any other vector animation films in the Seventies and Eighties because I’m having trouble finding many examples. It seems to me that not many artists explored the possibilities of vector animation until Web animation in the mid-Nineties brought it back into vogue.

(Thanks, Celia Bullwinkel)

Many artists have animated famous paintings before, but the husband-and-wife artistic team Rob and Nick Carter have taken it to a whole other level. They created a a three-hour animated version of an Ambrosius Bosschaert still life painting from 1618:

Every aspect of Bosschaert’s painting has been brought to life including each flower stem, insect and background scenery. The film…takes the painted scene from early morning darkness through to noon (where the film exactly resembles the original painting) into dusk and late night.

They worked with a team of nearly two dozen artists from the vfx house Moving Picture Company where they first recreated all of the painting’s elements in Maya. Then they spent two-and-a-half years animating the film. If you go to Rob and Nick’s website and click on #10, you can get a taste of the exceedingly subtle and meditative quality of the real-time animation.

This article in Computer Arts offers more details of the challenges involved in creating such a slow-paced animated sequence. The digital artwork, titled “Transforming Still Life Painting,” is being released in an edition of 12 (plus 5 artist proofs). Each one is valued at £50,000 ($80,000). The Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, which houses Bosschaert’s original painting, has already agreed to acquire one of the Carters’ digital reproductions for its collection.

(Thanks, Alex Rannie)

Seth MacFarlane’s first full-length feature is a hilariously raunchy mix of live action and CG animation. Mark Wahlberg stars as John Bennett, “a grown man who must deal with the cherished teddy bear who came to life as the result of a childhood wish…and has refused to leave his side ever since”. Universal will release Ted on July 13th. The following is an R-rated (for language) redband trailer – you’ve been warned:

Digital Domain CEO John Textor (pictured above with his wife) envisions big things for his company’s new feature animation studio in Port St. Lucie, Florida called Tradition Studios. While we’ve written about the studio’s ambitious feature film plans, what wasn’t known until recently is how Textor intends to create the films. His plan is to convince students to pay Digital Domain to work on its films for free.

The blog VFX Soldier has obtained a speech that Textor gave last November to investors in which he revealed how the company’s new animation school Digital Domain Institute will be integrated with the Tradition studio. Textor told the audience:

Classes starting in the education space, what’s interesting is the relationship between the digital studio and the college.  Not only is this a first in a number of ways that we’ve talked about, but 30% of the workforce at our digital studio down in Florida, is not only going to be free, with student labor, it’s going to be labor that’s actually paying us for the privilege of working on our films.

Now this was the controversial element of this and the first discussions with the Department of Education, ’cause it sounds like you’re taking advantage of the students.  But we were able to persuade even the academic community, if we don’t do something to dramatically reduce costs in our industry, not only ours but many other industries in this country, then we’re going to lose these industries .. we’re going to lose these jobs.  And our industry was going very quickly to India and China.

Students, in other words, will pay up to $105,000 for the “privilege” of working on Digital Domain’s features, the first of which will be The Legend of Tembo. As VFX Soldier points out, “It’s one thing to work for low pay, it’s another thing to work for free, but it’s unfathomable to be expected to pay to work for free.

If all of this sounds a little fishy, that’s because it is. The Animation Guild in Los Angeles is exploring whether Digital Domain might be in violation of state and federal labor laws. They’ve tried to communicate with multiple Florida government agencies, including the state’s Department of Education, with no luck yet. Federal labor laws, however, would appear to be in favor of artists as they clearly stipulate that interns cannot “perform productive work” (i.e. work on the production of a film) without being compensated with at least minimum wage and overtime pay. (Minimum wage, by the way, is $7.67 per hour in Florida.)

As animation education programs proliferate around the United States and competition intensifies for a finite number of jobs, studios find themselves in a position to exploit young artists more aggressively than ever before. Whether it’s Titmouse relocating its studio nearly 3,000 miles away to avoid paying its employees union wages or Digital Domain making people pay to work on its films, there are plenty of legal loopholes that studios can exploit to save a buck on the backs of their production crews. And some studio CEOs are so proud of themselves that they’ll publicly boast about how they’re getting away with it.

UPDATE: John Textor’s “Free Student Labor” Comments Have Staying Power

UPDATE #2: John Textor Made $16 Million In 2011 While Digital Domain’s Revenue Dropped

UPDATE #3: Digital Domain CEO John Textor Caught On Video: “Free Labor is Much Better Than Cheap Labor”

(Photo of Debbie and John Trextor via TCPalm.com)

It’s an international trailer. Watch it at WorstPreviews.com.

Easy Way (Camino Fácil) by Juan David Velasquez Bedoya is from Bogota, Colombia, a country where CG animation is just starting to emerge. It’s about 8-minutes and well worth a look. It’s a metaphor for life, as Juan David explains:

Easy Way is the story of a man who, from childhood to adulthood, is prepared to follow a specific path. When he begins his travels, he discovers that it is more difficult than he thought. He decides to change course to a path that seems easier, but the travel is equally difficult – and he’s unprepared for this new challenge.

Bi-coastal (NY & LA) commercial shop Buck produced and directed this spectacular 2-1/2 minute spot for online bookseller Good Books. And if you think the piece feels familiarly gonzo, that was intentional. Buck posted this disclaimer at the end of the film:

DISCLAIMER: What you will see is an entirely fictional and completely unendorsed representation. (Though we humbly suggest Hunter S Thompson might have liked it.) We are devoted fans paying homage. No disrespect is intended.

Credits after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s refreshing to go back to the beginning of Dracula — and then have Adam Sandler put his spin on it.” So says Dexter’s Lab and Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky of his first theatrical feature Hotel Transylvania. The troubled Sony Pictures Animation film, which has had at least four directors prior to Genndy, is set to open on September 28. USA Today published these images today along with more details about the film’s story.

(Thanks to all who sent in a link to the images.)

Animator/designer Gabriel H. Fermanelli has turned me on to the commercials he’s producing through Punga, a collective of artists in Buenos Aires who specialize in animation and branding. Fermanelli co-directed a series of spots for Wrangler Jeans (with Tomas Dieguez); this one is my favorite:

Fermanelli’s latest stylishly designed spot is for Volvo, featuring Sloths: