I’m sorry to say I have no interest in video games. But I’ve been curious about these new Looney Tunes titles. Today Variety reviews and pans the new Playstation game, Acme Arsenal, but thinks the other one, the Nintendo DS game Duck Amuck, is a classic. Read the review here.

It’s an encouraging sign for the development of CG animation that we are increasingly seeing young artists creating computer work that is non-photoreal and more evocative than descriptive. A prime example of this is a piece we wrote about a while back: RGBXYZ by David O’Reilly. A more recent bit of stylized CG that came my way is the short Elk Cloner by student filmmaker Jason Fletcher, aka Isoceles, who created it at SAIC. Even after reading the artist statement and supporting documentation (Elk Cloner was an early computer virus that infected the Apple II), I can’t say I have much of a clue of what it’s about. But is a piece worth recommending, and features an original filmmaking voice combined with a refreshingly abstract approach to CGI.

I’m sorry. This is the worst thing we’ve ever posted on the Brew. I’m horrified—and yet can’t stop laughing. Thanks to Jeremy Bernstein at DreamWorks for directing me toward these.

Adam Yaniv, an animator at Rhythm & Hues by day, recently pointed me to this small personal project he created as an entry in Heinz’s Top This TV Challenge.

What’s notable about this spot is how he used a combination of 3D software and Flash to achieve the hand-drawn look. Cel shaders in CG programs generally bother me because in order to create a hand-drawn look, they attempt to mask the CG, and the end result is neither fish nor fowl. Yaniv, on the other hand, used CG only as a foundation to assist the hand-drawn process. He explained the pipeline to me via email:

“I use 3D as kind of my blue pencil phase, getting the characters down in simple shapes, animating their action in front of the camera and so forth. Then I move into traditional frame-by-frame cleanup, using Flash in this case. The key is that cleanup is done in the same exact way that it would be in 2D, no cut corners. Meaning that I make judgment calls on every frame pertaining to model, volume, line-quality and animation style same as I would in 2D. So I use the best of both worlds, it’s all in the technique.”

Yaniv has plans to use this process in future personal projects. He’s excited about the potential of the process citing its flexibility to make changes right through the end of production, the sped-up timeframe in which hand-drawn animation can be created, and the ability to distribute the workload across a team of animators.

It should be noted that Aardman’s recent multiple-award winning short The Pearce Sisters uses a somewhat similar technique, beginning with CG roots and ending up with a hand-drawn look. Though Yaniv’s technique isn’t groundbreaking, it excites me to see artists experimenting with the digital tools at their disposal and finding ways to make technology work for them. As more and more artists like Yaniv embrace hybrid approaches, we can finally put to rest the tired 2D versus 3D debate and recognize the possibilities that exist when digital and hand-drawn are combined.

With SIGGRAPH 2007 now wrapped up, I thought it might be appropriate to link to the video below about a CG animated short that debuted nearly twenty years ago at SIGGRAPH 88. The film, Pencil Test (watch it here), was created in-house at Apple Computer to display the capabilities of the Apple Macintosh II. The film below is the ‘making of’ that explains how they did it. Interestingly enough, Andrew Stanton (director of Finding Nemo and the upcoming Wall-E) receives a credit on the finished film as illustrator and storyteller, and John Lasseter has a credit as “coach.” And one more cool note: the applications engineer who appears in the short, Nancy Tague, is now Mrs. Nancy Lasseter.

UPDATE: A Brew reader who prefers to remain anonymous writes, “The woman building the character is Galyn Susman, producer of Ratatouille. She’s really awesome, and has been at Pixar since before Toy Story.”

(Thanks, John Karel)

Emshwiller Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz is a new joint-biography of artists Ed and Carol Emshwiller. Carol was a fiction writer, but of interest to animation folk is the life of Ed Emshwiller, a multi-faceted artist who established himself as one of the most well-known sci-fi magazine cover illustrators during the 1950s and early-60s. From there, he turned his attention towards experimental filmmaking, and eventually began to experiment with CGI. One of his pioneering CG experiments, Sunstone (1979), can be viewed online here. In 1979, he became the dean of CalArts’s School of Film/Video and served in that post through his death in 1990. In 1983, he founded the school’s Computer Animation Lab. For more details, see this book review by Fred Patten.

The Spline Doctors have posted a new podcast interview with Mark Andrews (head of story on Ratatouille and The Incredibles) and Pixar story artist Ted Mathot. Haven’t listened to it yet but I think it’s safe bet that the interviewer, Pixar animator Andrew Gordon, asks better questions than this guy.

IGN has an interview with director Andrew Stanton about Pixar’s next feature Wall-E. The following comment from Stanton perfectly encapsulates what sets Pixar apart from almost every other major feature animation studio:

One of the keys to us is we’ve never thought about our audience, or never thought about who our audience might be. We honestly are just making the movies that we want to make, that if we didn’t show it to anybody else but ourselves we’d be fine…[I]t’s all artistic; there’s not a single sort of corporate kind of audience point of view looking at any of the stuff we do — at least within the walls of Pixar.

Incidentally, one can find similar sounding quotes from any number of Golden Age animation directors like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Allowing a filmmaker to make the film that they want seems like the most obvious concept, the only requirement being that the filmmaker’s vision has to be trusted. Sadly, with the exception of Pixar, most contemporary animation studios don’t extend that type of trust to their directors.