December 2012

How to Draw Super Chicks

Since I’m on my honeymoon this week, enjoy some of the finer stuff I’ve collected on my tumblelog over the last 4 years or so.

Pardon the title, but it isn’t mine. It is instead from super-artist Krisztianna who drew these awesome guides to drawing female characters. They are just a little tongue-in-cheek but with enough truth behind them to make people sit up and pay attention. Click to embiggen!

 

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This Needs To Hang in my Office

Since I’m on my honeymoon this week, enjoy some of the finer stuff I’ve collected on my tumblelog over the last 4 years or so.

I’m not even kidding! If someone out there would like to make a decent-sized print that I can hang on the wall, I will gladly give you money for it. It is, of course, from the classic shirt, Rocket Squad.

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Miracle Grohe from Sit Down, Shut Up

Since I’m on my honeymoon this week, enjoy some of the finer stuff I’ve collected on my tumblelog over the last 4 years or so. 

A show from years ago that, like it’s cousin Arrested Development, Sit Down, Shut Up was simply too good to continue. I’ve written about it before but you simply cannot deny the wonderful Mo Willems character designs.

 

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Repost: Eddie Shannon’s Film on Paper

Since I’m on my honeymoon this week, enjoy some of the finer stuff I’ve collected on my tumblelog over the last 4 years or so. This is a repost from May 2011 but the site is updated continuously.

If you’re not even a wee bit jealous of Eddie Shannon, then you’re clearly not into movie posters.

Film on Paper is his website where he is archiving his entire collection (literally thousands) and it is by far the most fascinating that I have come across. Filled with rare and foreign versions, the site includes a couple of animation ones, nice ones in fact. His ones for The Incredibles are unreleased, which makes them even more awesome (check out the one below if you don’t believe me).

Is this not the most badass poster you’ve seen for this film?

You could spend literally hours on the site and I absolutely recommend that you do. Movie posters are a fascinating artform in and of themselves and its nice to see them get some love from a devoted collector.

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Deadmau5 And Imogen Heap Crowdsource Animation, But There’s a Problem.

Musician’s Deadmau5 and Imogen Heap teamed up a while ago to create a song, ‘Telemiscommunications’, and now they’re looking to release a video. So far so good. They want it to be animated but instead of going the traditional route, they want fans to animate one second each to be combined into the final film. In their own words:

deadmau5 and Imogen Heap have set up a global competition for animators to produce a segment of the official video to ‘Telemiscommunications’. Tons of people will get to see your work and you’ll get paid a bit for it too if we choose you 🙂 Interested? Follow the instructions below.

Sounds great, right? They’re even willing to pay you for it, something that is often a bone of contention in such affairs when instead of money, you get, y’know, ‘exposure’.

All in all, this seems to be a fairly honest attempt to get each musician’s respective community together for everyone’s mutual benefit, and it is, except for one teeny tiny problem; what they’re paying the artists:

For each second we’ll pay the animators 50 USD

Now I don’t profess to know what the going rate is for animation but presumably it’s much more than $50/second. Over the course of a 4:08 video, the animation will cost $12,400. That sound like a lot, but when you realise that even a middle of the road short film can cost that much per minute, you start to see which end of the barrrel this video is aiming for.

So who exactly is this competition supposed to entice? Clearly it’s too low for any professional animator. At $50 for potentially hours (days?) of work, you’re certainly not doing this for the money. As for exposure, one second of film will not get you anywhere, unless you can make the most singularly brilliant second of animation ever committed to film. See update below. So logically, you must be doing it for your love of Imogen Heap and/or Deadmau5. That’s no bad thing, but I would assume that most artists would rather their fans support them with money rather than time.

Did I mention that you have three weeks to do it? Yup, good luck juggling that in with all the other stuff going on in your life.

To wrap up, it’s a good effort on the part of Deadmau5 and Imogen Heap to engage their fans in such a way, and to at least be willing to offer some form of compensation towards it. However although everyone in the music business is a bit more wary of how money is spent these days, animators have to be wary too, and the payoff to contributing such a miniscule amount of content to a film is hardly worth the payoff being offered.

Update: So yes, I read the article a wee bit too hastily. They’re not asking for one second, but rather closer to 1o seconds per contributor. That would put the total payment quite a bit higher but still not quite enough to make it worth the time and effort.

 

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