I’m always a fan of open-source technologies and tools, while their use may not be practical for everyday work or commercial projects. Often the technologies can present an interesting twist to solving an common challenge or problem. After watching some of the video on the author’s website I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the easy approach to rigging and different method for animating and adding keyframes. I would recommend watching the screen capture videos on their website to see how characters are setup for animation and how video can drive performances and help with the process of animating character limbs.  Tools like these will hopefully make animation more accessible to the masses.  Any tools that empower anybody to Enjoy.

Reverse Shadow Theatre from gabor papp on Vimeo.

Animata: rigid body creation from bencesamu on Vimeo.

• Listen to Ed Catmull discuss managing creativity.
• Pixar’s Collective Genius – Harvard Business Review Magazine
• How Pixar fosters Collective Creativity

Special Thanks to FXPHD for first mentioning Ed’s Siggraph 2008 speach, with topics discussed in this article and associated media options.

Basically, a scientist, Azuma’s own robot creations are brought to life by a freakish, hard to understand lightning bolt, and their only mission is to eliminate the human race. Luckily, Azuma’s son is reborn with neo-cells that allow the reincarnated bionic hero, Casshern fight robots and ultimately redem his race of humans or neo-cell humans. I’m glad I enjoy visual effects because the story has clear signs of genre predictability.

I’m shocked that I ever saw this movie, after being shown the trailer by a colleague in Bowling Green’s cave lab in 2004 I have been interested in seeing this movie for a while. I wasn’t 100% positive of the Title’s spelling, I just knew a Korean director had produced it, and I immediately recognized it was I accidently stumbled upon it at Blockbuster. The trailer spoiled an insane fight between the story’s heros and robotic machines meant to control those

I watched this movie with a lot of high expectations and I was only partially disappointed. Yeah it was action packed and it had tons of 3d, visual fx and killer robots, not bad for a 2004 film.

While some concepts and themes facing the characters were interesting and relavant to current events, the stories lack of editing continuity and rapid cuts to flashbacks made the story not this film’s best strength. The inclusion of too many underlying issues made this director’s first film appearance and heavily processed visual style the best elements. The rich saturated color palette was often juxtaposed with cold desaturated flash back war sequences and the processing was similar to Captain and the world of tomorrow, 300, sin city, but much more abstracted and saturated colors.

Website : www.casshern.com

Rating: 3 Stars for this DVD (1-4 Star range). (For the vfx faint of heart)

Pros : I finally saw this movie, after thinking I never would have.

Cons : Great Trailer, actual story could have been enhanced with a little less predictability. The DVD was lacking the behind the scenes, director commentary, assorted xtras.

Why Blog?

I’ve started this blog for two reasons, the first and most important reason is that I will be able to easily post and update my current 3D works in progress & provide details about the development challenges, time spent, concepts and ideas behind the work & other related process / inspiration information. The second reason for this blog is to allow me to document and share my reviews, implementation of scripts & workflows to ultimately make my abilities more robust. Finally to log, document and share this information to fellow 3D enthusiaists & potential employers/clients. I use a combination of Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Modo, Maya along with compositing packages like Shake, Nuke and After Effects when working on 3D projects.  If your interested in finding out what I did last weekend, or how I like my lattes then this blog won’t interest you, but perhaps you could hit me up on facebook.