Huge amounts of work and a bit of lazyness of myself made this blog freeze for almost a month without updates... =P

Now it's time to write it all here:

First I want to talk about Mike Cachuela's Workshop at AnimaMundi São Paulo. It was awesome!

Mike is a very talented and knowledgeable guy. He is also an excellent teacher who explains his ideas in a very clear way.

He offered us a lot of really great advice on how we can build an interesting story, recommended some books and talked a little about some backstage stories from his time working on films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Coraline. I can't stress enough how much I learned on those two days. :)

I found this interview (in Portuguese) with him made by a Brazilian TV network.

Here are all of us who attended to the workshop:

Among the main books he recommended, I bought two:

Story, by Robert Mckee;

In the blink of the eye, by Walter Murch. Revised 2^nd edition. This one will take a while until it gets into my mailbox.

Still on AnimaMundi, you can watch most of the films that were into the festival in this compilation made by the blog Animação S.A. You can also know about some other things that happened there, like the Laika presentation on the making of Coraline or the Amid Amidi talk on their official blog.

While in São Paulo, me and Suryara had the great pleasure of meeting in person Yorik and Maíra.

I only knew Yorik through the internet, by his works of architectural visualizations made with Blender, and it was very cool to meet them. I truly recommend their cheese fondue! The best I've ever had! :)

Another cool thing in São Paulo is that I met the folks at Editora Europa, which publishes the Brazilian versions of Computer Arts and 3D World (among lots of other magazines). Now I'm working for them as technical consultant and making article translations. :D

The work on the new Black Drawing Chalks animated music video is being very time consuming, but it is looking good. The visuals will be based on their art for the CD cover and Myspace page. I'm responsible for the 3D stuff, using Blender, while the guys of the band and from Nitrocorpz makes the 2D and composition. As soon as I can I'll post more from it here.

But the news on this is that now I'm officially part of the NitrocorpZ crew, working with animation and motion graphics! :D

And last, but not least: last year I've been contacted by Steven Withrow, who was interested in making an interview with me for his new book called Secrets of Digital Animation. This weekend I got the news that the book is available for order at Amazon, and my interview is there! :D

I'm really happy to know that, mainly because I'm honored to be listed among some extremely talented people like Nina Paley or David O´Reilly, to name only two! Yay! :D

It is very cool to see people like Ton Roosendaal, chairman of Blender Foundation and Blender's main architect, receiving a proper recognition for his achievements and contributions.

Right below you can watch a short interview with him made right after he got his Honorary Doctorate Degree in Technology by Leeds Metropolitan University.

P.S.: next week I'll be probably away from blogging due to my participation in AnimaMundi São Paulo.

Couldn't get much info on this movie, which will apparently be distributed by Universal Studios in 2010. I like what I saw with this teaser so far. Looks promising:

Great news for me today: I was selected to attend to the workshop "The creation of your film" by Mike Cachuela, at AnimaMundi in Sao Paulo!

He currently works for a tiny studio called LAIKA and, before that, he used to work at a place with a funny name: Pixar. There's a couple of movies he worked on, but I doubt anyone have ever heard about: Coraline, Ratatouille, The Incredibles and The Nightmare Before Christmas are among them... ;)

Yay!

I'm also looking forward to watching all those movies and attending to a talk called Papo Animado with some very cool guys, like Amid Amidi from Cartoon Brew.

Haven't watched Transformers 2 yet, but I will some of these days.

The production of a blockbuster movie like this is usually:

1 - Very hard to do;

2 - VERY expensive;

3 - Demands some time to achieve.

I've read an article at Gizmodo which tells how "only" 40 frames (little less than two seconds) took three months to be created by five skilled artists at Digital Domain. The Computer Graphics Supervisor, Paul George Palop, said this process was "very, very painful".

By this facts I wonder if the holy Triangle of Production rule was broken with this particular shot.

Director Michael Bay is known for demanding everything to be "awesome". So, putting movie making and script aside (we're talking only about technical achievements here), the final result is awesome.

Considering that and the Triangle rule, now we have only one option left to pick: that shot have to be cheap or quick to make.

Let's see... the production budget was - at least - 200 million dollars. That is so much money that the producers hired a top notch studio like Digital Domain to make the "secondary" effects and animation, since the main ones were made by ILM. Thinking of that we can assume it wasn't cheap (even more if we consider the current financial world crisis).

So... all it's left is to be quick and the rule works like a charm, right?

In my humble opinion: wrong.

After all, five artists working full time for three months to complete 40 frames does seem to be a fairly long time to me.

I have no doubts that these are among the best professionals working on animation and effects, and they've done a huge amount of top notch work as quick as they could. They have obviously reached the "awesome" vertex of the triangle.

Since they've got "awesome" and it was apparently not quick, the only variable that can "fix" the rule is Digital Domain not earning a good amount of money to make that shot. Probably not...

Rule broken?

[UPDATE] You can read more on the production details of this scene at CGTalk [/UPDATE]

Talking about Michael Bay: