Acting Insights

Great acting insights from Sir Ian Mckellen....

Webosaurs: Battle Arena

This is the other webosaurs spot I co-directed and co-animated with Eric Drobile; I did the big ass fight at the end. I wanted this one to be different that the other spots; more like the Marvel comics version of Webosaurs and I'm pretty jazzed with how it turned out. Huge thanks to everyone who made an extra effort on this one. Amy, Chris, Liz, Julie and Frank..big thanks to you guys!

Butter Fingers

So last Sunday we are having dinner...yummy lasagna. I poured myself some wine and as I went to put the half full bottle back in the frig..SWOOSH the bottle just drops out of my hand and hits the the floor...SKADOOSH! Wine and glass went everywhere. The only thing left in my hand was the bottle topper. I was bare foot at the time so I froze immediately..slowly looking down, I expected bleeding piggies. All ten looked ok.

What a lovely mess and a giant waste of wine! Initially I tried lapping up some off the floor but the glass shards made my tongue bleed. After bandaging my tongue and armed with rolls of paper towels and the vacuum, I set about cleaning up the mess. When I was done, I tossed the bag o glass into the garbage can in the garage and FINALLY was able to eat my dinner. My one thought, "at least no one got hurt".....well...at least not yet.

Today... is garbage day. I put on my flip flops and went out to the garage...filled up the garbage can with various miscellaneous bags o trash and tossed in a couple phone books; so now the bag was nice and heavy. Yanked the bag out of the can and began heaving it down to the curb. On the last big heave hoe the bag grazed my foot and immediately I feel a sting. I look and there is a 4 inch long gash across the top of my foot AND it looks a little deep. What the hell did that.....oh CRAP the glass from the wine bottle! Yep some glass was poking out of the bottom of the bag...awesome.

I hobbled into the house and sat in the bathtub. It didn't look as bad as when I slice my knuckle (see Meat Flap) but it was bleeding none the less. No one makes me bleed my own blood better than me. For whatever reason, I always think its a good idea to run water over major injuries. This does 2 things: 1. it makes the injury hurt way more 2. its like turning on the blood faucet because the injury starts to bleed...A LOT; clearly I never went to medical school.

With my wife's help I got band aided up and off to work I hobbled. Thank god for cruise control.

The morale of the story: If you drop the wine you WILL get cut.

More Animation Tips and Tricks

I have a couple more blog postings up at Animation Tips and Tricks. What steps do students often overlook was one from a few days ago. Pose to pose or straight ahead is the latest. Check em out!!

Toy Story 3 trailer

Looking forward to spending some time with the ol toys...

Animation Tips and Tricks

Woohoo!! I'm a guest blogger over at the AnimationTipsandTricks blog. The first question I am answering is: What is the importance of clean blocking? Can you provide some tips on clean blocking?

Quick...go see what I say!!

Cloudy With a Chance of AWESOME!

I took Wonder-pea to see Cloudy opening weekend in normal, boring 2D; I still find it odd that I go to see a CG movie and then request a ticket for the 2D version..the mind boggles. We both enjoyed it quite a lot and I dare say that it is my favorite animated film so far this year. Enjoyable story, fun characters, lots of good honest humor (no pop culture refs) and just entertaining start to finish. The snappy animation style worked well within the world that was created and I look forward to doing some single framing once the DVD comes out. I would love to give that animation style a try...so fun.

In its second weekend Cloudy retained the number one spot only falling 18.8% which is great!! If you haven't seen it yet then shame on you...and your family. Go give it a look, you will be glad you did.

New Webosaurs Spot

I co-wrote and co-directed this spot with my buddy Eric Drobile. We also animated the spot. I did the close up of Horns (Bring it Rexxy!) and the shot with Pterry at the end. Big thanks to everyone involved for making it snowtastic!!!

My Demo Reel

I uploaded my first video to YouTube! The upload/encode process took a looooong time but I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

Steven Spielberg Admires Animators

Maybe directors don't have to be animators first, but it sure is a wonderful thing when they have a clear picture of what they want.....

2012

This is so awesome...that I might have to go see the movie..

Webosaurs spots

Later this summer ReelFx will be launching www.webosaurs.com a massive multiplayer online game aimed at young kids. The game is currently in beta....go give it a try!!

I animated on the Horns! Horns! Horns! spot. I did the shot immediately before the game footage and the shot immediately after the game footage. I also did the back flex shot.





More to come!!!

Meet the Crashes

If you are a fan of TF2 you will love this...if you are not, then you will only like it A LOT..

Ghostbusters: the release party

My buddy Paul Allen invited me to the midnight release party for Terminal Reality's Ghostbusters: the video game which was held last night. I did a little work on a couple cinematic shots for the game, so it was cool of him to invite me. The party itself was open to the public and held at a GameStop near TRI's studio. Lot's o fans turned out for the midnight release, many in home made ghostbuster costumes...and I gotta say they did a mighty awesome job constructing their proton packs.


Photo by Paul

I played an early version of the game about a year ago and it is A LOT of fun. If you ever wanted to blast ghosts while trashing a hotel ballroom, then this is the game for you. I would have played all day.....and now I CAN..because the game is out RIGHT NOW! A big congrats to all the peeps at TRI for making a busting cool game.

Me with the original Ecto-1 and a headless person.


Paul with the original Ecto-1 and some junior Ghostbusters.

Slap Chop

*Update* You can download the Rap Chop song by DJ Steve Porter here.

This has been all the rage around the studio this week... makes me want to buy one.

Twitter

I haven't really been into the online social sites. Between work, spending time with the family, Animation Mentor and fighting crime, I'm just too busy for such things. I did get involved with Facebook, although anymore I'm usually signed in so I can play Mafia Wars or Pirates; join my family/crew!

I had checked out Twitter's main page a few times to see what all the hub bub was about. As near as I could tell it was just a "status update" only version of Facebook. After pronouncing that Twitter was dumb I went on to do other things less dumb, like taking the Facebook quiz which Crayola Crayon Are You?

But last week I finally joined and instantly saw the appeal. It makes stalking celebrities easy and fun! Right now I'm stalking Jon Favreau, David Letterman, Weird Al, Jim Gaffigan, Eddie Izzard and Rainn Wilson. I hope to start stalking more this week. These people are in LA, New York and London, there's no way I could have followed them around on my own. A. it would be expense...all that traveling B. I'm too lazy. Thank you Twitter!!

My twitter home: http://twitter.com/raychase

Going Bonkers

Today is my daughter's 6th birthday. Happy Birthday Wonder-pea!! Over the weekend we celebrated her birthday at Going Bonkers. The place is like Chuck E Cheese except with better pizza, a ginormous play area complete with tunnels and slides and no giant rat.

The ginormous play area is the highlight of Going Bonkers and within minutes of arriving Wonder-pea was off. Now her little brother, Lil Pumpkin, who is 2 and 1/2, wanted to explore the play set as well. The difference: my wife made me go with him. Now I will admit, it was pretty dang fun crawling and climbing through all the levels. Many times I thought "10 year old me would have gone crazy for this", but alas...I'm not 10 anymore.

The play period before pizza and cake was from 11am-noon...one hour; no problem. Lil Pumpkin and I entered the play area at 10:50. At 11:05 I needed a nap. Man oh man do you get a work out crawling through that thing.

My son had no trouble with the climbing and the crawling and since the whole thing is padded there was little chance of him knocking himself out. OK so why did I have to go with him? Basically I was there as his personal bodyguard, making sure the other kids didn't rough him up....or shake him down for pizza money.

Here we are crawling through one of the many tunnels. You can't see Lil Pumpkin because he is way ahead of me. At several points he would be three or more sections ahead of me going "come on Daddy", before climbing up another level. Now the really awesome thing about these tunnels is the many hanging obstacles that you have to push your way through. FUN!

Many times I tried to slow my son down. Lil pumpkin....-gasp-.....wait....I'm coming...-gasp-....lil pumpk....lil.. I told him that he should go on with out me, that I was slowing him down and endangering the mission, but he would have none of it. Apparently we had to keep moving at all times; perhaps raptors were tracking us. I even found a spot on one of the upper sections that was near an AC vent..the air..so cool. Hey buddy let's sit here a sec- come on Daddy!!....I wept, tears of blood.

In the below photo, I'm smiling because we stopped moving for 10 seconds. It was a glorious 10 seconds. In just a moment we would climb the ramp to our left and then roll down the other side. Yippee!! Now I don't have the best posture, but with only four areas large enough to stand up straight, my back was not enjoying the experience.

After an hour of crawling around Satan's playground, it was time for pizza and cake. At this point I was pretty damn hungry and feared that I'd go all "Tazmanian devil" at the first sign of food. Fortunately that didn't happen and the party went great. Barbie was the theme this year, so we got Wonder-pea a Barbie cake which she liked a lot.

All the kiddies seemed to have an awesome time and after the eating and the singing and more eating, the partiers played some games and everyone started to leave. Lil Pumpkin pondered a return to the play area..I could see it in his eyes. I begged him to not take me back in there. There was much whining and crying on my part.

After going bonkers for a total of 3 hours, we were bonkered out. On the way home Wonder-pea recounted all her party fun while Lil Pumpkin slept, tuckered out from all the activity. When we got home I collapsed in the driveway and took a four hour nap.

It was a good day.

Coco-Nutty Monkey

A couple months ago I worked on a commercial for Play Doh, promoting their new Coco-Nutty Monkey toy. I bought one for the kids and they seemed to like it quite a lot. Dad's a hero when he comes home with a monkey.

The animation I did for the spot is up in my animation area. You can check out the entire spot here.

Dragons

I haven't done a DrawerGeeks in forever....this week is Dragons.

25 Things I Hate About Facebook

I laughed...and then I updated my status. Facebook why can't I quit you??!!