Pres Romanillos Charity Art Auction

Animator Pres Romanillos has suffered a relapse of leukemia, and is in the hospital awaiting a repeat bone marrow transplant. His friends are putting together a charity art auction for his benefit.   You can visit the site now and view the art at www.pres-aid.com/  There are pieces from Al Hirschfeld, David Silverman,  Andreas Deja,  Eric Goldberg, Don Bluth, Ward Kimball and countless others...  

Pres is a personal friend of mine, I worked with him at Dreamworks on Shrek2...    Had many beers and spent many hours over heated shuffleboard competitions with Pres...  You wont meet a nicer person in animation than Pres....  Incredibly talented, and incredibly open with what he knows....   He and his wife Jeannine are hugely active in animal rescue and adoption.   Really good folk.

The Talbert Family Foundation has set up a charitable fund for Pres. 100% of these donations will go to Pres and Jeannine, to pay medical and day-to-day expenses. These donations are tax deductible. Thank you!   Spread the word!! 

Apparently you can have 'Good' and 'Fast'... not sure about 'Cheap' though.

You've probably seen this clip before, its from "Three Legged Legs" in Santa Monica and they do great stuff!    Check their site, they just banged out a cool Starbucks commercial in 4 days!   Check 'em out. 

Humans! from three legged legs on Vimeo.

Daily Life as an Animation Student.....

Yoshida Brothers cover Radiohead....

When this first popped up in my Pandora playlist, I was like 'Huh?'   Then I was like 'What?'   Then I said 'Hey...thats Radiohead!'      And then I started to dig it...   Check it out.  

World of Imagination.....

Ever see an animation thats so simple and elegant, that you wanna kick yourself in the eye, because you didn't think of it yourself?    Well this spot did it for me.     Love it.     Now only if ATT's reception on my Iphone could be as cool as this commercial..   ;)

Animation is Concentration....Archie Style

I've never been a fan of Archie Comics, still aren't, well...maybe Betty....or Veronica...  I digress.     Anyway....my friend Marty Murphy sent this image out the other day when the topic of "multitasking" came up....    It reminded me of that drawing of Milt Kahl yelling at a young Richard Williams when he asked him if he listened to music when he worked....     It holds a lot of truth...     I had to block out 7 seconds of animation literally overnight recently, and decided to Unplug from Pandora and my other usual distractions....   I'd forgotten what a difference it can make when you give your undivided attention to the blank piece of paper in front of you, or that rig in the default 'T' pose....     Think its nonsense?    Try it.    Just for one day.  

One eyebrow up, Open smile on other side......

.....You've probably seen the posts on the internet regarding whats been called "the Dreamworks Face"      "One eyebrow up, open smile on the other Side..."    Yeah, you see it a lot in DW films.....I'm not going to defend it...   In fact, we used to giggle about how many times we got that note in Animation dailies...  Sometimes we'd collect all the Post-it notes from the Directors with that exact drawing on it, and hang them around our Monitors...  buy 'em, trade 'em, collect them all..  lol.   I must have had 30 or more...
This Guy has some interesting things to add to the debate....  And one of my students sent me this link, to tie it into 'Lost', which of course gets my interest...    Enjoy!