6 days to air

This is the documentary on the TV show "South Park" that aired a few years ago after the release of the widely successful musical "THe Book of Mormon." This documents Trey Stone and Matt Parker's return to South Park from the musical and the challenges they face in airing a show in 6 days, from the writing process and conceptualization to the final broadcast. The documentary itself shows the animation of the characters in the show, and it also demonstrates the importance of storyboarding your animation before you jump right into it.


The full documentary is on Netflix, check it out!

Electromagnetic Spectrum: Radio Waves

This video doesn’t really talk about any animation itself.  Rather, I find the animations in it (used to talk about radio waves) quite impressive.  Although they don’t blow the viewer away with their quality and whatnot, I can really appreciate all the time, effort, and work that went into making this video.  There are some very impressive graphics that use everything from particle generators, to various camera movements.  There are also graphics boards that are animated.  This video is put together very well and allows the viewer to understand what they are talking about.  

Life of Pi

     I recently saw the Oscar nominated film Life of Pi.  The CGI in this film is amazing and incredibly difficult, since the CGI of a tiger on a boat had to be cross cut with shots of a real tiger.


     The company that created the CGI graphics, Rhythm & Hues, composed 690 shots of the 960 shots in the film, this includes 85 percent of the shots that involve one of the main characters, the adult Bengal tiger, Richard Parker.  over 600 artists in three countries worked on bringing the scenes to life, including 15 people on hair alone to place and comb all 10 million hairs on Richard Parker.  This company is not new to the art form however, they also did all of the animation on The Chronicles of Narnia and The Golden Compass, so they have a pretty good idea of how animals should move.  The animation is incredible, and the most impressive thing is that while you are watching the movie, you rarely think that the animals are computer generated.

Lord of the Rings

Have you ever wondered how Peter Jackson and the crew made the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings smaller than the rest of the characters? Turns out, big budget movies also use compositing to get the desired effect they are looking for. It blows my mind every time I watch the behind the scenes for these movies, just seeing the amount of work that went into it. They had to create 2 of every prop, one hobbit size, and the other normal just to be able to shoot two different characters in the same shot. In another video they show off the electronic dolly that syncs up with the platform that the actors sit on to keep the perspective they had. What impresses me most is that a lot of what they did was not CGI but instead very intuitive thinking and hard work that most likely ended up saving them money.