How delighted was I to get a Google alert this morning for LFC Short, The Car and The Road. It’s probably the first one ever for that short. Hey, not only that, but the file clearly states that TCATR made it into the prestigious Austrian animation festival, Prix Ars Electronica, in 2008. Prix Selection: Smart Worlds.  How did we ever miss that in this day and age of all points bulletins at all times of the day and night 24/7?  So, for all of you that missed it when it first premiered I’ve resurrected it from the archive and I’m featuring it here and now. Thank you Google Bot for all your hard and diligent work.

The Car and The Road: A Romance in Automation, follows the trials and tribulations of a sensible, straight road as he seeks to reinvent himself for the car he loves. Watch, as the road bares his inner passionate self to woo the fun loving car “that can do things other cars only dream about.”  Sigh… a true love story for the modern era.

This charming work, directed by Jerry van de Beek and Betsy de Fries of Little Fluffy Clouds, was created for the Lexus Car Corporation. Described by the Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (ASIFA) as, “A lovely animated fable…” The Car and The Road pay homage and takes its inspiration from Chuck Jones’ Oscar winning film, The Dot and The Line. Original composition for the almost 4 minute film was scored by Trivers-Meyers Music LA whose arrangement fits hand in glove with the visuals. Commissioned by Los Angeles ad agency, Team One, The Car and The Road, is a colorful and imaginative feast for the eyes and fun to boot!

Animated using Adobe Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop with Autodesk Maya and hand drawn frames. The Car and The Road will be seen on all broadcast media: Cinema, TV and Web.

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Most of us look back at our time spent at university with true fondness as a time of amazing achievement and pivotal moments unsurpassed by any other. A time when dreams become aspirations and aspirations become reality and every second is shared with friends made – ones that we carry with us the rest of our life. This is the story of Journey, a 30-second HDTV commercial and the first in a campaign for the California University of Pennsylvania.

Executed in an elegant painterly style, Journey, combines both 2D and 3D animation to recreate the texture and layered look of a traditional watercolor painting. In this watercolor world, one in which we can freely move around, the story is told of a student’s journey through life. Beginning with a single brush stroke on textured paper the river of life is revealed depicting two friends in a rowboat. As the canvas blooms into vibrant color the two friends begin to move through the university campus, casually meeting up with another friend, as they all finally enter into the pulse of university life.

Effortlessly the camera moves us gently back to gradually orbit around the characters and in an echo of the story, allows us to fully take in both the pastoral scene laid before us, with students going about their day, and the effect of the growing color palette as it washes over the canvas to create vivid momentary and fleeting glimpses of the campus in all its diversity. A gentle pull out, up through a canopy of trees, moves us skyward like a soaring bird over the rooftops of the buildings to lay the entire campus before us.

The campus, characters and shaders were created in Maya. The animation was created in multiple layers finessed in After Effects. Compositing was done in-house at Little Fluffy Clouds.

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Really good design books are hard to come by so Little Fluffy Clouds is more than pleased to be featured in one – which from the galleys to date – looks to be just that. Picture Perfect: Seeing and Understanding Color and Design, by Chris Dorosz and J.R. Watson, is an upcoming design publication by Fairchild Books, a division of Conde Nast Publications.

This extensive text/workbook takes an interactive approach to the study of color and design, highlighting the elemental importance for designers to understand how color is perceived, experienced, and manipulated in order to be used effectively in their designs. A highly visual text, Picture Perfect, will explore and apply the principles of color and design and help stir the imagination of today’s art and design students.

The Friskies images from Little Fluffy Clouds were chosen for their skillful use in paring the end “client”, in this case a cat, to the advertised product. An extract from the book expands on this and speaks eloquently of the processes at work in the design.

“Picking one color to work around in a design can establish a dominant impression, reference or mood. This Friskies cat food commercial has taken the orange color of a Tabby cat as the key color and expands it into an analogous palette using yellow oranges and red oranges. More subtly, it engenders feelings of warmth and happiness as it taps into primordial instincts of the regenerative powers of the sun.”

Picture Perfect: Seeing and Understanding Color and Design, by Chris Dorosz and J.R. Watson, will be released in the fall of 2010. Order your copy now.

A long suffering Santa tries his best to deliver Christmas gifts to the world while Rudolph and the reindeer team go round and round in circles unable to find their way.

This darling little Christmas ad for Radio Shack has a crinkled paper, stop motion look and feel with a sweet Christmas musical score and some very funny copy – given a brilliant delivery.

Hey, it’s not often you can say that the voice over for a spot you’re working on is priceless but the V/O in this ad is just so great we cracked up the entire time we were in production.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Reviewing Lee Lanier’s latest book, Professional Digital Compositing – Essential Tools and Techniques, Kirk Buckendorf eloquently states: “While not as glorious as 3D animation or as artsy as digital design, digital compositing is the unsung hero of multiple industries. Without it the 3D animation would never make it to the screen and beautiful artwork would never come alive.” and  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

While not a book for the neophite – because it does contain a lot of technical material – Lanier’s book is definitely readable and extremely informative covering all aspects of the oft neglected “soldier” of animation and film production. As you thumb through it reads like an all star cast of  the best companies in our industry and the interviews, with some of the best compositors in the game, give us an on the ground view of those companies and a little taste for their working philosophy. Best of all there’s real intelligence to be had in the advice given and actual instruction as opposed to PR fluff. Each chapter has a “Tips and Tricks” section which is invaluable and the accompanying DVD allows you to drill down further and pick up even more usable info.

In an inspired flash of brilliance, Lanier posed most of the people he interviewed at their station (only a few stodgy companies submitted standard PR stills). I got a kick out of seeing everyone at their desk because you get an instant hit for the personality behind the work. Above, seated at his desk, is Little Fluffy Clouds own Jerry van de Beek. Methinks this image speaks volumes : )

The Mercedes-Benz SLR 300 is a machine like no other – sleek, sensual and legendary – the ultimate in bling. Not just the fastest production car in the whole world – with a top speed of 207 MPH – but a veritable goddess among luxury automobiles. In fact a possession so indulgent it’s positively out of this world.

So while the star of the spot is the McLaren SLR 300 undoubtedly the star of Little Fluffy Clouds studio is our creative + animation director, Jerry van de Beek, who modeled the car using available photographs only and without the aid of any factory specifications or a cad cam version. Working with partner, Betsy de Fries, the two designed and directed the spot together. Van de Beek animated the entire piece – writing specialized shaders, applying final gathering techniques, rendering complex layers and compositing the piece in After Effects. VFX extras were skillfully actualized to create a look as luxurious as the car itself.

Out of This World is an original spot designed, directed and animated by Little Fluffy Clouds. Production took roughly 8 weeks – sans model. This sizzling all CGI spot is animated in Maya, composited in After Effects and rendered with Mental Ray. The stunning VFX extras use Real Viz, Trap Code and Sapphire plug-ins.

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Just installed Maya 2010. Fantastic what you get for this new price. However I did have a little problem running Toxik – Maya’s compositing program. When I tried to launch the program it wouldn’t go beyond the initialization of the user interface. This had to do with the 3Gig switch I had turned on in my Windows XP. If you experience the same problem, turn it off, reboot your system and you should be fine.

She’s a happy homemaker from Sunnyvale who plays the oboe. Welcome, Courtney Mortimer!

Hey, if someone told me I’d won the lottery I’d think I was dreaming but if a talking squirrel met me at the door to tell me the good news I’d think I was more than dreaming. Yet that’s the story line in this funny California Lottery spot from BBDO West.

Our part in all this nuttiness was to create that talking squirrel making him as realistic as his real life counterpart. And that we did by removing the head of the real little guy and replacing it with our own. We assure you no actual animals were hurt in the making of this spot but there were a few harnessed squirrels on the live action set with their unharnessed wranglers.

Modeled and animated using Maya by our illustrious creative director, Jerry van de Beek, Make Me A Millionaire!, airs in California and has an afterlife forever more on You Tube.

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Emru Townsend 1969-2008

Emru Townsend came into our lives back in 2003. We made a little animated short by the name of Au Petite Mort. Emru saw it at Siggraph that year and reviewed it on his site. I did not see that great review until months later but as soon as I did I wrote to thank him. I felt he truly understood the intent of the piece and was so happy he appreciated all the work that went into it. That moment of contact started a long, interesting and incredibly diverse friendship. Our conversations via email and Skype covered all sorts of topics from animation, the arts and the state of industry on any given day, we discoursed on culture and simulculture, we nattered on about friends, relationships, family ties and touched very lightly on our backgrounds. It was easy and casual. I sent him everything Jerry and I worked on and solicited his honest opinion with which he was generous.

Many moons passed and we arranged to do a podcast for Frames Per Second. Through a series of technological mishaps it turned into a weekly event of chitchat on the phone while being recorded. Many of those sessions failed to record or transcribe or simply vanished like a poof of smoke in a cosmic disappearing act. It was as strange and baffling as it was amazingly funny. But it kept us talking for weeks on end always starting with, “Now, where were we?”  Somewhere along the line Emru got a cold that he couldn’t shake. We commiserated because I had one too that seemed to drag on for weeks. He said it was making him feel strange and was going to see the doctor if it didn’t shape up. The rest is history.

We followed everything Emru posted by the day and sent encouraging notes. And even when things seemed bad I refused to accept that he would not somehow just get better. There were so many highs and lows and even at the worst moments I found myself rocking with laughter at some of the things Emru wrote, said or described. When Emru’s sister Tamu wrote, “Game Over”, I couldn’t believe it. I almost still can’t…  So, it’s taken me months to write this piece and also start writing the blog again.

Sometimes people come into your life for a short time only. They make a profound impact and when they depart the planet they leave a gaping black hole where once there was an outstanding human being. Emru Townsend was one such person. We are all richer for having known him and all poorer for our loss. Now become a donor and help save a life.

UK – Anthony Nolan Trust, African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust

USA – National Marrow Donor Program, DKMS Americas

Canada – Hema Quebec Stem Cell Registry, OneMatch Stem Cell Network

I like reading blogs as much as writing one myself. In fact I often neglect mine in favour of reading others. So, imagine how great it felt when I checked in on fellow Brit, Ian Lumsden’s, intricate animation blog and found our piece, TODAY, there – In Praise of Barack Obama. Here’s an excerpt from what Ian had to say.

“It seems appropriate on a grey day here when such little light as exists is cast by events across the Atlantic. The words resonate with hope and the CGI piece is beautifully crafted by the design team, co-founders Jerry van de Beek and Betsy deFries. Quintessentially American rural landscape on a perfect Spring day, butterflies, canary let out of its cage, splinters of light, flowers and a young couple squinting in the bright sunlight: the piece unfolds and matches the rich voice of the narrator and lyrical beauty of the poem. Lovely and uplifting.”

Thanks Ian for discovering our work and pairing us with this breathtaking moment in history.

Check out Ian Lumsden’s wonderful blog and even more wonderfully animated films at: http://www.animationblog.org/

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