OG’s BLOG

All right. This is another one of those great artists that inspire me. Florian Satzinger studied under Disney great Ken Southworth (“Alice In Wonderland”, “Woody Woodpecker”, “Tom & Jerry”, “The Flintstones”) and you can really see the influence in his work.

I love his character design, I love the eyecandy character design and highly original, free-flowing mechanical concepts. Perhaps best of all, he blogs about his process and shows his sketches, cleanups, finished pieces in progress, and his photographic research which informs his color work. I highly recommend his blog Paperwalker and his Character Design website, Saltzinger & Hardingerg Features.

NASA does have a plan to deal with Apophis – a gravity tractor, as was eleganty explained by Neil Degrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium.

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I’ve noticed that the entertainment industry loves to write off genres. For instance, according to them, “no one” wants to see sitcoms anymore. “No one” wants scripted TV. The Romantic Comedy is “dead”.

And then, something comes along to prove them wrong. 30 Rock proves that a sitcom can still be very funny, staggeringly popular, and critically acclaimed. And Ghost Town is a movie that proves that the romantic comedy is not dead, and can actually be a lot of fun.

Turns out the key is not in the genre. People still hate stupid sitcoms. People still stay away from stupid romantic comedies.

But if you focus on the characters… interesting characters… and go out of your way to make something actually GOOD, then genre labels don’t matter. You can wind up with an actual good film on your hands.

Sure, we’ve all seen enough of your typical romantic comedy, and Hollywood keeps churning them out every year to understandably diminishing returns. They’re stupid, they’re predictable, they’re forgettable.

But Ghost Town is actually good. Against all odds you care about the misanthropic main character played by Ricky Gervais, at his humanity-hating and hateable best. Against all odds, you actually care about the slimeball played by Greg Kinnear. And against all odds, you can see why a beauty like Tea Leoni could fall for the goofy charms of Gervais’ character because she is dimensional enough for you to understand. It’s all complex enough to dig into, yet it all comes down to a simple three-character comedy, and that’s despite its sci-fi and rom-com labels. And it is admirably well constructed.

You might even shed a tear or two near the end. You care that much about the characters. It’s that good.

I know. Sappy. But true.

Battlestar Galactica webisodes are up, to keep you entertained until the final season comes on in a couple of weeks. Link HERE.

Watch out for the mystery meat navigation. SciFi didn’t see the need to put NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons on their viewer, or to list the episodes in order. So if you’re not careful, you’ll watch them out of order or wind up accidentally getting a spoilerific ENHANCED version of one of the webisodes with director commentary before you’re ready.

The webisodes are quite good, easily as good as any of the BSG episodes, and I say this as someone who normally hates webisodes. That said, if you’re not caught up through the fourth season, and don’t want your surprises all spoiled, don’t even think of clicking the above link…

The Last Knit (”Kutoja”) is a great little animation by Finnish artist Laura Neuvonen, who works as an artist/director at Finland’s Anima Vitae. As with most of the animations I find fascinating, Neuvonen says a LOT without saying a word. Great action and holy mackerel, the feeling of WEIGHT she gets in this piece. Check it out!

Dragon Hunters is a great looking film coming to us from FuturIkon Films, out of France. You know, for years I’ve been seeing fantastic animation and design coming out of the French animation schools like Gobelins. Well, when I say I’ve been seeing fantastic animation and design, I mean they have been beating the holy snot out of students from other schools, taking their lunch money and calling them names… metaphorically speaking, of course. I have been wondering all this time what would happen when these students got out into the big bad art world. What sorts of films would they make?

I guess I got my answer. I mean, I’m not sure anyone from Gobelins is working on this film, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It has that look. Very stylized, great attention to color and lighting, great attention to design. I’m not completely sold on the character design, but at least the characters aren’t flat, understylized blobs.

I’m also not completely sold on the story, just from the haven’t-we-seen-this-before standpoint, but I’ll probably see it anyway because the design work is top notch.

At the very least, this film speaks to the artist in me. We’ll see if it speaks to the writer as well.

It’s been said that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem you encounter begins to resemble a nail. So it is with software. I don’t know about you, but I’m a pretty simple guy. I’ve got a few pieces of software – Adobe Photoshop, 3ds max, Adobe AfterEffects, Apple QuickTime, Macromedia DreamWeaver, Macromedia Flash, TextPad and n-Track Studio. These pieces of software pretty much do anything I need. In fact, pretty much anything I see in my head, I can get this software to do, either by using it the way it was intended, or by using it in other ways.

I have friends who are the complete opposite. If there’s a new rendering program, they’re all over it. They’re on the beta test team. Ditto on any plugins or scripts for any of the above software. They seem to spend all their time getting and learning new software.

That just ain’t me, but sometimes it bites me in the tail. Take the example above. I was going for that effect. I know you’ve seen it a million times, where there’s a sort of fog effect coming from some text on screen. Bonus points if the fog effect moves as if there’s a light passing back there behind the text somewhere.

I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get this effect, but I am positive there is a neat little plugin out there that will do this at the press of a button. But I spent about 20 minutes figuring out a way to do it with 3ds max, and I love the result. Basically, I made a black plane and cut the text into it, then passed a fog light behind there at a speed that gave me the effect I was after.

Whaddya know? Another finished sequence, and it only took an evening. I could use more sequences like this…

What about you? Are you a plugin-in and software junkie? Or are you a whatever-fits-the-bill kind of artist? What shortcuts do you use?