Girl Meets Geekdom » Computer Graphics

Oscar Nominations for Animated Feature

sallymander — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:18:27 +0000

In this article I named my three guesses for the animations that will be nominated for Best Animated Feature this year. I got two out of three. The nominees are Wallace and Gromit, Corpse Bride, and Howl’s Moving Castle (I guess Madagascar instead, but I’m glad it did not get nominated). Unfortunately no CG animations this year, but still a good selection. My guess for winner? Wallace and Gromit…but I still have yet to see Howl’s Moving Castle, so we’ll have to see.

Disney may have bought Pixar, but Pixar took over

sallymander — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 04:22:21 +0000

Now with Pixar’s Ed Catmull and John Lasseter running the show at Disney, one must wonder what will happen to the future of Disney? Pixar is a studio attempting to hit a one-film a year production rate. Disney makes a lot more movies…some of questionable merit. Rumor has it that production on Toy Story 3 has already halted. What about Rapunzel Unbraided, Pinocchio 2000, and that Snow White remake? What will happen to those films? I heard Ed Catmull give a talk on the production crisis of Toy Story 2. They were not happy with the story, production halted, and they did a frantic rewrite. Frankly, every Pixar film has gone through a similar crisis, or so I hear. Can they impose that on the 3 production Disney has in the works? After all, Pixar has something like 3 or 4 shows either in development or production as we speak. Will they start to neglect their own productions? Will Disney become the studio that produces the crappier secondary features made to compete with PDI Dreamwork’s winter features? One thing’s for sure, Dreamwork just lost their edge with numbers. In the future, I’m sure we will see as many Disney/Pixar films as PDI Dreamworks.

Disney Buys Pixar: It’s Official

sallymander — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:01:20 +0000

Yes, yes, after months of rumors, it is finally official: Disney has bought Pixar. The price tag on Pixar ultimately closed at $7.4 billion. This is probably the most surprising piece of news since the Autodesk/Alias buyout. A few weeks ago I would’ve put money on the deal falling through. Pixar just seemed so independent, so we-don’t-need-Disney. It wasn’t just a Steve Jobs farce to raise the value, I heard it two years ago from Ed Catmull in a lecture he gave at my school. I guess they really had me convinced that Pixar really was going out on their own. Granted the deal is greatly in Pixar’s favor…and now Ed Catmull is the president of both company’s animation studios, so he really has nothing to complain about. Jobs is the biggest Disney shareholder and is probably the biggest winner of all. Interestingly enough, years back he actually tried to sell of Pixar to Microsoft and HP. Good thing for him, neither of them went for it.

Well what can I say? All the computer graphics businesses are assimilating.

Fake or Foto?

sallymander — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 08:54:46 +0000

Alias has a new Fake or Foto quiz out. For those of you not familiar, Alias provides 10 images of which half are photographs and the other half are CG and asks you to identify which one is which. Try it out. I got 5 out of 10.

Happy Feet Trailer Out

sallymander — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 08:29:39 +0000

Blur Studio’s doing it, The Orphanage’s doing it, so why not Australia’s Animal Logic? Animal Logic joins the club of effects houses turned feature animation studios with Happy Feet, a film seemingly about a lot of penguins dancing. The film features an all star cast including Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Elijah Wood, and Brittany Murphy. The trailer shows a sea of dancing penguins based on motion capture (humans not penguins). Check out the trailer for yourself.