Fake Disney/ Royal Wedding Photos

17 May 2011

In my circle of friends, there are people of great skill, wit and intelligence. There are people who spend their weekends doing the cryptic Times Crossword, yell at the stupid contestants of University Challenge for being too slow, and are feared by pub quiz teams across the land.

However, when one of these fine people comes across a Disney related question, they all turn to me. (And this makes up for me spending most of my time nodding intelligently and frantically Wikipedia-ing in the toilet).

So it was this position as all round Disney Trivia Queen that led me, this week, to receiving no less than 22 emails with this image...



Despite being quite clearly a fake, this image went round the world faster than Susan Boyle. It's not a particularly good fake - actually, I don't think it was even meant to be a fake, more just funny comment about a terrible hat - but to clarify, here are the originals...



The images and positions are the same, but the colours are quite definitely not.

People make me laugh sometimes - I get asked to perform absolute miracles every day in Photoshop; (Sample: "can you just add this head (taken at 7pm) to this body (taken at 11am) - oh, I know one person it black and the other white, but can't you just 'shop' it? Shouldn't take more than a few minutes right? Isn't there just a button that does that...") and then the next day everyone is fooled by an MS Paint job!

...more Photoshop funnies

Making of Tangled

14 May 2011

Regular readers of this blog might remember my gushing over Disney’s Tangled a few months ago. It wasn’t gushing on the level of my Mary and Max review (which was in serious danger of embarrassing Niagra at one point) but I certainly made it clear that I felt Disney was back on track.

So imagine my delight when we found that there was to be a special ‘Making Of’ session with some of the creators in London Town!

(Probably I should’ve mentioned this before the event, but it was a bit of a last minute thing and frankly I could do without the competition for tickets).

Here’s the blurb:
Join Clay Kaytis (Animation Supervisor) and Mohit Kallianpur (Look and Lighting Director) as they share an insider's look at the challenges and triumphs faced from character creation through final composite. Starting with the establishment of ambitious and hopeful objectives, the story continues with hair-raising tales of experimentation, trial and error, and breakthroughs during the course of bringing ‘Tangled,’ the Studio’s 50th full-length animated feature, to the big screen.

This panel will provide an inside look at the challenges and triumphs faced from character creation through final composite.


And it was great. Clay Kaytis isn’t actually an animator that I’m familiar with, but he spoke with passion and clearly knows his stuff (although a large percentage of the talk revolved around how great my favourite animator Glen Keane is and how many times he saved the day). Tangled’s animation has more character than any of their recent films, so it was fascinating to watch that come to life through trial after trial.

Mohit Kallianpur was funny and managed to find the exact level of geekiness for the room (high). Despite spending my life animating (I actually honestly found myself animating in my sleep once) it still staggers me how much work goes in to a production like this, and the incredible detail that they go in to for everything. To maintain such high quality over the 4 years of a production and still be smiling at the end takes a very special type of person!

Truly awesome artwork for Pixar

5 May 2011

In decorating our new studio (did we mention we had a new studio? – oh, we did? Sorry.) we have been desperately trying to source some original Disney film posters. Not poster designed recently to promote a new edition of the original films, but replicas of the posters that were created in the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Turns out they pretty much don’t exist. Which sucks.

This is really just a long winded way of getting to today’s point, which is to show you some awesome artwork that we discovered for some of the Pixar films during our search for these posters, as well as the original ride posters in Disneyland California which were the inspiration for them.

(And also to put it out there on the world wide web that should anyone know where we can get the posters we want, we’ll either:
• Bake you some cookies
• Sing you a song
• Draw you a caricature that may or may not look anything like you )

UP

WALL-E

The Incredibles

RATATOUILLE

They're by hugely talented Pixar artist Eric Tan, and are inspired by the styles of the 50s, and by these posters for the original rides at Disneyland California.

Barking Heads - comic strips

2 May 2011






We've been doing some work for organic pet food Barking Heads recently. The company uses a family of pets to represent their product, and they asked us to bring these characters to life through animation and a series of comic strips for their website and magazine adverts.

This project is a lot of fun to work on - although coming up with ideas for the strip has probably lost me a couple of fingernails! I thought I'd show a couple of the strips here, while we're working our little socks off on the animation for youtube.

Split Personality

18 Apr 2011

We’re currently trying to decorate our studio in a way that befits our split focuses of Animation and Web Design. Mostly this has involved multiple trips to Ikea.

One half (my half) represents our funky and creative natures – we have a mood wall for inspiration, paintbrushes that we’ll almost certainly never use, storyboards proudly displayed and of course, that staple of student bedrooms everywhere, a wooden mannequin.



Aaron’s side (or as I like to refer to it, the boring side) represents our technical natures. It has files and calculators, diagrams and charts, aspect ratios and financial projections. Bleurgh!

But it is at least all red and white, so it might be boring, but it is at least Slurpy branded boring.