Happy 2009

Just recently came back from an amazing trip to Japan. Great food, great company and overall a great way to end 2008. With a new year comes new resolutions and new goals. I personally have about 10. Whether or not I accomplish them is another story.

My new year’s advice courtesy of a randomly saved RTF file from May 2008:
“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.”

Vague? Yes. Sappy? Of course. Inspirational? Perhaps. Happy new year everyone.

3D modeling

I’ve been playing around more in 3D. In the future, I want to build an entire metropolis from the ground up and then let a monster run wild. Brainless fun – helps keep your sanity…

Some Randomness

Random #1: My top 3 link addictions of the week month.

1. Chase Jarvis
2. Buysnow.com
3. Tokidoki

Random #2: Why would anyone ever shoot interlaced footage? My very wonderful, super slick, super cool Canon HF100 can shoot 24p, 30p and 60i but I find absolutely no reason to shoot in 60i. If I need to catch something moving quickly, I’ll just increase shutter and shoot progressive. I did a comparison on my computer and the 60 fields does not make any difference. In fact, all it does is create an extra step for me during post because I have to deinterlace. When will 60p be out???

Random #3: Speaking of shooting footage…the Phantom v12 shoots at 1000fps. That’s like watching a 5 minute video of a person yawning. That puts the RED camera, aka my dream camera, to shame.

Random #4: I’ve been playing around with a new version of my Burton snowboarding piece (see the ‘work in progress’ below). Winter can’t come soon enough. :/ 

Screenshot: 

Pictoplasma 2008 Conference

This past weekend, myself along with a couple other designers from Last Exit, attended Pictoplasma 2008 which was being held for the first time in New York City. It is a 3-day festival celebrating character design and animation and attracts some pretty big names in the animation world.

Speakers included:
• Sam Lanyon Jones – Tokyo Plastic
• Philip Hunt – Studio AKA
• Sam Borkson & Arturo Sandoval – Friends With You
• Gangpol & Mit
• Akinori Oishi
• Aaron Stewart
• Motomichi Nakamura
• Tim Biskup
• David Oreilly
• Fons Schiedon

My favorite presentation was Sam’s of Tokyo Plastic. Not only is he brilliant at what he does, he is also a very humble, funny, eloquent speaker. I especially loved the story when he spoke of his time over in Thailand. Him and his partner would party until 6am, go to sleep, wake up in the afternoon, work until night, start rendering files and then go out and do it all over again. Now that’s a rockstar designer’s life if I ever knew one! The conference was small and intimate which was perfect for Q&A. I got the chance to ask Sam if he was ever going to do another project using Flash after the successful Drum Machine he did years ago in Flash 6. That was really the first project that catapulted Tokyo Plastic to fame and I found it interesting that they haven’t done many more projects with flash. He said he would love to go back to flash animation and hopefully he will in the near future.

Studio AKA was also magnificent. Their new short film ‘Varmints’ is visually breath taking. I firmly believe that they could be close to ‘Pixar’ level if they solely concentrated on film production.

David Oreilly’s presentation was also very entertaining. Everyone should check out OCTOCAT. I’m sure you can find out about the back story if you do a quick search. Absolutely hilarious.

Each speaker was brilliant in their own right and this weekend was just the sort of inspirational boost I needed. I came home flooded with ideas in mind and techniques I wanted to try but most importantly, it gave me the urge to start drawing again. Yes, drawing – the thing you do with pencil and paper. I just want to ride this wave of inspiration/creativity for as long as I can.

Xhilarate – Creative Bookmarks

Thanks to the Xhilarate team for featuring my website.

World of Warcraft Trailer

I never really got into the World of Warcraft series but the cinematic trailer for the newest edition, “Wrath of the Lich King” is insane. I tried to find out who created the trailer but no luck so far. Anyone know who created it?

Check it out here!

MTV Interview Part II

The last couple of days have been very hectic. Moving into a new apartment is very exciting but you never realize how much junk you have hidden away until you start cleaning and packing. In any case, its been a couple days since the MTV interview got published. Since then, I’ve had some interesting comments, phone calls, emails, and facebook requests. My parents also received some emails from Japan as the news broke in a bunch of japanese websites and blogs. Thanks to all the well wishers and also the cynics. I couldn’t help but laugh myself when reading some of the witty remarks.

Of course my website and blog were greatly affected by the interview. The good thing was that traffic spiked up by about 500%. The bad news was that my site dropped from a #2 google ranking to #6 when searching ‘Wii Yatani’. The google search results were flooded with News sites reposting the article. Damn you google search spiders!

Anyways, with all that being said, I enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame but now it’s back to unpacking, cleaning and making my apartment look like a page from an IKEA catalog.

North Kingdom – Designer’s First Monarchy

 

“Designer’s First Monarchy” – talk about a bold tagline! Only someone at the #1 spot could make such a statement and get away with it and North Kingdom truly fits the bill. Their two websites, Vodafone Future Vision and Get the Glass, easily rank among the top 10 sites EVER. Their projects undergo a production pipeline similar to a damn feature length film. Green screening, sound design, VFX; they absolutely push the boundary of the internet and user experience. I’ve always had questions about their workflow and even though their site has some nice behind the scenes info, I wanted to get inside even deeper. Lo and behold, Robert Lindstrom’s (co-founder) blog, DCHPL. I came across it months ago and it’s an absolute must-read blog for designers, developers, project managers everywhere. You might have to filter through some of the posts but the behind the scenes stuff is just incredible. 

 
**UPDATE: I’ve started animation for the Burton piece and it’s coming along nicely.