2.25.2011

Hold on tight!

The past couple days have been crazy! I was surprised to have my name attached to any information about the layoffs, and the amount of responses, offers and well wishes have been amazing!

I have just been asked by IUPUI Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis - to come speak with the Siggraph group about animation and my experiences! That's pretty exciting!

Back in November of 2010 I arranged a panel talk / discussion forum for the students at the Art Institute of Colorado hosted by a handful of NetDevil artists and myself! And that was great fun. I've been to a number of schools hosting talks ranging from, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and in the past year speaking to colleges! I fly out in 2 weeks.

I am very grateful.

The next couple of weeks should be interesting and I look forward to what comes next!

2.24.2011

The Defender Project

I was asked to help my friend and director John Ludwick. He was tasked with creating 9 animated commercials and I animated 4 of them.

All 2D, created in Flash. This was a great experience, we were strapped to time constraints being asked to deliever on a very tight schedule. I tried to keep each animation under 20 hrs of work (tried) lol. These were created for Mediasauce.

Here are the finished pieces:

1. Defender 2 - Flamingos
2. Defender 5 - Sprinkler
3. Defender 3 - Nosy Neighbor
4. Defender 8 - Nosy Returns

I loved working on 2D commercials and would love to do it again! Keep in mind this was all during some crunch time at work. If I could do this full time I would be able to produce even better work.

2.23.2011

Laid of from NetDevil

Well this sucks... haha.

Unfortunately a lot of talented folks lost their jobs as I've been finding out on Facebook! I personally think it's pretty terrible to find news out that way and not to be correctly notified. We all were receiving phone calls tonight and I just got mine about 2 hrs ago.

From what we've been told a handful of artists will be kept on board and continue working on Lego Universe. But at the moment that will be a very, VERY small team. As the count continues to rise on FB, they've cut over 20 people.

I will say I did enjoy the fun times I had at ND and my pushup club which was going strong for 18 weeks! I had over 35 people in the club at one point! With that said I wanted to share one of my last animations at NetDevil:



My other animations can be viewed on my vimeo page as well - This animation was particuallary challenging due to time constraints, limit on frames, parent constraints, reanimating twice because of wrong assets-which required a new balloon rig.

All in all, I feel this was one of my best animations, although parts are too quick and the overlap on the loose balloon are hard to watch at times I did what I could and it doesn't look to bad in-game either.

I truly hope everyone lands on their feet and finds a new fun adventure! It was a great experience and it was awesome to be apart of something (at the time) so fun and exciting. To my ND peps - I wish you the best!

**update: just to clarify - We were all told we were "safe" just a week or so ago, and last night the first couple of people let go were posting on FB. Then all hell broke loose on FB and everyone was getting anxious, so yes- its a total surprise to be getting a call saying you lost your job. Personally, it sucks to find out massive layoffs are happening and watching friends post about it before you know or hear anything directly.

What really sucks for me is I took time off for the holiday and was heading back into the studio - but no, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to some people.
-tc