I’ve put together a little video that describes the various stages of animation I go through. These aren’t hard-and-set rules, but more like guidelines that help me animate more efficiently. Depending on the shot I’ll be more or less rigid about keeping the stages separate.

I also left out an important stage in the video, which is sketching out ideas for the shot. I left it out because the drawings — if you can call them that — are really embarrassing. But for me it’s a really important stage because it’s easier for me to explore ideas through rough sketches than through painstakingly posing a model in 3D. (If anyone is curious, I often use Pencil for some of that drawing/exploration stage. Pencil is nice because it’s a 2D animation software, so I can actually do rough 2D animation to test out ideas.)

.ogg video file

as we mentioned earlier, it’s getting quite busy over here. and now that the Apricot Team is moving in finally, it’s gonna get even more busy! Last friday we had Bart from BlenderNation over to do interviews with us… i shot a fun little timelapse video during the entire day. it’s interesting to see how often people get up from their chairs, how much coffee we drink and how crazy our heads bob around…

enjoy!

watch the movie in .ogg format

It’s about time that the title of the movie is going to be announced.

Don’t you think so…

Download the .ogg file here.

Dear mother,

how are you doing? I’m sorry you haven’t heard that much from me lately, but I’m sure you understand it’s been extremely busy here. The new week schedules Ton is putting under our noses are just insane. Even with the help of some external animators it’s gonna be incredible hard to finish the movie. Those 80 hour work weeks I had in the beginning? A joke compared to my new weeks. But please, don’t worry about me, I’m doing fine. To be honest, the first days of the week I was pretty sick. I felt horrible, enormous headache. But you know me, stubborn as always, I just went to work. Strangely enough, despite me not getting any sleep I recovered pretty good. And while I was recovering I even got so much energy, I skipped an entire night of sleep (of course I stayed in the studio).

Making this movie as good as possible is my main drive. Ton wants us to finish the movie, no matter what quality (producer’s talk). But you know that’s not good enough for me. Whatever needs to be done, I’ll do it. We can do it. Seeing all the great results gives me alot of energy, especially combined with the latest music from our composer Jan. And sometimes we get weak results, they give me even more energy: that some day soon I’ll get back to them and do it even better.

You know Andy, right? The guy who was working on the fur when you came over. You made a joke about his hair, remember? The last few weeks he’s been working on the first shots of the movie, and wow, it’s gonna look awesome! I’m so glad to have him on the team, the guy’s got skills. He’s a perfectionist, never satisfied (sounds familiar, doesn’t it? ^_^).

Check this out, it’s from one of those first shots.

We really love that bird, he looks so silly. And he’s not even a main character!

(more…)

Continuing in the current series of posts about “Outsider” perspectives of the Peach project, here is eight year old Australian gal India, giving her special views and comments.

India and her mum Cathy have spent the last month in and around Amsterdam annoying Campbell and the Peach crew as much as humanly possible.

At the end of the video is a special “Hi” to India’s Connect-4 Guru Martin (aka Theeth) who spent some time down under with Campbell and family.

Download the ogg movie here

Hello all. A friend of mine, Aaron, from the USA came to visit the Peach project last week. He put together a video and a blog post for all of you:

The condensed version of a week in the life of the Peach project:

.ogg video file high quality (39.6MB)

It’s a couple of months before the premier and there are lots of things to do. Not only the most obvious (finishing final animation) but also finishing scene construction and render preparation so that the first of the finished shots can be shipped off to the render farm. A simple calculation revealed that at the current animation pace the project won’t be finished in time, so four external animators have been found and hopefully with their help the timeline will become reasonable again.

(more…)

During the last week Nathan had a friend over; Aaron. Aaron just left today with a signed t-shirt from the whole Peach team. Be aware this is a collectors item. The one and only :)

I’ve been teaching the guys and girls here how to play the renowned Dutch student card game “Toepen”, which doesn’t have winners, but only losers. Obviously – since it’s a student game – the loser has to get everyone drinks. Here in the institute we have free drinks, so we made up penalties for each round… and I’ve lost the round with as a penalty to make a blog post with a silly picture!

So here it is; the New Years Eve crew (minus Andy who takes the picture, and Enrico + William + Brecht who celebrate it at home) and with Campbell’s girls Cathy and India. On behalf of everyone: happy new year and let’s make it a great 2008!

-Ton-

8 minutes

13 scenes

154 shots

12000 frames

5 characters (plus a butterfly)

10 weeks left to animate it all

…and this is what happens when you have an insane animation schedule:

.ogg video file high quality (2.0MB)

(Music by AcidMan: http://www.beatpick.com/AcidMan)

every friday evening we have a weekly meeting where everyone shows their work of the past week and discuss how to schedule the next one, making important decisions about story, styling, animation and so on. these meetings can be long and tiresome, yet at the same time a lot of fun.

so last time i went around with my camera (which is slightly less crappy than the one that the blender institute owns) all day to capture the atmosphere of a typical peach work day, talks about animation, style of the movie, blender development – and of course the final weekly meeting at the end of the day. i hope this is a bit more ‘immersive’ than a regular interview type documentary… just to give you an idea how much fun it is to work on this movie! yaaaaay! happyhappyjoyjoy! :o)

enjoy!

download the video in ogg format (better quality)

i’m hoping to do this more often. especially next friday is going to be interesting when our composer Jan Morgenstern is coming over for a short visit. so stay tuned!

.andy