Skylanders - Spyro's Adventure

Submitted by Charles on Tue, 10/18/2011 - 08:28

Imagine my surprise when I went to YouTube's homepage over the past few days and found a major advertising campaign underway for the "Skylanders - Spyro's Adventure" video game. Spyro the Dragon is a character I designed and developed for Insomniac Games back in early 1997. It's been a very successful franchise and is still happening as is evidenced by this new interpretation of the property. It's on all major video gaming systems, including Wii, Nintendo 3DS, XBOX 360, Sony PlaySation 3 and PC/MAC computers. It became avilable on October 16, 2011 in North America, October 15 in Europe, and October 13, 2011.

Here's the official website for Skylanders. You can also see the original development art I created for Spyro the Dragon here.

Enjoy the trailer for Skylanders...

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Walt Disney - The Man Behind the Myth

Submitted by Charles on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 06:53

The other day I caught the end of an interesting documentary on the life of Walt Disney. Since I missed most of the television broadcast, I turned to YouTube to see the rest of it. It's an inspiring program, produced by the Disney family in 2001 and narrated by Dick Van Dyke. I learned a few things that I hadn't known before about Walt and enjoyed viewing rare footage that was new to me. I've compiled the film in the eight parts that are on YouTube onto a topic on the Forum for easy viewing. Follow this link to check out "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth". Here's the first part to get things going and to give you an idea as to the quality of this documentary.

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HoBSoft: Visual Notes in production management

Submitted by Charles on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 16:35

HoBSoft is the production system used on several recent animated films of exceptional notoriety including "Asterix and the Vikings", "Brendan and the Secret of Kells", "Chico & Rita" and currently "A Monster in Paris".  With all the experience gained from the production of these movies, they've learned that making textual notes really limits the communication to the artist during approval situations. So HoBSoft has upgraded the Web interface for their production management and automation system, adding new technologies. Now it's possible to draw directly on the movies in the HoBSoft Web application. No more writing text based notes. Just draw! Take a look at how it works through this video. The Forum Topic is here.

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After the Rain - fishing with bananas

Submitted by Charles on Thu, 10/06/2011 - 17:59

Gobelins School of the Image in Paris is one of the reasons why French animation continues to reach new heights of creativity and excellence. This film was produced in 2008 by animators associated with the school. It's made the film festival circuit and certainly warrants a spotlight on AN's homepage. The Forum topic can be found here.

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Eye of the Storm - music video

Submitted by Charles on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 09:25

From the album Highway Collection released earlier this year, Lovett's "Eye of the Storm" is an enigmatic and masterfully animated video that is as haunting as the song. Directed by Chris Alender and produced by Kris Eber for Soapbox Films, you can view the making of this project by following the link to the Forums. Thanks to Adrian "Skynet" Foster for showcasing this earlier. 

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