Back to Teaching Full-Force

So it appears it shall be a busy winter/spring session for me in terms of teaching. Both of my Saturday courses (2D and Stop-Motion) have adequate enrollment to go ahead, which only happened once last year. In 2008 things really dried up in terms of interest for my stop-motion course, but it looks like things are turning around now for this year. In addition to being back to my 6-day work week, I'm starting to build Stop Motion II for AAU, PLUS finally getting to teach my Stop Motion 1 course, PLUS teaching another stream of Experimental Animation. That's 4 courses in all plus the usual full-time admissions wibbles.

So this shall be me...



In other news, watch for me at Spark FX coming up next week, namely introducing the '7th Voyage' screening, or hanging out Thursday & Friday afternoon and all day Saturday.

More Random Stuff

Here's some more random strange things I've discovered lately. Jay got cornered by some old folks at the thrift store and got a wooden storage box with ugly Disney wallpaper thrust upon her. Since we're trying to get rid of stuff rather than hoard it, we had to throw it out, but I had to get some pictures first, as some of the pictures are pretty strange. Especially, why is Daisy holding a Baby Pooh bear and why does Pinocchio look stoned? Is he pushing a boat through a slab of concrete?






I found this awesome 1950s stop-motion film, which I'm guessing is a coffee commercial, by the Joop Geesink studio. I love the human puppets and the happy coffee beans.



Found this cartoon too...the narration is strange and the animation is fun.



And this is a brilliant puppetry piece that my friend Galen found and posted on Facebook. Done in a Bunraku style with black suits and rods against a black background, there appears to be 2 puppeteers operating this little guy who is merely made of foam. So simple but beautifully done, and a good example of how line-of-action and posing comes across for a great live character animation.



Whee happy fun.

Farewell, Muppet Shelf

A major project of ours over this long weekend has been a gradual re-arranging and de-cluttering of stuff around our house. We'd like to get as much done over the next couple months before Jay gets too pregnant to handle piles of junk shifting around. Since the new baby will be taking over Ariel's current room, Ariel will be moving into our current "studio" room which has housed our computer, animation desk, sewing stuff and most of our toys. So this weekend we started by moving the animation desk into our storage room so it doubles as more of an office space for the occasional animation job. So another big feature of our studio room has always been our infamous "Muppet shelf" where we displayed our collection of the Palisades action figures. But of course with trying to conserve space, grow up and expand the family, we decided it was no longer practical at this point to have them all out as they were. Besides, they usually got too dusty. So I took some pictures for posterity before we packed most of them away. The shelf unit was moved into the new office space where it now stores the animation book collection and some videos. We kept the Swedish Chef set and the Electric Mayhem on the shelf for now, and may perhaps get out some of the others and spread them around in the future.

So it's been fun, folks, but it's time to move on...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!