Current Flavor - Inspiration

I was in LA over the past weekend, made my customary trip to Meltdown on Sunset and came across LA<>SF by Christian Schellewald, an amazing artbook of sketches, paintings and studies of Los Angeles, San Francisco and the travel inbetween. Having lived in both cities and traveled back and forth many times, the book hit a special chord with me. I don't know Christian personally, but had the

Favorite Animated Works

I like this list theme thing, so here's another. Please feel free to add your list in the comments section. Every so often things like this cross my mind, so here are my top 16 favorite animated works off the top of my head (I don't like to spend too much time on these; that way they are instinctual, gut choices). They can be any format (short, feature, commercial, etc etc) as long as it's a

Best films of the last 20 years (1986-2005)

A few of us were in the story war room the other day and the "AFI's Best 100 Films of All Time" list happened to be on the table. Naturally, for a group of story folks, discussion ensued about the validity of some of the films on that list. Then I proposed that we make our own lists except to limit them to our 20 favorite/best films from the past 20 years (1986-2005). They must be films that we

More on Story

A fellow story artist described to me once how important life experience is to our work. This was about 8 or 9 years ago and at the time the thought never would have crossed my mind; but since then I've brought this notion up many times in conversation and even applied it to my own life. If we tell stories for a living, how can we be the best at what we do if we don't have any of our own to tell?

Story Structure: Some Thoughts

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to give a talk about story structure to our group of interns at work. I gave considerable thought to the subject and was a bit surprised about some of the things that occured to me, so I thought I'd try and communicate a couple of them here. Everyone is familiar with the 3 act written structure in scripts and plays, so one of the first things I thought about was

"Why Storyboarding Doesn't Work"

My jaw dropped when I read this article on the vfxworld website...Per Holmes explains why storyboarding is an outmoded shot-planning tool for the 3D environment. "So what’s wrong with storyboarding? Well, the biggest problem is that storyboarding is so far removed from real camera work that probably 90% of shots and moves simply can’t be drawn in this format. That sounds like an unforgiving