Via Cartoon Brew:

The end of an era.

The last of the Nine Old Men, Ollie Johnston, passed away today in Sequim, Washington at the age of 95.

Read more here.

I have this dream of studying at Gobelins someday.

In my humble opinion, there is no place in the world where you can have more complete animation/art education than there. I know there are some very good schools around, but when you take a look at their student gallery, you'll realize that they have that 'extra' thing. To my taste the 2006 ones are the best of the best =)

From June, 30^th to July 11^th they'll offer a Summer School program on Character Animation. The cost fee is 2,200 Euro, with accomodation, lunch and transportation within Paris included. That's some VERY good investment.

Unfortunately I can't make it this time. I hope I can go there in the future. Maybe I can save money for next year, who knows? =)

If you have the chance to go there, please don't miss it!

Isn't this REALLY awesome? =)

This is a 1982 making of the opening of a HBO special. Everything is very carefully and skillfully done in the old fashioned stop motion way. Hands down to these guys.

Oh... I saw it here.

Last night Big Buck Bunny had its premiere. I wish I could be there. You can watch on the video below and see how cool it was.

I found it very interesting to see the lecture from Jon Phillips, representing Creative Commons. It showed clearly what it means and how it conciliate with commercial interests.

For those who didn't buy the DVD, the movie and production files will be soon online.

Big Buck Bunny Premiere from BartV on Vimeo.

Argentinian artist Pablo Vazquez, also known in the Blender community as VenomGFX, has published a making of his famous artwork called "Swim, Merlin, Swim".

I found it cool the way he managed to achieve the water caustics effect: he used a "caustics generator" (open source) to create texture maps which were mapped into a spot light later on.

Oh... and Pablo is the new member of Project Apricot, of Blender Foundation. This project will deliver an open source game, in the same way the animation projects.

---

And I also stumbled upon an article called "How to break into Animation". Worth a read. =)