The acclaimed 2D animated end credits for Ratatouille gave us a taste of what those guys at Pixar are capable of doing in this medium.

Now I've just read the news telling that the upcoming DVD and Blu-Ray Ratatouille discs will bring us the first 2D short from Pixar! =)

I have already bought my Ratatouille DVD (in pre-sale) and now I have one more reason to be counting the days until the release date. While we wait for the release, Animated News shows us how's it going to look.

Today my post is just to tell that the crash course on Blender I gave on EITM - IV Forum de Software Livre (Local Free Software Forum) was really cool!

This was the fifth time in a row that I presented something Blender-related on a local Free Softare event. It's always good to see people from the past events and also to notice that a lot of new people are interested both on Free Software and Blender. Congrats on the organization for this awesome event!

The course was pretty short, and the intention was to present the capabilities of this awesome tool. I'll be sending a cool selection of links and docs to all who have participated (but write me, because I don't have everyone's e-mail addresses!)

I've been a lot busy these days, dealing with my job and free lances so this blog had fewer posts recently. Luckily, among those free lances, there are some in which I've used our beloved Blender. As soon as I can I will show you. =)

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Last Thursday (Oct, 25), we (Jovan, Suryara and me) presented a lecture about the making of our "Legends of The Amazon Forest" animations to Graphic Design students at Faculdade SENAC. It was pretty cool, and everyone there was really kind to us. Thanks a lot! =)

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Talking about events, tomorrow (Oct, 30) I'll be giving a Blender short course at the Executive IT Meeting.

I wanna thank Henrique Zorzan, Krysztof Nowacki (gucias) and Yorik Van Havre, who gladly permitted me to show their awesome architectural visualizations as examples of what Blender can do in that field =)

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About some animation news, the first Kung Fu Panda trailer is now online. It looks that it's going to be pretty cool. Now I'm waiting for the premiere of Bee Movie here, which also looks promising.

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Wondering about the reason I've picked that weird image header to illustrate this post?

By Marck's recommendation, take a look at this 1960's cigarettes ad starred by the Flintstones! Talk about being politically incorrect, huh?

Well... that's all folks! =)

The great animator Daniel Martinez Lara, also known as Pepeland, has offered his first version of the rig Red-Nelb for download to Blender users.

He states that this rig is an experiment, and not yet stable for production work, but I think it's good for studying. =)

Probably some of you would tell me that I think everything that comes from France is brilliant.

I don't believe that this is true, but I admit that the shorts which made me smile recently came from there. Basically, I think they achieved something that's pretty hard to do: to beautifully join technique and storytelling.

The last one to achieve this is Hugh, made by students at ESMA. On the official site we can only watch the hi-res versions with audio in French. If you are like me and do not (yet) understand French, you can watch a version with English subtitles here.