Animated Movie Posters

Why must all animated movies be advertised with a pun as the tagline? Is this a studio-wide mandate? 

It may look like all posters for animated movies are from the same company. The posters above are actually from different movies, marketed by different studios. 

These are by no means the worst, just the ones I could screenshot in 30 minutes searching google. Live action movies are not universally marketed this way. (But, this shows they have their own issues.)

Here's your 3 step shortcut to making an animated movie poster:

1. Image of character against white (clouds are also acceptable)

2. A pun , preferably in Helvetica (this works in non-English languages too!)

3. Profit!

#fb

Dingoo A320 and the Mac

The Dingoo A320 is a neat little device for emulating game systems, but there a few gotchas when using the A320 with a Mac.

1. The A320 will disconnect from the USB port after a few minutes.

This is very frustrating when trying to transfer large files. The solution is to either not use the Dingoo to transfer files via USB to internal memory. Or, just use the SD card for files. Remember you have a 5 minute timer running to transfer files before it craps out. This is not an issue on a PC.

 2. Ejecting the A320 will crash it.

If you use the standard Mac software eject button to dismount the unit, it will freeze up and have to be hard reset. If you just yank out the USB cord, it will update and unmount just fine, but the Mac will give you a warning about disc corruption etc etc. So one way or the other, there will be some kind of error when it comes to unmounting the A320.

 3. Formatting the miniSD card to install Dingux will not work on a Mac.

You will not get any errors, or anything out of the ordinary, but it won't work. The boot sector for Dingux is corrupted in this process. You need to format the SD card on a real PC. Using VMware or Parallels won't work either. I don't have Boot Camp installed, so I wasn't able to test that. Avoid many hours of frustration and format the card on a PC.

Drawing Club Vampira Theme

This weeks theme at the Drawing Club was Vampira. Tried real physical acrylics this time, no Photoshop!

Drawing Club Russ Meyer theme

Haven't been able to stop by The Drawing Club since I've been out of the country for the last year. Finally got to drop in last week and do some sketching.

http://www.thedrawingclub.com/workshop/russ-meyer-theme-photo-and-artwork/

Essential VFX links on Twitter

Just a quick listing of who I find is invaluable to follow on Twitter for vfx news. Many vfx companies and supes have twitter accounts and will post job openings there. (@dneg , and @MPC_VFX for example).  But there are a few that if you work in visual effects, you need to follow. I find twitter to be a better source of up-to-the-minute information than many of the dedicated sites that cover cg.

Who you should be following:

@Variety_DSCohen

David S. Cohen , writer for Vaiety and covers technology and visual effects. Lots of good info daily about the state of the business. Also good info that many other news outlets should be covering, but aren't.

@VFXSoldier

The mysterious VFX Soldier likes to stay anonymous, and that's ok. He (She?) covers the important vfx labor and union issues.

@VisualEffectsSo

Official Twitter feed of the VES (Visual Effects Society). It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing we have to a union or a voice.

@alba

Eric Alba is an independant vfx supe, and posts great links everyday that are related to cg, animation, and vfx. Not sure how he has time to prolifically tweet and supe.

@vfxblog

Ian Failes writes for fxguide.com (another site you should be reading daily).

oh yeah, and me: @MichaelLevineTD