Darrin Hofmeyr

This is a brilliant clip from Cirkus Productions from New Zealand, it explains exactly how the animation process works. Well, sort of…it’s meant for their clients, I think!

Thanks to Motionographer, Cartoon Brew and somebody at work that sent me the link.

If the video isn’t playing go here for the original post. An interview and some clips with Sylvain Chomet – the director/animator of Triplets of Bellville.

Testing Media Upload

Hey all, I am just trying out WordPress and getting it to play nicely.

I apologise for the awful theme(s) until everything is sorted.

Please go HERE for the old site.

I finally put in the effort to install wordpress – so I don’t have to use Blogger.

Straight away it seems faster and more intuitive… we will have to see!

Now I just have to move all my other stuff!

So apparently when JZ fell over while doing his traditional dance at his fourth, er… sixth wedding it was actually part of the dance. If that is the case then he is probably the best dancer in the world as it looked so believable.

“The “fall” was part of the Zulu dance, said Ngizwe Mchunu, who led the Zulu warriors who danced during the president’s traditional wedding on Monday.”

I don’t understand why they don’t just admit it was a mistake and laugh at themselves. It wasn’t that horrendous and a man with such a huge gut was doing well enough chucking his legs in the air.
The guy goes on to explain that reporters and the media must learn the Zulu culture…
uh, ok? Sure! Like what is that??? Lying? Or maybe making shit up?

“It was part of the dance. Zulus deliberately drop their bodies when they dance. It is the way of excelling. There is no excitement if you don’t do it.”

I have seen how they fall down while dancing, they sure as hell don’t trip backwards over a dude sitting down and have people laugh and giggle, then somebody goes over and pretends to bash them with a shield as the guy gets up smiling at himself for being a tool.

News24 has the article here.
What-evaaaa!

If you have purchased the latest Harry Potter DVD, you will have seen the Free Willy “Escape from Pirates Cove” trailer in the beginning.

BlackGinger did almost 200 shots on the direct to DVD movie directed by Will Geiger and starring Bindi Irwin and Beau Bridges.
The breakdown of shots was roughly a third completely CG shots, and two thirds comp or cleanup type work. I wont say much more than that for now until people have actually seen it.

Yahoo has the trailer here unfortunately it is an awful streaming version. Blergh!

At long last I have the photo taken of all the BlackGinger staff men-bers who grew their face hair for charity during the month of November. In total I am proud to announce that we raised over R4000 and BlackGinger matched that total. So a cool R8000 towards CANSA. Well done all!

There was an eclectic mix of styles from the regular to the extreme truckers. I must admit some of the guys went all out and others, myself included, were more restrained.

Till next year.

I have been a bit silly this week.

The month of Movember is nearly over and all the male staff, well most of them, at BlackGinger have been growing our moustaches in support of CANSA. We also got sponsorship from friends and family wanting to see how stupid we would look with the abomination that is a hairy upper lip.

We finally finished the CG salmon job I supervised, shot on location in Hazyview and finished at BlackGinger. A great learning experience in dealing with underwater shoots and creating CG fish. Luckily we had a good portion R&D’d from Free Willy but there were still tricky bits we overlooked and discovered on our way.

download here 15MB

Directed by Slim of Egg films

Producer – Gabriella Harris
Flame – Eddie Addinall
Modeling – Francois Conradie, Hayden Barnett
Texturing – Kirsten Beets
Rigging – Duncan Greenwood
Animation – Richard Clark, Andre de Villiers, JC Phillips, Darrin Hofmeyr
Shading – Jason Slabber
VFX – Kyle Ueckermann
Lighting – Jason Slabber, Wayne Berry, Camille Naude

True story, we got lost on the way to Hazyview to shoot the river footage – got lost on a Garmin shoot, can you believe it?