Carlos Baena

Vancouver Spark Animation Festival

baenca — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:13:22 +0000

For those in the area the weekend of Sept 11-12th, I’ll be up in Vancouver, Canada representing Pixar with Day&Night’s Teddy Newton at the Spark’s Conference/Festival. I’ll be talking about my work on Toy Story 3.

Spark 2010 Conference/Schedule

Carlos.

AnimationMentor Student Showcase 2010

baenca — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:52:07 +0000

I wanted to congratulate the AM Students whose work got selected for the 2010 Showcase. They have worked really hard. I’m very impressed with their work.

AnimationMentor Student Showcase 2010

Enjoy.

Carlos

Rowan Atkinson – Invisible Drum Kit

baenca — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:32:06 +0000

I found online what I still consider one of the most inspirational things I’ve watched and owned as an animator. I found a VHS version of this back in college, and on and off I’ve watched and studied this clip so many times. Every time I’ve watched it, I’ve found something new and that says something. From an animation point of view, this clip has about everything I love about what it is that we do. Totally recommended.

Things to watch for:

- Timing: It creates expectations but surprises you in amazing ways. Wonderful texture/rhythm throughout the whole thing. Some repetitions contrasted by an increase in the intensity of the performance, but adding entertaining beats & accents.

- Leading the eye: He’s dealing with invisible objects, yet through his body language/posing you know exactly where to look at.

- Expressions: It’s Mr.Bean, so you know you’ll have some unique facial expressions worth studying no matter what.

- Choices/ideas: Some of the choices throughout are original.

- Subtext: Some great bits throughout. Once he tests the drums, the expression of joy he does is brilliant. Almost like saying “oh boy…”.

- Keeps you watching: event when the drum sticks fall, he finds entertaining ways to keep you watching and keep the beat/rhythm going as well.

Some of this stuff may seem repetitive, but sometimes I really feel like I have to re-watch things like these to get inspired again. Enjoy.

Carlos.

Bishop 2.0

baenca — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:40:22 +0000

Yesterday we announced our Bishop 2.0 rig for the AnimationMentor students. We wanted to take seriously the feedback from the Studios in providing a more flexible rig that would allow students to customize their characters in a lot more ways than they were able before. See the movie below for more information.

I wanted to acknowledge the incredible job that Alexiss Memmott, Taylor Mahony, Kevin Freeman, Keith Ribbons and Brandon Beckstead have done over the last few weeks.

Carlos.

Ps: the animation piece at the end of the video was done by Alumni student Brandon Beckstead.

Clara Bow Face Reference

baenca — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:06:08 +0000

I recently found reference of early actress Clara Bow. Highly recommended to study subtext and inner monologues for animation. Here is a link with great stuff in it. Thanks to Dhar Jabouri for finding this. Enjoy.

Carlos.

Best Day Ever

baenca — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:02:21 +0000

Still recovering from Sunday. One of the most fun, most intense days of my life.
Enhorabuena a todos los españoles. Mas que orgulloso de ser español.

Carlos.

ps: our friends at Disney Spain put this together

Using Cinevate rails/dollies.

baenca — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:29:53 +0000

So back to the topic of Shortfilm equipment we used on the live-action short, the other types of dollies we used came from another company, Cinevate. Thanks to Dennis Wood/Hubert Den Draak from Cinevate, we used both their rails and their Dolly-Ballare. Their rails are seriously strong, and could hold the camera, plus adaptor, ARRI lenses, mattebox, ff, etc with no problem.

Once again with the 3D help of my friends Edward Robbins/Eduardo Martin in providing models/sets, my DP Tiffany Taira and I used 3D animatics to figure out what sorts of shots we were going to use, and why were they important that we used a dolly move. Having dollie/track moves really adds a bit of production value to any film as long as it’s not overdone. As I mentioned before, moving the camera can make things more distracting than beneficial except for when they serve a purpose. This became even more important when working with kids because setting up dolly/tracking shots was time consuming and we only had 7 hours a day to get over 15 setups completed…so at one point we need to know exactly which moments in the short are we going to need a camera move and why.

In some of the shots we used the Cinevate rails I had previously purchased on my own about a year earlier. Here you can see how they were used, including tests and animatics.

Then for some key scenes, we needed a much longer, stronger and more stable dolly but our budget didn’t give us the flexibility of purchasing equipment. So Dennis/Cinevate helped us out for a weekend to get some shots we needed. We used their Dolly-Ballare. We put it together the previous week to the shot, and by Saturday/Sunday we were using it and getting great stuff with it.

Here below are a couple of production photos taken by my friend Bob Roden who wrote the story and was also script supervisor on the set. On the pictures are DP Tiffany Taira, Camera operator Jason Kim and camera assistant Grace Thompson.

For those looking into live-action independent shorts, this is another one of those very affordable/well constructed tools I’d love to recommend. Thanks again to Dennis/Hubert for their help on our short. Very very appreciated.

We are currently finishing editing the short, and learning great deals through it. It’s been a ton of work. It really is true that while this is really fun, is also really hard. So having some key people help us in the process has been great.

Carlos.

ToyStory 3 opens tonight.

baenca — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:55:51 +0000

The experience of working on his film meant a lot for me. I sure hope you go see the film, and enjoy it as much as I enjoyed working on it. The reviews are amazing so far. The film opens tonight at midnight. I’ll be in line with friends watching it.

Update: Here is a video from Director Lee Unkrich on the countdown at the animation department this morning.

ToyStory 3 Countdown

Carlos.

ToyStory 3 Roundtable (part 1)

baenca — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:47:04 +0000

Andrew from SplineDoctors gathered a few of us who worked on ToyStory3 to talk about our experiences. Thanks for putting this together Andrew.

I hope you all enjoy it.

ToyStory 3 Animators Roundtable (part 1)

Carlos.

Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders

baenca — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:34:19 +0000

I had the geat opportunity of meeting Dean DeBlois through AnimationMentor back in 2006. I only have the upmost respect for him and his sensibility. He’s also about one of the nicest guys I’ve met in this industry. That’s why I was so excited about How to Train your Dragon, which came out beautifully. Very special film.

This is a great podcast the guys at Speaking of Animation put together, and a great listen on the making of the film, as well as storytelling, structure & animation.

Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders Podcast

Carlos.