Animate a Face SOLD OUT!

The last copy of my Animate a Face CD set has been sold! I won't get a chance to update my site until later tonight, so if you know someone who's about to place an order, please pass along the news.

Even though the first-run CDs are gone, I still have a set for my own use, and am still keeping an eye out for alternate avenues of distribution. One distribution firm I was considering apparently doesn't have a system in place to sell multi-disc products. I haven't looked at the contents in a while, but there may be a way to compress it down to a single disc. Electronic distribution is an option that some have suggested, and I'd like to explore that if possible. Leads to appropriate distribution solutions are most welcome!

I'm very grateful to everyone who has taken a chance with my little tutorial product, and hope that it's been helpful in your animation efforts.

Two Webosaurs vignettes online!

We've been producing a number of short 15-second vignettes for Webosaurs, and the first couple have been released into the wild!

What I love about these pieces (not just these two, but the whole series) is that the animators at Reel FX were given a huge amount of ownership over their work. The team was given the task of creating mini-stories that could tie in with certain parts of the Webosaurs world. The group split into pairs, and each twosome developed a script, boarded and pitched it, directed the voice talent (Justin Harder and myself), animated the shots, and even offered direction on the background designs. It's been a huge collaborative effort, and the end result in each case is something that's part story, part ad, and all fun.

(Edit: word has it the crew here is going to update the clips so the ends don't get truncated by good ol' YouTube. They're a tad short in their current form.)

(Edit edit: fixed links to embedded videos, fixed size)

Kicking off voiceover site

I'm finally kicking off a separate voiceover web site:

www.justinbvocal.com

Just a temp splash page for now, but the blog portion of the site is alive and kicking. Voiceover-related posts from this blog will gradually move over there. Many thanks to Grant Goodwin for help with the logo design.

Short Story: The Cobweb

A little over a month ago, I took a day off to just relax and unwind. Somewhere in the middle of the day, the voiceover bug jumped up and bit me, and before I knew it I was perusing the available projects in the Librivox forum in search of something short to record.

It wasn't long before I located a thread for a collaborative production of Beasts and Super-Beasts. I'd been searching for material to use as practice for narrative voiceover work, and one of the unclaimed short stories in this collection caught my attention. After receiving word from the project coordinator that I could claim the requested story, I dove in. An hour later I uploaded the finished piece, which I present for your listening pleasure:

The Cobweb

There are things that I could have done better, but all in all, I'm very happy with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy it!

Twitter me this...

I've semi-recently become a Twitter semi-junkie. As part of this semi-new-found addiction, I've added a Twitter gadget to the blog sidebar. Happy to hook up with other animators, developers, etc. However, be warned: I do weed my follower list from time to time, blocking users who (for lack of a better phrase) creep me out. If your creep quotient is low, you'll likely stay. :)

Totally awesome!

ThinkGeek always comes out with the best products. Especially at this time of year. :)

Monsters vs. Aliens vs. Apathy

There are a only a handful of animated films that I have intentionally avoided for one reason or another. In some cases, the animation style was just too off-putting. In others, it was the apparent quality of the film as a whole that turned me off.

In the case of Monsters vs. Aliens, however, I simply didn't care. Not about the plot, and not about the characters. While I got a few minor chuckles when I watched the early trailers, nothing in them raised my interest to the point where I felt myself saying, "I have to see this!" In fact, the film was so far off my radar that I frequently found myself saying, "Oh yeah...I forgot that was coming out," when friends would ask about it.

And that's another thing: almost nobody in my animation circle was talking about it. It wasn't a hot topic like many past films had been, so those moments were friends would ask about the film were few and far between. Hence the forgetting.

Anyone else feel the same way? Chime in! Anyone see it? If so, what are your thoughts?