Saturday, October 15, 2011

Link of the Week, 10/17/11-10/23/11

Hey everyone, Tyler here for this week's Link(s) of the Week:

This week, I'm providing some "out of the box" sort of resources. You may have to put in a little more effort to find them useful, but I promise they are:

First, is The 11 Second Club

What this is, in a nutshell, is a monthly, global animation competition, open to both students and working professionals. Every month they provide a sound clip from a movie or some other source (roughly 11 seconds long) and anyone at all can animate and submit a sequence to fit the sound clip. The community votes on the entries and the winner gets both the recognition, but also gets a critique from an industry professional.

I use this site alot, but I've never entered the competition. How, you ask, do I use this site to my benefit then? I find it to be an excellent source of inspiration as well as a fun exercise in problem solving. I like to download the sound clip and thumbnail/storyboard/ design characters around it, as well as browse the entries every month to see how other people interpreted the same sound clip. It's a great resource if you're stuck/blocked while working on something. 11 seconds isn't very long, and it's a good way to both warm up and cool down after working on something for too long, or to just kill time and watch some funny, short cartoons.

The next site is for fans of and people who want to make videogames/videogame art, Giant Bomb


Now, this site is great for their incredible editorial content such as news, reviews, and video features (a small plug from me), but if you don't care for that sort of stuff, I'd like to direct your attention to their almighty database search:

Giant Bomb is an extremely comprehensive, user updated and maintained database of all things videogame, everything from specific games, game makers/companies/studios, to reoccurring themes/concepts in games. If you love a certain game, if you can see yourself working for the studio that made it, or if a game's art catches your eye and you want to know who made it, I cannot stress enough Giant Bomb's usefulness. Look up the game in question, and you can even discover the address and contact info/emails for the company or studio, and get the ball rolling from there.

Some of you (hopefully) are already familiar with Giant Bomb, but I'm constantly surprised by the number of people who are videogame fans and haven't heard of it. Give it a look see, it's one of the only game sites I still visit.


Lastly this week, like those before me, I'm posting a "portfolio" of an animator who inspires me: Squetch, AKA Bernard Derriman

Squetch (which is an amalgamation of "squash" and "stretch") is an animator/animation director from Sydney Australia, and someone who's work I've been following since about 2007. In his own personal work as well as his commissioned work, he used to be Flash based, but has more recently converted to Toon Boom software. He tends to use a limited style of animation, but in a way that can get very subtle and effective results. I'm particularly a fan of his facial animation and lip-synching, as well as his design aesthetic in general.

for those too lazy to click on the link, here are some of my personal favorites of his:


He used to do a webseries with stand-up comedian Arj Barker called 'Arj and Poopy', this being my favorite "episode".


An older short film of his


His most recent short film


Thanks guys, sorry if this post is super long! Hope you enjoy these links
-Tyler Crowley

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