ASF part 2: Budapest

So today finally another update about the ASF workshop. At the moment I'm in Budapest attending lectures at MOME University. This module is about finding the right visual style. We've seen lots of Eastern European animations. Which is good, because in Eastern Europe they have made very interesting animations. Partly this is due to the Soviet period. The Communist Party aknowledged animation as an important way to reach the people and time and money were of no great concern. Simply put, the animators could do what they want as long as they didn't openly criticize the Communist Party. As a result, aside from the propaganda, a lot of artistic animations were made. It's a good thing to see these animations, because usually we only see a lot of American (oriented) or Japanese animation. Of course I already knew about these animations, but it never hurts to be reminded again. No matter how great the American or Japanese animations can be, I myself would really like to see more different (maybe more European) styles.

first impression of Budapest... at night...

We also went to two studios. Espacially Lichthof Productions was interesting to me. They are now working on a feature film which gets mainly made in 3d. What is very nice about this production is that they really capture the 2d concept art in their 3d work. The concept art and the final look are quite similar. The textures for the 3d models also have the drawing lines from the 2d art in them. Here you can find some more info about the film and see some visuals. Also they developed a rather interesting technique for animating the characters. It's what I would call stop motion capture. They have these puppet armatures which they animate the classical stop motion way. But these armatures have little lights on it and they photograph them from different angles (just like normal motion capture). The images taken are then fed to their home made software and presto, they have a stop motion animated skeleton in the computer. It's too bad that they can't use it right now, because of a lack of money.

entering MOME...

Besides this we also had a talk about SourceBinder which is a promising on-line node based flash creation kit (that was a mouthful). A lecture about visual effects in the movies, a presentation by Tamás Waliczky about his artistic computer animations, something about scriptwriting and some background information about Log Jam. Log Jam is a very funny series of short animations by Alexei Alexeev, who, by the way, also gave the presentation.
Well, that's it for now. Hopefully the last few days will be fun and inspiring. And then I will go home to my beautiful and sweet wife.