Vibram Five Fingers

Over the past year, I ran in numerous neighborhoods and parks and enjoyed my own improvements and triumphs over the time. A few months ago, my studies of running techniques brought my attention to some interesting facts: the human foot does not need a trendy, padded sole in order to run properly. Actually, the running shoe (a relatively recent invention), encourages people to run improperly by hitting with their heel first. The impact of this running style distributes force in correctly and hurts the knew and shin. The foot is built in a such a way that the ball and arch of the foot absorb the impact before spreading the remainder of the force to the leg. While padded shoes do absorb impact, the actual force placed on the knee is higher than when running barefoot.

My friend Alexiss wrote about this subject and found great reference illustrating this:

I'm sure you are asking "We know that running barefoot is actually better for the legs, what do we do about it? Have you seen the ground outside? There is all kinds of stuff out there that can hurt our delicate little feet. What do we do?" Well, that is where the Vibram Five Fingers shoes come in:




These shoes let you feel the ground just like you were running on bare feet, but protect your feet from sharp objects and surfaces of varying temperatures. I've been running in them for a little while now and you really can feel the different types of ground beneath you. I will occasionally go off track and run on different surfaces to feel them out. And now, running on concrete sidewalks just doesn't work for me so I find myself searching for new paths that are a little gentler. Also, now that I feel every impact I naturally started running one the balls of my feet which has taken some time to get used to. The shoes also force your toes to spread apart into a more natural formation, up until now my pinky toe has been squished next to my "ring" and these shoes finally forcing to carry its (my) own weight. My full report on running with these shoes will appear later this week, but I highly recommend them!

GDC Newsletter article

Animation Mentor releases a newsletter each month with animation interviews, news, tips, and tricks. Last month, I attended the Game Developers Conference and was surprised at how few animation students/alumni I saw at the convention. So I did what I normally do when I am passionate about a subject that more people should know about: I wrote about it.

But, unlike my intentions for this blog, I wanted a large and animation-specific audience so I wrote my impressions for the AM Newsletter. This is not the first time I wrote an article for the newsletter, but it has been quite a few years. I think it may be time to write a little more often, there is so much to share!

Nic Cage teaches overacting (unintentionally)

When acting out dialog an animator (or actor) may tend accent every syllable or action with a pose or hand gesture. This is an easy trap to fall into because once we force ourselves to think and analyze conversations, especially when breaking it down to 24 fps, we no longer act "naturally" and tend to add movements and gestures no person would actually do in real conversation. You end up creating a scene with so many accents that nothing stands out and one which confuses the viewers, or worse, takes them out of the movie completely. Watch the clip below of Nic Cage over emphasizing:



"Not one time!"

Remember kids, overacting is bad! (Although it can be quite funny once taken out of the movie and shown to the world)

Nic Cage as everyone!

As odd as it may sound, this week as been an unplanned "theme week" for my posts. Beginning with the Face/Off reference in the "How to Train Your Dragon" soundtrack, going through the Kick-Ass Premiere and Wondercon preview, and ending with tomorrows interesting reference material, this week has had a Nicolas Cage theme. And I didn't plan that. It just so happens that there is a lot of Nic Cage material out there and somehow it came across my browser more this week than it has in the past 7 months.

But the ultimate collection of Nic Cage humor is here:

NIC CAGE AS EVERYONE!

(a smaller collection of pics can be found here too)

For some reason, the internet mobs decided to take Nic Cage's face and insert it into (in)famous people/characters. The results vary, but here are a few of my favorites:

Wondercon: Celebs

More pictures from Wondercon this past weekend, these are of the stars who attended the convention. We took our seats in the main hall at 11 AM (after buying a day's worth of food at the local grocery store) in order to get the best seats for all the presentations throughout the day. Even though we were there hours before the presentations, the place was almost completely full (over 4000 people). We did get good seats at the very front but we were directly in front of the video screen and not in front of the actual stars. After every presentation either James or myself would get up and try to find a newly vacated seat and it took us almost 5 hours to get better seats, just in time for the Kick-Ass panel. I feel sorry for people who want to see the presentations and only showed up early by 3 hours or less because they did not see anything...

The movies presented were:

Prince of Persia
Sorcerer's Apprentice
Toy Story 3
The Losers
A Nightmare on Elm St
Resident Evil 4
Inception
Kick-Ass

plus a few screenings of shows like V, Fringe, Human Target, and Happy Town (which was pretty cool).

You can find more info from James!

Wondercon: The Floor

After missing the past few years, I attended the 2010 Wondercon and a fabulous time was had. My college buddy James flew up from Texas (we've been trying to do a comic convention together for years) and we painted the convention red. Below you will find photos of us standing in line (waiting for Kick-Ass tickets mostly), seeing cool costumes, showing off our homemade t-shirts, visiting the local foodery and laughing at the people waiting for the iPad launch.

Check out James' post on the same subject too.

Jay's Playlist: JigginJonT

Welcome to my playlist, where I discuss the music which is currently entertaining me. Below you will find a video, press play to begin the song and then read my feelings on the album.

Today's music is arrangements by JigginJonT:


As I've said numerous times before, one of my favorite genres is soundtracks. One of my favorite sub-genre of soundtracks is game soundtracks. And my favorite sub-genre of game soundtracks is orchestral/band/piano arrangements. Surprisingly, the genre of arranged video game music is actually quite large (at least bigger than you would expect), and even more surprising is how many well made fan arrangements/performances of game soundtracks exist. Talented musicians. who also love video game, will write, record, and upload their arrangements for everyone to hear; and with Youtube and OCremix it is easier to get attention for your arrangement.

One of the first fan-made performances that blew me away was "Live from the Yggdrasil" by the jazz pianist Jon Titterington (aka "JigginJonT"). The complex jazz single stuck with me from the moment I heard it, and it is one of the very few pieces to survive my (now retired) 72-hour test: I would start playing the song on Friday morning and if I was not sick of it by Monday morning then I knew it was a wonderful piece.





Beyond being a talented pianist, JonT found success in his arrangements by choosing video game pieces that were lesser known and making them his own. At the time (and today still), most fan arrangements were of pieces that were either the game's main theme, an overused-cliche theme, or the game's few piano/guitar only themes which were easy to recreate. Yet Jon chose pieces that if I hadn't been told the game I probably wouldn't have recognized, even after playing the games (although sometimes a decade had passed since playing them). He then adds his favorite style of the time to the piece (there is some definite Vince Guraldi in the above piece) and by the end of the arrangement he has made the theme his own.

Below you will find the original themes for the two pieces listed above and can see how much Jon changed, yet retained, in his arrangements.

Kick-Ass Preview Screening

I have always wanted to attend a "highly anticipated" movie preview with the movie's stars, but up until I moved to California I never had the opportunity. Now I have attended the company screenings (specifically, Pixar) of films I have worked on (an awesome experience in its own right), but that just isn't the same as seeing a movie before its release with the actors who made it. Well Wondercon offered myself and my friend James the opportunity to do just that and we weren't going to miss it!



The program announced that tickets to a special screening of the movie Kick-Ass would be given out on Friday and Saturday. We knew these tickets would be popular (especially at a comic convention) so on Friday we arrived 20 minutes before the show opened only to find over 500 people ahead of us in line to get into the convention (and likely find the tickets). Luckily, no tickets were actually given out at the Kick-Ass booth that day, if the had been we wouldn't have gotten them. We learned from our first mistake and on Saturday arrived 1 hour and 15 minutes before the show opened and only had 100 people ahead of us. When the gates opened we rushed to the booth only to find another 100 people in line in front of us (not everyone from the previous line went to the booth, but many exhibitors who had their own booths on the floor skipped the first line and were waiting for tickets before the gates opened). For a few tense moments when it looked like they would run out of tickets (they were withholding many for prizes later in the day) before we would get there. Luckily, that didn't happen:

Eric Goldberg meets my reel

This past weekend San Francisco hosted WonderCon, a comic/movie convention that is the sister-con to the San Diego Comic Con. While I am writing number of future posts regarding the many cool events seen at WonderCon this post is focused on one unexpected event which made my day.

The convention program listed a Disney "Meet the artists" event for attendees to bring their portfolios and receive feedback from professionals at Disney. In my planning for the day I did not include this event for a number of reasons: the description mostly talked about "portfolios" and "artist" so I assumed the event tailored to 2d production artists instead of animators (and this was correct); the program didn't mention the attending artists which meant either Disney did not tell the organizers or did not know who would be available (usually not good signs); and finally, my position already allows me to meet many awesome, talented people at Disney and since these events tend to fill up I didn't want my attendance to prevent someone who doesn't have the chance to meet Disney employees from meeting them here. On the day of the event my curiosity got the better of me and a decided to poke my head into the door just to see which artists were giving feedback:

Another year! Another review!

Like most companies, we have annual reviews at my job and unlike many employees I actually look forward to mine. I enjoy looking back at all the projects I worked on, discussing my successes and failures, and looking forward to my future projects and ways to improve (pretty much just like the purpose of this blog). It's a great retrospective and I'm always reminded of why I am here and what I want to do in the future. I'm not going into the specifics of my review, just that I loved doing it and have some really cool plans for the upcoming year. Hopefully by next year's review I will be able to post the results to a few of my ambitious projects. :)