Happy New Years n' shtuff!

Yeah, I know yer all probably sick of the turkey by now, but hey, it's Aardman. Sorry for the lack of posts as well, it's been a bit of a workin' vacation this year. Monster posts updating y'all on the TAIS general meeting, upcoming events and more. Just a quick note on the TAIS meeting...I was re-elected blog beast, and all the board members, sans Marc Beaurteaux, whose gotta pay them bills, have signed on for another year. This last year has been an absolute blast, what with the blog, all the TAIS events, my film, all the stuff cooked up by the other TAIS members and all them animations and animators discovered on the interwebs. Really lookin' forward to 2008. Now go home and watch some cartoons, dammit! Cheers!

Emilio's Christmas

Hey, it's no Charley Brown's Christmas, but at least the theme music by Matt Rach rocks. Grab a glass o' nog, settle down with them loved ones and have yerself a Merry Ho-Ho on me. And thanks one and all for indulgin' this screwy pooch this year and visiting the blog. Cheers, mates!

Cintiq 12wx: Not so grand fer canucks...

O.k., this really gives me the shits. Wacom comes out with an awesome new bit of kit, the sketchbook-sized Cintiq 12wx, which reviewers say is the greatest thing since bananas met peanut butter. 'Cept Wacom don't ship to beaver-land, and Canadian resellers, gentle, helpful upstanding souls all, have taken the opportunity to fleece the ever-luvin' hell out of their countrymen. The 12wx retails for $999 bucks stateside and our dollars are almost at par. Yet check out the markups...as little as 70 bucks and as much as 300 over the retail. Nice. I emailed Wacom...I'll letch'all know what they has to says. More later.

UPDATE: Teach me to jump to the conclusions. Got an e-mail from a reseller and he sez the markup is for duty and shipping. I'm gonna assume that the smaller the shops, the higher the markup. Plus, this ain't exactly a mass-market piece of kit, so the smaller shops can't be getting many in, hence the markup. The larger shops must be takin' a hit just to sell 'em. Hmmm...looks like I may have to work my Ohio connections to get me hands on one of these without payin' an arm and a leg extra just to get it here. Meanwhile, the reseller fella I was talkin' bout sez he complained about the situation to Wacom in hopes of bringin' the price down. Haven't heard back from Wacom, so I'll be givin' this fella the benefit of the doubt. On account of he wrote back. More as this story develops!

UPDATE on yer UPDATE: Hookay, shot a voicemail to the fellas at Vistek here in T'rawna and Silicon Cowboys out in BC about availability and shipping. As soon as I gets the skinny, I'll let y'all know where the best bang for your Canuck buck is.

Merry Cookiemas from TAIS!

Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW


Madi and Bryce have a sweet lil' surprise for us, a stop-mo animated greeting created with cookies from the sultans of sweet Queen of Tarts. Originally this was meant for the ARC Holiday party (going on tonight at the Gladstone!) but they ain't hooked up for the video tonight. No worries, here it is in all its cookie-fied glory. Amazing stuff considering they whipped it up yesterday. Nice work! More holiday goodies to come.

Minushi on DVD!

Tyler Gibb, he of the self-animated sci-fi feature Minushi, has a great holiday surprise. The film is out on a special edition 2-disc DVD! You get the full film in Dolby 5.1 (wonder how many orcs he had to slay to pull THAT off) as well as full director's commentary, subtites and "Details", his production documentary that runs through all the nitty-gritty involved in creating a feature-length film solo. Just in time fer Christmas...and it's only 19 bucks! Bargoon. Go buy it at the Minushi e-store!

VGCats: Still Alive

Just had to see if embedding this would work. Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats fame has taken himself a serious shine to the Orange Box. So much so that he put on his animatin' hat and whipped up this lil' treat for us happy webcomic fans. It's a flash video of the Portals theme, written by geekling troubador Jonathan Coulton and sung by the voice of GlaDOS, Ellen McLain. Check it out! Now I just gotta get off my butt and finish MY toon. More on that later. A great way to end the week, neh? Hit up VG Cats for more video-game based cartoon insanity. Later!

Zero Punctuation: Assassin's Creed

Again, not technically animated, but I don't really give two licks of a hamster's hind end, cuz it's funny. And it pertains to the video game industry, which is animated in spades. So it counts. This week's target? Assassin's Creed by Ubisoft for the XBOX 360.

Cintiq 12wx: it's a grand, baby!

Hate to nick shit from John Martz over there at Drawn, but all you TAIS members gotta know about this. The Cintiq 12wx is a sketchbook-sized version of Wacom's awesome draw-on lcd monitors, with a 12.1 inch diagonal screen...essentially you've got 8 1/2 x 11 inches to draw on. The bonus is that the unit is small and light enough to be spun round on a table top, so hard-to-draw angles are no sweat. Everything I've heard about performance is telling me that this is the same Cintiq quality that has made this the digital art tool to have, just more compact.

Here's the kicker: the e-mail I got from Wacom yesterday lists this lil' darlin' at $999 canuck bucks! It ain't cheap, but it's definetly sumthin' you could save yer nickels for over a few months and own. Good on ya, Wacom! I'll be getting one of these lil' beauts for me birthday, I thinks. There's a bit of a demo courtesy of them there YouTubes below. And here Christmas is right 'round the corner. If you've got a flash animator or digital artist on yer shoppin' list, a slightly overweight wallet and a need to be a holiday hero this year, well, hop on over to the Wacom E-Shop and get you one!

Kivioq's Passage

Just had a chance to go through Grant's blog in depth. Besides more lighthearted fare, Grant is also working on an epic. It's an historical piece, telling the tale of the doomed Franklin expedition through the eyes of an Inuit hunter. Damn, this looks ambitious. I'll try n' see if I can't squeeze a few more details about the production out of the good Mr. Dix in the next few days. Meanwhile, here's a sneak peak.

Grant Dix stop-mo to go!

I was doing a search for info on animation grants for an L.A. animator lookin' to hop across the border to work in Toronto, and look what I done found. Grant's Animation. Get it? Man, I love it when Google does that. Grant Dix is a stop-mo animator from right here in T'rawna. His latest appears above...yer gonna love the toilet-cup gag and the sneeze fx. Hell, he even worked some bloopers in there...nice! Hey, Grant, howzabout submitting this film to Frederator, hmm...?

Here's an open invite to drop by TAIS in the new year. I'll keep an eye on Grant's blog, letch'all know when he posts some new stop-mo goodness. More later!

UberStreet Studios

Just got an e-mail from the fellas over at UberStreet Studios, a small New York shop specializin' in commercials and music vids. UberStreet is the stompin' grounds of one Dan Pinto...you'll remember him from his film 'Hedgehug', featured in the Nicktoons festival and Channel Frederator's ep. 96.

They've just updated their website, so you can go over and check out Dan's work, as well as that of co-founders Bryan Brinkman and Matt Gaston. Dan's currently helpin' ol' Bill Plympton out on his new film 'Idiots and Angels.' Go take a gander, throw some more work their way!