Channel Frederator Blog

As a huge fan of Flight of the Conchords, I was curious about the mock animated series “Albi, The Racist Dragon” that showed up in Episode Seven. Well, after some intense Googling, I found out that the guy responsible for directing this terribly touching toon is Oliver Dear. Director, Illustrator, Animator, Painter, Production Designer, Actor–he has got it going on! (And his dad, William Dear, directed Harry and the Hendersons.)

After the jump, a bonus Conchords clip on that subject of getting it going on (warning: silly adult content)… [Read more…]

I’m really excited to announce this month’s winner of the Cartoon of the Month prize! We had 8 films from episodes 136, 137 and 138 in the running this time - a bit low because of the Channel Frederator Awards, but nonetheless stiff competition! In the end, Pushkin took home the prize!
Pushkin is a great stop motion film brought to us by Trevor Hardy of Fool Hardy Films. I took a few minutes to do a mini-interview with Trevor below. Check it out and then, if you haven’t had the chance to watch it, or haven’t seen it in a while, go watch Pushkin again in Channel Frederator episode 136.

CF: What inspired you to create Pushkin?

I came up for the story line for Pushkin after losing my own cat who thank fully returned a while later but with bent whiskers??? (Don’t ask me?), whilst writing pushkin I watched Sylvain Chomet’s brilliant film, ‘The Triplets of Belleville’ and of course his sets and atmosphere totally inspired me and helped carve the look of the world Pushkin would live in.

[Read more…]

Animator and software developer Friedrich Kirschner has figured out a way to do 3D scanning with a webcam, some Legos, a plastic bowl, and milk. It’s called Milkscanner. It’s a silly sort of stop motion that actually works!

The Lego structure holds the webcam. Your object of choice is placed in a the bowl of milk (filled up to halfway). More milk is added three teaspoons at a time. Each scan is a “slice” and it appears that you can get a pretty accurate outline from this calcium-rich contraption. (You have to flip the object to finish the scan.)

For the latest version of Milkscanner, go here.

Friedrich Kirschner has his own website here, which spotlights lots of cool Machinima innovation. (Machinima is the process by which movies are filmed using game engines.)

And go to this Vimeo link to see a variation on the technique where people are dipped into a kiddie pool that is filled [Read more…]

This is a great piece of footage. This animatic was done by Phil Tippett and crew for the first “Jurassic Park” film. It’s really cool to see the armature supports and such as well. The personality that Tippett’s crew was able to inject into these characters was incredible. While I can see why CG was chosen over stop motion, that snake like tongue would have been awesome!

Here is the way the sequence played in the final film.

-Floyd Bishop