The New Blather

My obsession with programming an automatic melody generator (that actually gives good results, unlike just about every other melody generator out there) continues. Again, the program works by analyzing existing melodies and “learning” from them. In my 2008 version, the program analyzed the given melodies while it composed new ones from them. Now the program [...]

I’ve been finding it hard to focus on my animation studies this week. I had a little musical epiphany, and my mind is now once again obsessed with working on my book on writing melodies and the “melody generator” computer program to go with it. The program is now capable of outputting some pretty nice [...]

Here’s a question I made up (though I’m sure someone’s asked something like it before… nihil novum sub sole). I don’t know the answer to it, I’m still trying to puzzle it out: Say you’re trapped in a science lab. The scientists there have invented a way to erase 24 hours worth of memory each [...]

1. The idea of emergence 2. There are no secrets to success 3. School is stupid 4. There’s no such thing as a genius 5. There’s no such thing as a teenager Here are my top five worldview convictions; ideas that I was not raised believing but came to accept through thought, observation, and communication [...]

The New York Times online has a great little video about Pixar: Now if that doesn’t make you want to be an animator, what would? Pixar has been coming under scrutiny lately as it was recently revealed that their film Up borrowed heavily from a short cheaply-produced poorly-shot film of the same name that Disney [...]

I recently came across this blog: Freedom to Learn by Peter Gray. There are a bunch of interesting articles there, and I haven’t read them all. But I really appreciate some of them; they echo what I’ve been saying all along, and it’s always nice to feed my confirmation bias. In one article, Gray writes: [...]

Here are the 2011 movies I’m most interested in. Some I definitely want to see in theaters (the ones with a star), and some I just want to keep an eye on and I’ll decide after watching previews and hearing other people’s reactions. (Animated films I almost always want to see in theaters. March 4, [...]

There’s an interesting blog post over on Blue Sky Disney about 3D. I do find it nice to see a blog post by someone who doesn’t seem to hate 3D as much as many other bloggers (just check out that post’s comments), but he also makes an interesting point: A lot has been said about [...]

In our second part of animating a box lift, we space out the poses we did last time and add in betweens.  Unfortunately there’s really not much to show here, but I’ll blather about the process I’ll use for a bit.  Here’s a screenshot of what my workspace looks like in Maya: [[insert screenshot here [...]