It’s been a long time, friends. We know that you, the Intertron, have missed us greatly. We’ve been lethargic about updating the blag for most of the last year, but I return to you with good tidings! First, and most obvious, is the fact that we’ve returned to the blogotronic. We’ll be posting updates over the next few weeks detailing the events that transpired while we were in hiding, which include but are not limited to: the completion of our company website, the production and completion of other websites, a strategic move toward photorealism, a number of near-epic fails, and a large increase in our collective Sass Level™.

[cue title sequence, credit roll, and introductory overture]

So we’ll begin this hot, supersonic reentry into the blogosphere with the purchases that we made over the past few months.

Back at the end of winter ’09 I momentarily shirked the day’s obligations and went “surfing” around the Inter-tubes. I ventured over to meetup.com and searched for “animation,” which I’d done a few months before with lackluster results. This time, however, the search turned up a recently-established computer animators meetup which, we soon discovered, met less than half a block down the street from our office at a small one-room computer animation school. Fate? Destiny? Happenstance? You decide!

The meetup groups were fun and packed with people in our industry, but unfortunately the school failed when the economy ate six kinds of shit and Tom,the rad fellow running it, had to move back to Los Angeles. Tom, it turns out, has worked as an animator and lighting guy for all sorts of notable animation and production companies. Long story short, we visited him for a few hours on his last day in town and ended up buying two badass computers from him that were used as workstations for Disney.

Now you're playing with POWER!

They even have “Property of Disney” stickers on their cases.

Bought, not hot

The computers were used to create Jimmy Neutron and a handful of other movies and originally cost Disney something like $15,000 each to build. This is mainly due to the fact that they’re now six years old and are still capable of keeping up with pretty modern computers (dual 2Ghz Xenon processors with with hella RAM and kick-ass Quadro cards WHAAAT UUUUUPS!!). They were sold off to Disney employees when they were replaced and we ended up purchasing them from Tom for one hundred bucks a pop. We also picked up a really nice HD monitor to replace Karl’s dark, flickery monitor and save the last remnants of his already-withering eyes. He is far too young to have eyes-fall-out syndrome. His step is too spry.

Face-eyes

Tom also told us about a book called “Digital Lighting and Rendering,” from which he apparently learned a lot of his badass lighting skillz. I just finished it and highly recommend it to a lady or a dude.

A Rim Light is Pretty Important.

We’ve purchased that book in recent weeks, along with a few others:

Karl has not yet mastered it.

Mastering Blender: A sweet little book full of tasty secrets about the open source animation software we use and love. It goes over some advanced Blender skills/strategies and goes into writing Python scripts to make Blender do things that would appear to most to be indistinguishable from magic.

They're not tricks, Michael.

The Illusion of Life – Disney Animation: This book is on the course book requirements list for basically every animation class out there. It was written by some of the greatest animators who have ever lived. This is hardcore, no-nonsense hand-drawn tactics for giving life to drawings.

It's funny too.

The Animator’s Survival Kit: This was also on hell of course lists. It’s pretty much a huge handbook for walk cycles, run cycles, movements, expressions, and everything else that makes animated characters look as captivated and lifelike as this universe allows.

Aaaand there’s this one just for good measure:

We've had this book for a few years. It isn't new.

We’re also in the process of formulating a plan to purchase two high-end workstations from Dell. These beasts will likely have two 4-core Ghz processors each, making each about four times as powerful as the workstations we currently use. It would be the equivalent of upgrading from a steam locomotive to a super high-tech SPACE TRAIN.

NOPE! ALLLLLREADY BEEN THERE!!!

It is a wonderous, fantastical time here at Pixelfab Studios. We are becoming more legit by the day and our plans for world domination draw ever closer. We can already hear the Pixelfab Beast singing its banshee cry as it begins its emergence from the womb of Imaginative Creation. Soon it will rain its magical, cleansing fire down upon the world of animation and creative content production. All who stand in its path shall fall victim to its row upon row of terrible, bloody fangs.

The final bell tolls. It rings out death and destruction.

The stench of its festering carnivore breath has already begun to wilt the flora and sicken the fauna. Stay tuned for the continuing rundown on the past year’s developments!

The time: three weeks ago.

The place: Wagner Murray Architects.

The situation: a megamillion-dollar deal gone sour.

So the WMA boss comes up to us and explains that the stadium spaces we’ve been designing for UNNAMED SPORTSKETBALL TEAM have come to a grinding halt for reasons we can’t mention. We were assigned the task of putting together great-looking renderings of each of the spaces, some of which we’ve never even worked on, in order to unfreeze the gears of this complex machine we call capitalism-based public-funded sports multi-sponsorship. The rigors entailed by this process included the creation of props and scenes in 3-D, the lighting and rendering of said scenes, and the gathering of approval from all of the affected parties. This entry, unfortunately, cannot reveal the innermost secrets of our work as of recent. We really can’t even put the renderings up on the Internets because they’re still under wraps. But, suffice to say, we have been fruitfully busy these past few weeks (and weekends…sigh…) and, therefore, have a legitimate excuse for not posting much on this blag for a little while. I mean, come on! We did months worth of work in three weeks.

We can, however, reveal to you some Pixelfab plans for the somewhat-near (read: 5 years) future because WE are the gentlemen in charge of this company and WE get to say who can tell whom what and when! Our main idea of this week revolves around the (hopefully near) future office space of our company. Out of hand we immediately dismissed all of the standard solutions to the problems that hang heavy on the soul of the Modern Head of Company. Why settle for a brick-and-mortar, or possibly glass and steel, solution? It’s the 21st century, so we figure that it’s important to at LEAST use late-19th century technology to aide our office ailments. Who needs a geographically-bound office space when, like modern information, you can soar over the horizon at or near the speed of thought? Our office needs to be hip, it needs to be modern, and, most important of all, it needs to be railworthy.

Enter Charles A. K. Pullman. I don’t know his first or middle names, so I’ve inserted my first name and Karl’s first two initials.

In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had revolutionized the world. Rail travel was a shining beacon of future progress, but it was wrought with the unpleasant trend of overcrowdedness and the inconvenience of frequent explosions and collisions with fate herself.

The Pullman car changed all of this. It was a model of luxury in a world of toil and scant antiseptics. The Pullman car was the ideal mode of transportation for the 19th and 20th century elite and, thus, is the ideal mobile office space for the elite businessmen of the 21st century.

Gone are the days of draftstables, career typists, and notary-scriveners. We live in a world where a magical box can think a billion times faster than even the most gifted maths-genius; where the word “digitron” is no longer an adjective, but a noun; where a businessman can travel from one side of this vast globe to the other and be made BORED by the entire excursion. We live in a world never conceived of by even the most insane fever-dreams of man or god.

The mounting of our business inside of a train car has, of course, long been a dream of both Karl and myself. We just didn’t know it. We figure that the best way to go about it will be to buy some fashion of circa-1860s decroded-ass railcar and, over a year or two, improve her until she is sleek, steadfast, and impermeable, not unlike the Titanic on her maiden voyage. It will be a good opportunity for us to learn to weld (NO RIVETS!), as well as design, with the utmost quality, the inside of part of a train. All we’ll need after that is a plot of land within a stone’s throw of a legitimate rail line and clearance from Uncle Sam so we don’t get thrown into prison for Impersonating a Train, or whatever railroad-based crimes happen to currently exist in the lawbooks (we don’t know much about this).

Security for this vessel will certainly be a concern, but I assure you that she’ll be properly moored.

We plan to buy the largest anchor chain possible (within reason (or, rather, “reason”)) and attach it to a large steel post stationed, not unlike a sentry, in the firm, bountiful piedmont clay of the Carolinas. An intricate security system involving trap-doors and spike-and-acid-filled tiger pits should protect our valuable computing hardware. We haven’t really thought this part through as much as the rest.

Your thoughts on this matter are greatly appreciated. Anyone with a hauntingly intricate knowledge of trainlaw and rail engineering may be considered for consulting work. We look forward to inviting all of you aboard our vessel, at least as far as fire code will allow.

Heya, fellas! Today I make my (non-editorial) debut here on the Pixelfab “web-log.”

As you probably know, I own 50% of the shares in this company and 97% of the talent.

I jest.

Karl may have informed you (I don’t read his posts) that I’ve been working on the company website for some time now. I started months and months ago with promises that I’d have a smooth, sexy Flash site up and running in just a few weeks.

Well, I basically lied. I’ve been learning the ins and outs of Flash for the past couple of months and the design and structure of the site has gone from Elementary Concoction of Malformed Idealism to One Big Jumbled Mess of Code With The Intention of Becoming an Extraordinary and Sleek Interface. If I were to give a rough (with “rough” being defined as “I’m pretty sure, but there’s a chance that this may suddenly take me another month”) estimate of the progress I’ve made on the site, I’d say it’s approaching 92% done. It’ll be hot when it’s done. Seriously.

The Website: Details

I started out with a pretty decent design for the site, with some vague notions in my head about how I wanted the different parts of the website to move and react (read: “pretty buttons go up and down”). I started making some basically crappy proofs-of-concept in Flash that, after a number of months, have evolved from stupid and needlessly-time-consuming-in-their-creation animations to a heavy, solid code base that digs into the real intricacies of Flash programming. I have, essentially, put my programming minor to very good use.

The main focus of my attention, for the majority of the time spent on the site, was the way the menu buttons move and interact. I figured that out and, after hours and hours of frustration and yelling at inanimate objects, it’s basically perfect. My work now lies in programming a dynamic media browser that loads outside images in for viewing. Once it works the way I want it to (and it’s close, I SWEAR IT!), I can just drag and drop files into a folder on the web server and the website will automagically load them up and sort them into the proper places for me. Web editing will become a thing of the past, like the telegraph and socialism.

My Laptop: Status

In other news, my laptop completely ATE SEVEN KINDS OF SHIT recently. The video card died because of other, deeper-rooted problems. Dell’s replaced the video card twice, and the new video cards have both eaten themselves alive. The up-side of this is that it’s given us the idea for the creation of Safe Mode Porn, which is made particularly for computers running in 640×480 resolution. If anyone out there wants to be part of some awesome pixelated-as-all-hell 1991-inspired porn, email me at graphics@pixelfabstudios.com.

My laptop, Alyx, effed up so bad that she started talking to me in Internet slang.

Startz?! WHAT THE HELL, ALYX?

She’ll (hopefully) be fixed in a few weeks and work on various projects can return to 100%. I’ve included a few images of myself on the phone with Dell’s tech support.

I developed a pretty awesome way of attaching the phone receiver to the side of my head.

That’s canned air in one hand and business-as-usual in the other. This is multi-tasking, which was previously thought only to be an ability possessed by the digital computer.

That’s Karl’s crotchal area behind me. Lovely.

I’ll write about the rest of the company’s goings-on in a later post. Now is not the time.

♥ Chase