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™.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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’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.

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 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!