In the process of reorganizing my apartment (living and working) space and finally getting around to framing prints and posters that have been sitting in my closet for way too long, I have been  inspired to seek out new prints to hang on the walls. Check out these wonderful Braniff Airline posters (via World of Kane). They are way too expensive for my current home-furnishing budget so saved jpegs will have to do for now…

Also came across some  “La Grivoise” playing card sets not long ago.($2 each in a sale bin!) Groovy and saucy illustrations!

*UPDATE: See all the cards (orig. French) HERE

When in Paris, I visited a cool flea-market store that specializes in keychains. It appears that they have a website: Porte-cles Publicites – which doesn’t quite do the store justice, but worth checking out if you’re into vintage keychains and cute dangly objects.:)

And thanks, Keith for this link: Lucha Wiki!

After lusting after the Wacom Cintiq for six years or more… we finally bought us some! And can I tell you how much I love this thing. The Cintiq 21UX is so so cool. I am wasting less time tweaking every single freakin’ brushstroke in Flash as you do. My lines are smoother when drawing directly on the monitor. I am doing more roughs directly in the computer = less paper/scanning time! I can even rotate the Cintiq to get nicer curves. This thing is just too awesome. Highly recommended and worth every cent.

Ramona, Link and Betty-Lou.
by Lili Chin

These mimobots (custom USB memory drives) were designed for Mimoco.com, and will come preloaded with photos by toy photographer Brian McCarty and music by Phofo. The release date is not yet confirmed but you can read about and pre-order the Ginchy mimobots HERE. Or check ‘em out at the San Diego Comic-Con next month…

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Events

Opening Saturday night: Cuadrilatero II at the Tropico de Nopal Gallery.
And this weekend: The L.A. Chinese Food Festival.

Mucha Lucha spot animated by Sam Leyja for Cartoon Network. (Sam also animated this one.)

… Because you all keep asking us about Nacho Libre, check these out:-

Boston.com’s article on Lucha Libre’s mass appeal (which includes an interview with our Los Campeones writer – Keith Rainville ) And also this not-too- promising review on Slate.com. Hmmm. Is it another Napoleon Dynamite with “Mexicans”? Yes, I am going to put aside my cynical reservations, see the movie this weekend and decide…

Los Campeones de La Lucha Libre © Fwak! – click to turn

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Going Solo?

Tonight was our final training class on Toonboom Solo, a vector animation program that surpasses Flash in many ways, bringing back more sophisticated elements of traditional animation programs (eg, Animo 10 years ago) — Character Color Palettes, X-Sheets, Compositing “Node” controls etc. (Toonboom Harmony is the networkable version, with shared libraries)

We were particularly impressed with the Drawing capabilities (eg, brush strokes are easier to do, they stay consistent and don’t automatically merge/flatten as they do in Flash), and the 3D Camera feature!

2D drawings in 3D space – Click here to see it in action

Then there is the trippy stuff like Morphing (a much more sophisticated version “shape tweening”, to use Flash lingo, but with contour hints that actually work) and Inverse Kinematics where 2D drawings can be manipulated (via joints) as though they were 3D puppets.

No doubt numerous Flash plug-ins already exist to enable features like “rigging”. “camera” and “special effects”, but we find it impressive that Solo/Harmony covers tons of animation features, all in one standalone program.

A big thank you to both Francisco of Toonboom for the training, and to Joel at Film Roman/IDT for setting this up. Can’t wait to receive our free copies of the software to experiment with! It will be interesting to test the compatability between Solo and Flash to see how well the two programs talk to each other…

Related Link: Toonboom Harmony Discussion (@ Cold Hard Flash)

Update: Final day class Photo! (taken by Joel)

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Other news: We have now registered FWAK! ANIMATION USA. I guess this makes us an International company. And YAY! Both our greencard applications have been approved.

More Los Campeones designs

A few still to be tweaked/still to be color-styled Flash designs of some of the rough sketches I posted a few days back.  Yes, some people draw directly into the Flash and make the process entirely paper-less.  But not me… -Eddie

More Lucha!

Everyone’s favorite masked muerto, La Parka, with fans

In the quest for more Lucha reference/inspiration for Los Campeones, I ventured with Keith to Cudahy for this month’s FMLL.

Cudahy?!?  Talk about a secret society.  Finding info on these events is getting harder each month.  Plus this time it was held in a part of town I’d never heard of.

With the temperature reaching 100 in LA, the place was dripping.  But it was worth the heat and the trip (and the 45 minutes trying to find a way back to LA when we found the freeway was closed!).  And La Parka danced.  Shake it with the bone-man…

Day 1

As today is officially the start of production, I felt I need to mark the occasion somehow. 

48 weeks.  Starting…NOW!