Just read a very cool interview with Andrew Stanton. Worth a read. =)

And to start this week (Wall-E starts on Friday) with more on the movie:

• 7 videos (be warned of spoilers);
• Concept Art of Wall-E and Finding Nemo for sale;
• News about Burn-E, short that will be include in the movie's DVD.
  

I saw yesterday this news on Cartoon Brew and could not resist: I bought in pre-sale the animation book by Eric Goldberg.

It's 240 pages filled by the knowledge of one of the greatest animators around. By just 23 dollars I think it is FAR from being expensive.

Now I'm just waiting for the package to arrive. =)

Now the three Animation Mentor founders have a blog. =D

Carlos Baena and Bobby Beck have been writing for a while, but now Shawn Kelly also joined the bloggers club. I found it very cool that he used his famous column "Animation Tips & Tricks" on Animation Mentor as the subject of his blog. Another one to be on my daily read list. =D

And talking about Animation, Tips and Tricks, I found this cool video at Spline Doctors. Interesting as reference for facial rigs:

For those who could not afford the Big Buck Bunny DVD nor have enough bandwidth to download a 9 GigaBytes ISO, now you can watch a Rigging tutorial made by Nathan Vedghal.

This tutorial does not cover all the complexity of the actual rigs used on the movie, but it has some great tips for both who already knows how to make rigs and for those who are willing to learn to. The upload was made by Ben Dansie on Vimeo. That means you can download the video in higher resolution if you are a registered Vimeo user.

Big Buck Bunny - Rigging Tut from Ben Dansie on Vimeo.

*UPDATE: I am very sorry, but somehow the links stopped working. I am trying to fix this, but for now, you can reach the tutorial by copying and pasting the link below in your browser:

http://vimeo.com/1184944

*UPDATE 2: fixed. =)

Ok, so you have this cool idea for an animated short, huh?

If you want it to bee really cool, you have to pay attention to a few more things than just arcs, overlapping and all animation principles. We have also to manage a way to tell our story visually.

And where can we find info on this? Well, Wikipedia is not the ultimate source on this, but it helps a little:

• Continuity Editing;
• Establishing Shot;
• Shot reverse shot;
• Eyeline match;
• 180 degree rule;
• 30 degree rule;
• Montage;
• Soviet Montage Theory (or Discontinuity Editing)

And, changing a little the subject... did you see that 30 seconds preview of Presto?