Still waiting for the Kung Fu Panda premiere in Brasil, but I couldn't resist watching the great 2D animated parts that went online.

The final credits have been around for some time. That great sequence was animated by DreamWorks artists in conjunction with Shine Studio.

But now it's time for the opening sequence - that one animated by James Baxter studio. I could not watch it only once: It's TOO "legendary" and "awesome". ;)

If you didn't watch this movie (like me) and prefer waiting to view everything on the big screen (not like me), do not click on the links below. Those points to Kevin Koch blog posts with that sequences. He even names the DreamWorks animators who worked on the credits sequence.

• Credits sequence;
• Opening sequence.

I saw some cool things this weekend that I want to share with you:

• First comes a cool animated short, which illustrates this post: E.T.A, from the German Danish (thanks, Morten) guys at JunkWorks (pretty ironic name, huh?);
• The second is a cool new video about Wall-E production. This time the focus is on cinematography, showing some decisions made for camera and illumination. I'm counting days till June 27th;
• The third is not related to animation, but I also think is cool: the browser Opera 9.5 is available for download. I've been using Firefox 3 beta for some time, and also the previous Opera version. I found this new one to be very light on resources needed, quicker on rendering pages and very cool new visuals and features (but I still love "speed dial", that was available since previous versions). A recommended download. =)

Most of you may already know the Wulffmorgenthaler comic strips.

In addition to being funny (and with a pretty acid humor, sometimes outrageous), one thing that pleases me a lot is that they always use only one frame to tell the story.

This kind of synthesis is something very usefull for who works with animation. Those strips are basically keyframes that defines a whole scene.

It is good to remember that keyframes are not those we set when using animation apps. Those are mostly "extremes", or the poses that will have inbetween drawings. The "real" keyframes are actually those drawings that define a scene, basically what we find when looking at those comic strips. =)

And guys... I want to thank you all very much for your kind messages on my birthday! It was really great to receive them. =D

The animation world is happier on this day because...

It's my birthday! =D

(yeah... I know... no funny at all... =P)

To bring a bit of usefullness to this post, a BlenderArtists user known as DingTo made available to download the Making Of Big Buck Bunny. It's a 22 minute movie in a 170 MB file. Very good for the ones who didn't buy the DVD nor want to download an ISO image of about 9 GigaBytes. =)

Aardman (ah... Aardman...) made available some production images of their new Wallace & Gromit movie: A Matter of Loaf and Death.

Sometime ago I talked about the Wallace & Gromit website. It is really good and it's worth spending some time on the visit. =)

Still on Wallace & Gromit, Carlos Baena told about a great video (in three parts) on the production of Oscar winner The Wrong Trousers. In this video Nick Park fala talks about a lot of cool stuff, from his beginning in animation to his personal touches in the production.

The user who uploaded the video don't allow embedding it on external sites, so here comes the links:

Wrong Trousers - Making of (part 1)
Wrong Trousers - Making of (part 2)
Wrong Trousers - Making of (part 3)