A character I am working on for a project.  I was going for a no- nonsense guy, grizzled and hard but not necessarily mean, just hard.  More to come on this one.

This character is a concept for a larger production.  Right now I am concentrating on character development and will need to nail down at least two or three more before moving on.

This is a project that I am working on.   I have some work to do, particularly on the explosions but I thought I would post progress.  Robot and dumpster modeled in Maya and Zbrush. I used Maya and Motionbuilder for the animation. Scene was rendered with mentalray, comped in Nuke and then edited using FinalCut ProX.

I've been working on my character design; better anatomy etc.  This is a work in progress and I like the progress it represents.  

Stay tuned for the finished image

In the past I have been pretty critica of MSFT's advertising efforts and they have deserved it.   Most of what I have seen has been pretty mediocre stuff.  Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates?  The spots were kind of funny but about a decade too late.  Jerry rolled that schtick for American Express for years and it worked then but I am not so sure anymore.  How about the Laptop hunter campaign where actors pretend to be consumers shopping for a laptop bargain?   All that campaign did was reinforce Microsoft's image as the low cost option and Apple's image as a device people covet.  How about this campaign featuring people wearing plastic dinosaur heads?  Weird and bad.  The "I'm a PC" campaign was well done and it showed an interesting, diverse and real group of people who are PC users.  It was clearly a response to the "I'm a Mac" campaign and though it was well done I am not sure it did much to combat the success of the Apple campaign.  But I am not here to rehash those, no I want to talk about their latest effort for IE9.  I have to give MSFT a lot of credit for embracing the idea that in the past IE was not a very good product. I don't know if it deserves all of the vitriol from the anti MSFT zealots but they are acknowleding the reputation non the less.  I love it when an organization can stop taking themselves so seriously and "take the piss" out of themselves as the Brits would say. A spot like this seems very out of character for MonkeyBoy Balmer's MSFT, a place where iphones get thrown across the room and the cool-aide is tasty, thank you very much.  Alas, while the intention is there the execution is pretty heavy handed and a bit schlocky but credit where credit is due, this is certainly in the right spirit.  

You can judge for yourself

Following up on an earlier post, apparently now I have to really learn the words and all the movements.  I think we will do the Haka everymorning as a family, to greet the sun and our neighbors.

(download)

Click here to download:

0305_haka.MOV (2.06 MB)

Ronan and I taking a stroll along Alki beach after a fine Irish Breakfast at the Celtic Swell on Sunday.  Little man just wanted to jump in the water and throw rocks.