Little Bastards Concept Rokyn Animation (Spain)

The project is quite far along in development of visuals, storyline and tone, as well as having technical and production design in place for the feature. Curro Velazquez is currently working on the first draft of the script. Rokyn is in conversation with a Spanish theatrical distributor and with a possible Spanish co-producer. It is seeking a European co-producer who could come in with some funding and could also come on board with an experienced 2D animation studio or team. Based on their track record, Irish partners would be ideal.

As with Maya 2016, Max received quite a list of development love from Autodesk, but by far, the most exciting tool that eclipses all others is the Max Creation Graph.

Since Max 2016’s release, Maya users have been clamoring, “Where’s mine!?!” and Houdini users have been saying, “Welcome to the party!” You see, as much as Max has been open to third-party developers, the development still required that skillset commonly known as “coding.” Even with MaxScript, it required some understanding of programming.

With MCG, users can create custom modifiers and such in a visual way that is similar to building shaders in the Material Editor. Those Max users familiar with Cebas’ Thinking Particles or Thinkbox’s Magma system used within Krakatoa and Stoke will feel perfectly at home within MCG.

So, in very loose terms, MCG allows you to fit function nodes together to generate very specific results. Let’s say, as an example, you would like a tool that can dynamically weld vertices together based on a distance threshold between verts — which you could do in an EditMesh modifier, but you don’t want the overhead of a full EditMesh. So you can take a parameter node holding a number, feed it into a Weld Node like you would a map into a material channel. You then feed a mesh type into another slot. And then a mesh output.

That could have been done as a MaxScript, you might say. And you’d be right.

But now you can publish your MCG tool as a modifier, with a little slider for your threshold value, and share it with your fellow artists.

This is an incredibly simplistic example, but believe me, there are already amazing tools being published and shared in the Max community. Just do a search on “MCG Max 2016” and filter to videos. Even upon release a SuperPack of 30 MCG scripts was dropped to give users a chance to get used to this new system.

Sure, there are other features in Max 2016 that will make our lives easier: Text Tool stuff, Voxel and Heatmap skinning for riggers, a camera sequencer for editing a sequence “in-camera,” new camera parameters to make it behave more like a physical camera (with the help of Chaos). But nothing is a game-changer like Max Creation Graph.

Time-travel stories are notoriously difficult to present because of the so-called “grandfather paradox”: A character who visits the past may somehow interact with an ancestor in a way that would prevent his being born. The offbeat sci-fi adventure Steins;Gate succeeds where many big-budget and live-action sagas have failed. The series is based on an Xbox game, which was adapted to a light novel, a manga, a radio play and a board game, so the artists had plenty of time to work out the bugs.

When college student and self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintarou Okabe announces, “Working hypothesis: Reality and my brain are at odds,” he’s offering a rare understatement. Okabe seeks experiences that go beyond the boundaries of normal life — and unwittingly finds them. He’s convinced that the researchers at SERN (a variation of CERN, the scientific body that operates the Large Hadron Collider) are out to get him. He denounces their efforts at persecution into his cell phone — when it’s not turned on. But Okabe is no lunatic.

He sets up the Future Gadget Lab in a cluttered apartment over a computer repair shop and recruits an off-beat group of misfits to aid in his experiments: smiling cosplay expert Mayuri, American-educated genius Makise, überhacker-cum-nerd “Daru” Hashida, techno-warrior Suzuha, transgendered Ruka and Moeka, who never speaks when she can text. Somehow, a jerry-rigged combination of an ancient microwave, a cell phone and other electronic junk enables the lab members to send text messages back in time. The target phone receives them days before they’re sent. Some of these messages change the past in ways that alter the present, but only slightly. And no one remembers how things were previously — except Okabe. Alarmed at what his Edsel of a time machine has wrought, Okabe makes contact with John Titor.

(Backstory note for non-nerds: Between

White and How it Influenced the Look of Some of Your Favorite Disney Characters; The Fairest Facts of Them All: Disney Channel Star Sofia Carson Reveals Seven Intriguing Facts About Snow White, and Alternate Sequence — Never-Before- Seen Storyboard Sequence Where the Prince Meets Snow White. animation supervisor Steven Markowski, The Making of The Iron Giant – hosted by Vin Diesel and featuring interviews with the cast and crew, deleted scenes, original opening sequences and featurettes that give you an inside look into the score, character design, storyboards and animation, motion gallery, and the new signature edition trailer.

(Release date: Feb. 16) the Circle of Life. Though digital HD is not included, the disc does feature a dazzling selection of subtitles – English, French and Spanish. There’s also a music video of Beau Black performing the single, “Here Comes the Lion Guard.”

(Release date: Feb. 23)

not talking fructose-y fake sweet, I’m talking “real.” If a character genuinely loves, has passion, believes and has some kind of hope, he, she or it can’t help but be likeable on some level. And audiences are wildly attracted to that quality — especially when their hero has to struggle to maintain sweetness in the face of his own comedic ineptness.

Heroes are “good” guys or gals … or hamsters, or shellfish. They are not pranksters. They are not lazy. They are not mean (unless you’re doing some sort of parody on heroes). Sure, sure, the wiseacre Bugs Bunny is arrogant, even downright nasty, but Bugs’ saving grace is charm.

Unfortunately, in today’s entertainment market, charm isn’t enough. Great hero characters need to ooze a kind of awesomeness I like to describe as “best friends making a fort.” Your hero should have the kind of personality that feels like it did when you and your best friend made a fort in your living room. You know, when time just sort of dissolved and you made up secret codes, talked in burps and laughed until your sides split? That magical feeling of friendship created by the uniqueness of a character’s personality is comedy hero gold.

Sidekicks, on the other hand, can be a total mess. Sidekicks can be pranksters. Sidekicks can be lazy. Sidekicks can do awkward things and come up with awkward solutions to problems that don’t need solving. Now, don’t get me wrong, your hero needs to instigate the main through-line of mayhem in your episodes by being overly zealous or by ignoring small details, but the sidekick can always up the ante, making your hero’s situation all the more impossible to solve.