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Led by former Pixar artists, Oculus wants to inspire filmmakers to start creating virtual reality animation projects.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced the juried winners for the 65th Emmy Awards. Among the winners are six artists for Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented in a ceremony on Sunday, September 15, and the show will be televised on September 21st on FXX (a spinoff-network of FX). Congrats to the winners!

• Adventure Time “Puhoy”
  Cartoon Network/Cartoon Network Studios
  Andy Ristaino, Character Design

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced the juried winners for the 65th Emmy Awards. Among the winners are six artists for Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented in a ceremony on Sunday, September 15, and the show will be televised on September 21st on FXX (a spinoff-network of FX). Congrats to the winners!

• Adventure Time “Puhoy”
  Cartoon Network/Cartoon Network Studios
  Andy Ristaino, Character Design

Next month, Giant Robot will host a solo exhibition of work by the Spanish-born artist Alberto Mielgo, best known in the U.S. for his art direction on the Disney TV series TRON: Uprising.

The show will take place at Giant Robot’s GR Works storefront in downtown Los Angeles (114 W. 4th St. Los Angeles, CA 90013). There will be an opening reception on Monday, November 5, from 6-10pm, and the show will run for one week. Titled Albert Mielgo: Solo, it documents the past three years of Mielgo’s output, and will focus on his models and their working process together. “I think it’s fair to talk about them that people know how good they are,” Mielgo said. “How much they mean to me, and why I decided to paint them.”

Mielgo has exhibited his paintings in Spain and the UK. In 2010, Mielgo was a subject of the short film documentary Innocent In A Way (NSFW) by French filmmaker Alexis Wanneroy. Mielgo started his career as an animator on features like Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, El Cid: The Legend and Jester Till. In addition to that, he storyboarded on Corpse Bride, created conceptual art for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and drew the backgrounds for the intro of the videogame Beatles Rock Band.

Disney is previewing the entire pilot episode—”Beck’s Beginning”—of Tron: Uprising on YouTube (sorry, US viewers only). The series, which premieres June 7 on Disney XD, takes place between the original Tron and the more recent Tron: Legacy. It follows the quest of a young program named Beck (not Jerry), who under the mentorship of Tron, leads a revolution to wrest control of The Grid from the sinister clutches of Clu.

If you’re the type of fan that geeks out over new vehicles in the Tron universe, you’ll likely have a different take than mine, but as someone who just wants to see good entertainment, I wasn’t satisfied. There’s some mad artistic talent working under art director Alberto Mielgo, but they can’t overcome the monotonous direction that alternates between flat dialogue scenes and numbingly repetitive (though impressively staged) action scenes. The leaden CG character animation, produced by Japanese studio Polygon Pictures, and ridiculous script (“There you are.” “Here I am.”) don’t help matters.

To be fair, this is just the pilot. As Tron: Uprising director Charlie Bean gets more episodes under his belt, he may yet realize the show’s full potential. On the other hand, it could just be ten more episodes of a guy jumping on a light cycle ad nauseam, which is what this pilot episode felt like at times.

On a sad note, the end credits include the dedication “For Pete.” That refers to a technical director on the show, Peter Kranjcevich, who passed away unexpectedly last month at the age of 36.

If you watch the episode above, please share your thoughts.

(via Super Punch)

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Alberto Mielgo, Charlie Bean, Peter Kranjcevich, Polygon Pictures, Tron: Uprising

I try not to fall into the trap of choosing artistic favorites—different works are worth appreciating for different reasons—but if asked to choose a favorite background painter today, I wouldn’t hesitate to nominate Spanish-born artist Alberto Mielgo, and if asked to provide an example, I’d point to this stunning pan background he drew for the Beatles Rock Band trailer (the project is from last year, but he just posted the background on-line).

At first glance, his original style, with its high level of detail, might not seem like a natural match for animation. He’s been lucky though to work with smart directors like Pete Candeland who understand how to make the best use of his paintings in the context of animation production. The paintings, with their smooth blend of photorealism and abstraction sometimes remind me of the Precisionist paintings of Charles Sheeler, while some of his work also recalls Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings which have a similarly clean sense of light. Whatever his actual influences, he pushes far beyond them, and brings a fresh and beautiful sensibility to animation.

The thing that I find most exciting about his work is how he interprets the inherent patterns of landscapes through abstract color and shape. Zoom close into one of his paintings and it becomes mesmerizing in an entirely different way:

While there’s nothing wrong with trying to recreate the look of traditional techniques like gouache, oil, and watercolor within the computer, I get far more excited when I see work like Alberto’s which doesn’t attempt to mask its digital footprint. For example, note how his clean lines and shapes break down as objects recede in the distance and begin to look like digital artifacting (example here). His work feels well suited to the digital medium and takes advantages of its possibilities while applying solid artistic principles that a painter using more traditional techniques would use.

Mielgo will be speaking at the CTN Expo in LA later this month.

Alberto Mielgo is a Spanish illustrator living in London. He is a masterful painter who has an astonishing ability to create a kind of reductive literal realism that appears almost photographic. Here’s a small section…

… of a much larger illustration Mielgo created for an advertising client. On his blog he explains how he did six comprehensive roughs before this version of the image was settled on… and then, after execution, the project died!

Mielgo hints at his work on many major film and video game productions… but unfortunately, because of corporate secrecy, he is often unable to share much of that work with us. He had to take down an example of his contribution to Beatles Rockband, but was allowed to show a sketch from a Dorian Grey film project.

Alberto has also done some comics projects. This is a page from a story he drew for Image’s Popgun #3.

Illustration, concept art, comics… *whew!* … and somehow Mielgo finds the time to do fine art gallery painting as well!

Alberto Mielgo’s website.

Posted by Leif Peng on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: advertising, Alberto Mielgo, Comics, concept art, Illustration, oil painting