Monthly Archive for March, 2009
Mikko Vormala and Henri Tani of Piñata assisted fine artist Johanna Kiivaskoski in creating her first animation film. Johanna hadn’t animated anything before and had heard of Mikko from his previous animation assistant. She wanted to create a very realistic nature animation of a fly getting eaten by a carnivorous plant. She had chosen Francesco Cavalli’s song “Delizie Contente” by Cecilia Bartol for the music: “Gentle murderer - Lead me to my death on these beloved arms.”
The animation is drawn on traditional animation paper with coloured pencils and then digitized into a computer. The backgrounds are hand painted with watercolours. “Mikko walked me through the basics of animation and sent me home with a pile of animation paper.”, says Johanna. “Every now and then the guys digitized a bunch of my frames and we reviewed them as an animation. The first movement I created was the fly moving it’s wings.”
“Guiding Johanna in the animation process was challenging especially with such a tricky style.”, says Mikko. “Luckily Johanna has excellent drawing skills and a lot of willpower. She inspected real flies with a magnifying glass and waded around swamps sketching real plants to get the facts and mood right. All the plants in the animation have their real-life counterparts.”
Johanna took care of all the animation work with the exception of Henri animating the camera movements while compositing the final film. “It was great to have the opportunity to concentrate solely on the drawing and painting with Mikko and Henri taking care of all the technical aspects.”, says Johanna.
Tuomas ripping it up.
Just imagine walking into a meeting so proud of your new shirt. Here demonstrated by Mikko Vormala of Piñata and Kalle Kotila of Woodpecker Film.
Scheduling projects is always a pain in the ass, and there’s just no way to avoid the work that goes into building and maintaining the schedules with all the changes happening on a daily basis. A good scheduling tool is most of all easy to use and understand and helps you focus on the main issue: how to fit all the projects around each other in the best way. We at Piñata have decided to go all Lego with our scheduling.
A Lego-based scheduling tool is so easy to use that it can be updated by anyone. It’s also highly customizable with every kind of piece you can think of from apples and checker flags to skulls and coffee cups.
We still think Lego is a tad post-nine-elevenish with some of their naming policies, though. They’ve decided to call this piece “a camera”. Oh come on now, just call it like it is: it’s a friggin bazooka!
