Alchemist spinoff 1

Okey, this is the first spinoff post from the "Secrets of the Alchemist" post series... yay!

This spinoffs intend to be quicker notes about the steps taken in the production of my short film. This one here is for talking about the technology I will try to acomplish my goals.

Animation is well known to be long time absorbing and really expensive compared with other film productions. Some feature films takes at least 2 or 3 years to be completed, instead less than 1 year a normal live action movie does. Im not Dysney, Dreamworks or Toei, but Im mexican and we are world famosos as well known masters of improvisation. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending of the focus you take, because you can take very bad decitions trying to avoid an amount of huge problems but I think technology can put the things in the right place and avoiding us to spend a lot of money.

Alfredo Salazar, one of the animators Im working with, suggested to save time and money using the wacom tablets. I had my doubts until he showed me some of his work done with this technology and my mind blowed up! Old fashion animation takes a lot of time and people doing different things: one guy drawing the skelleton of the animation, another guy inking, another guy coloring, another guy cleaning... and tons of other labors. With a wacom tablet, one person can draw, ink, color and animate a full character sequence in one day or two, and the results? well, as good as you are already in photoshop! :)

Alfredo also found this cool sample on youtube, from an speed painter called Nexx using a wacom intuos

It's really impressive, we don't need a lightable and tons of paper and ink, just a good PC and a wacom. Im negotiating with an advertiser if he can provide me at least 3 of this tablets for my studio, in exchange he will get his ad at the end credits of the short. Crossing my fingers, I want to have one of this toys in my table right now.

As you can see the wacom price is very affordable and cheaper than a classic lightable

http://www.wacom.com/intuos/6x11.cfm

In the personal notes: Im going to see Spiderman 3 today with my girl, she loves the series and we hope to have a good afternoon. We're a bit dissapointed because we planned to go to a Lucha Libre show next tuesday, and the main attraction is injuried. Mistico, the lucha libre rockstar of the moment, was scheduled to be in the main event but he got injuried on his last fight and we really wanted to see his performance. Sigh, anyway, we'll try to have a good time.