Attention Artists Of The US, Your Copyrights Are At Risk!

This really interesting (and terrifying) video about what's going on in the Copyrights Law market in the US has been brought to my attention, and I figured it was too important not to share it with you.

Right now, Copyrights Law in the US (and most of Europe) states that artists (of any kind or genre) have copyright over their own work for the entirety of their lifetime + 70 years after their death, and that without having to register your work anywhere. You created, it's yours. Period.

Note: These are taken from the video interview of Brad Holland, a lifelong professional artist and expert in the matter (see bottom of the post).

But there's a law that some have been trying to push past Congress (previously known as the Orphan Works Act) based on their claim that because there's no registration of said art, then people can't find the copyright owners so libraries and museums that want to digitize their collections (for preservation and research purposes) can't do so. Basically, the law would allow these institutions "good faith infringement" of copyrights. Sounds somewhat OK, right? Except that these same people are now trying to do the same, but for commercial infringement of any work of any artist, living or dead, regardless of circumstances. And the entire thing would devolve from the Copyrights Office into the private sector so that those individuals only (and not the artists) could profit from it.

So what exactly does this proposed law entail?

When Technology Meets Art - How To Train Your Dragon 2

I don't know if I've mentioned it before on here, but growing up I wanted to be an artist working for either Disney or Dreamworks. So when I went to college, I decided to study computer science (not knowing much about computers except how to type in Word and play minesweeper, I thought computer science and computer art were pretty much the same thing). Of course, I ended up deviating from my initial goals, quite a bit in fact, but my fascination for that art has always remained.

So here are a few interesting facts regarding the making of How To Train Your Dragon 2 which I thought I'd share with you:

1. Total number of artists to work on the movie: 495
2. Total number of storyboards created: 100,000+
3. Time taken to craft the film: 18-24 months (90 million+ render hours for the computers to render the frames)
4. Total number of digital files: 500 million+
5. Total amount of storage needed: 398 terabytes

It's quite impressive to see how far technology has come as far as animation goes. It used to be artists had to "scan an image into a computer, then "draw" the animation by typing numbers.... With a giant spreadsheet, they could change the way a smile looked or how a shadow fell across a face." Now, however, artists can work directly on the computers and change the final image in real time, as Fredrik Nilsson (workflow director for animation/crowds) explained regarding Dreamworks' Premo tool:

Animator using the Premo tool
Image Credit: Dreamworks Animation

"I used Premo with a touchscreen-sensitive pen. The display could show me any given frame from the movie. I could make a change to the main character Hiccup's face, clicking on him. Then I could use the pen to pull his face downward, turning his smile into a frown. I could then tell the computer how long he would hold that pose before he would start smiling again. Then I played the frames and watched it all happen in real-time. It was easy and intuitive."

Pretty amazing, eh? And to think I took an animation class (which was awesome, by the way), where I had to draw each frame myself (it took me close to 500 drawings to draw a couple of seconds, and that was a very basic cartoon).

As for the animated feature film, I know it came out quite a while ago, but I thought it was a great movie (I'm always skeptical about follow-up movies)!

Source:

Venture Beat - an absolute read for those into animation and technology in general! Filled with tons of details and great interviews!

And Another St. Valentine's Day Goes By...

...dripping poison into the hearts of those without a life teammate. And who's to blame for this affliction?
Poison Heart Bear! "The cousin the other Care Bears never told us about."

Source: instagram

Haha! Just kidding :) But I love the adorable monsters Bobby Chiu creates (see more here).