Toy Story 3 has been No. 1 at the U.K. box office for four consecutive weeks. The movie is now the top grossing Disney release ever in the U.K. bringing in $90 million.

Toy Story 3 from Pixar.

World wide, Toy Story 3 has also become the highest-grossing animated motion picture of all time, taking in more than $920 million at the global box office to date, according to The Walt Disney Studios.

They predict that Toy Story 3 will pass the $400 million mark at the domestic box office this weekend, becoming only the second film released by Disney to reach that level. Toy Story 3 currently ranks as the fourth highest-grossing film in company history globally.

This is yet another box office accomplishment for the film which took $110.3 million on its opening weekend in June.

Finally, Toy Story 3 currently ranks as the number 14 film in worldwide box office history.

More info: The Pixar Blog

Art of Toy Story 3 by Charles Solomon is available from the Amazon UK book shop.

Pivot stick figure animator is a great piece of free animation software that is ideal for introducing the principals of movement to children. When the software is first opened there is a stick figure in the centre of the frame. Each limb is jointed and can be moved by grabbing red spots with the mouse curser and dragging them. When you add a frame and move the figure a grey shadow is left in the old position in an onion skin effect. This allows you to judge how much to move the figure. Once two frames have been completed the animation can be played so you can check how you are doing as you go along. The frames also appear in a strip along the top of the work area.

The animation can be saved at any stage as a piv file and also as an animated gif file. Here is a 12 frame test animation that I made with the Pivot software.

The onion skin effect.

There is much more that you can do with Pivot. You can import any jpg or bmp image to act as a background. I created the background of the above animation in Photoshop using a few oval shapes and saved it as a bmp file. When it is imported it is added to all of the frames. If you don’t like the effect you can remove it and try a different background.

You can also design your own stick figures using a range of shapes. It is simply a matter of dragging each part into the work area. The four short animations that are included with the software give an idea of what is possible. They feature a man, a horse, an elephant and some dominos.

Pivot stick figure animator runs on a PC with Windows 98/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7.
It is a free download from the SnapFiles website.

The Graduate Showcase is Computer Arts magazines’ annual compilation of the best final-year student design work from around the world. It is now in its 14th year.

If you are a final-year student on graduate design programme then this is your chance to get your work seen by over 20,000 design professionals worldwide. It is a great way to kick-start your design career. Entries can be made in the following categories:

• Animation
• Graphic Design
• Illustration & 2D
• Video & Broadcast
• Web & Interactive Media

The deadline for entries is 11 July 2010.

You can find out more details about entry specifications for each category by downloading the entry form. It is in PDF format.

Colors! is a painting program that takes advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the Nintendo DS touch-screen to create a digital sketch-book. Animator Sheila Graber, who has been experimenting with it, told us; “It is great for ‘smudge and click’ as I used to call it in ye pastel days when I used 16mm film. It is SO much easier using this programe and you don’t get your hands dirty! I can recommend it for animators of today”.

During her long and illustrious career Sheila has produced a number of “face to face” movies where one face dissolves into another. Now she has produced one using Colors! called “Facelife”. It covers life from cradle to grave through various faces.
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The land where the Bong-tree grows

Since my “Computer modelled cat” post describing how I created the model using Animation:Master I have decided to do a short animation based on “The Owl And The Pussy-Cat” by Edward Lear. This is the poem that starts: “The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat”.

I have now upgraded to the current version of Animation:Master. My favourite part of the computer program is creating models. There is a line in the poem that goes: “They sailed away, for a year and a day, to the land where the Bong-tree grows”. The Bong-tree is mythical so is open to interpretation. I thought it would be fun if the Bong-tree made a bong noise whilst bouncing like a spring.
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Wire-frame model of the cat.

A computer generated cat has emerged from my experiments with the Animation:Master program that I mentioned in my Computer animation revisited post.

I started with the head by creating a ball shape. A smaller ball was created for the snout and half pushed into the head. A ball was added for the nose and two balls for the eyes. Eyelids were modelled from half balls and positioned on top of the eyes. The ears are also created from half balls. The whiskers are long thin tubes that resemble drinking straws.
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I have just started a new animation project using a computer program called Animation:Master. I first used this program way back in 1994 and last used it in 1998. That was three computers ago and my animation from that time has found its way to computer heaven never to be seen again.

I was inspired to install the program on my present computer following a visit to the Martin Hash’s Animaton:Master web site last week. I was pleased to see that not only was the program still available but it has grown in scope over the intervening years.
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