señor taco’s travels

Warren Ellis writes:

“The more creators who only took on housepainting as a part-time gig, the healthier this medium would be.”

Oh man, so true. This is why staring my own work up is very appealing.

I am very thankful I’ve worked someplace other than Pixar. It really makes me appreciate how good our working conditions are. Take today for example. Today this fine espresso machine was installed in our building.

I will use it I’m sure to brew up some fine liquid concoctions. Also today O was thrown for a bit of a loop when I opened up the fridge to grab a soda¹ and what should be there. Nectar of the divine rendered human.

That’s probably just someone trying to get rid of it. They normally only have beer at work on Friday at Beer Bash in the evening.

1. Yes, I am bad and drinking sodas right now.↩

From Upcoming Pixar comes the news that Disney has released the WALL-E teaser Poster:

© Copyright 2007 Disney-Pixar

I can’t wait to see more stuff come out.

(Via Upcoming Pixar.)

via May on Twitter: “at the megadeth show for work. we met with dave mustaine and he was super nice”

Today marks my first year anniversary of working at Pixar.  I’ve seen Ratatouille finished up and released.  I’m getting to work on cool projects with insanely talented people and I’m really happy and challenged at work.  Let’s see what the next year will bring, it should be fun, challenging, and sometimes stressful I’m sure.

My house mate, Keith, got interviewed by Animation Express.  You can read it here.  Way to go Keith.

Today at work we got a message letting us know that Disney/Pixar has posted some early test animation from our upcoming movie, Ratatouille. This is an old test and the model has been improved since, but is a funny clip.

Well, today is the end of my first month at Pixar. The first couple of weeks were training. The second couple of weeks were me being thrown into a package I’d never seen and trying to figure out why it was broken. After the frustration I finally felt like I got some progress made this week. This afternoon a facilities person came by and gave me my own name plate:

Now I just need to figure out how to tastefully and reversibly make it say “Dan.” Darn those legal names. I kind of wish they had asked what name I wanted to go by. I got the computer database changed so that’s a step. Oh well, I could have worse things to complain about.

And now back to the bug hunting.

This last week I turned in my resignation at Wild Brain. After a little over three years there I’m moving on to a new challenge with Pixar Animation Studios. I’ll be starting on the 14th of August. I have a little over a week left at Wild Brain and I know it’s going to be hard to leave. I’ll miss working with the people at Wild Brain and that’s the hardest part, leaving friends behind.

In a slightly related note, this year Wild Brain purchased Kid Robot. Kid Robot makes vinyl toys and one of them, Munny, is blank so that the people can customize them. A few months ago Wild Brain offered the employees our choice of a Munny to customize as we saw fit for display in the studio. I finished mine this weekend and you can see the results in my gallery.

Wild Brain is in the process of moving forward with projects and as such we’ve put a re-vamped web site up. Sure, it’s flash, but there are quite a few things to look at on there. In the next few weeks more videos will be going up. Until then you can check out some of our commercial spots, television
productions, and a little bit of Hubert’s Brain.

In other Wild Brain news we got a new CEO a couple of months ago, The Jim Henson Company and in October we were on the cover of SF Weekly with a pretty decent article on the company.