Donald Fergus / page 2 of 4
Donald’s talent and skill shine through in ADi’s character animation bringing quality and life to our work. His life-long ambition to make beautiful character animation has put him on track to making a name for himself in the global animation industry.
Donald’s latest Journal entries…
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March 3 2011
CG in the Desert
This year I volunteered my 3D skills to a Burning Man arts team for their project titled Katabasis: Journey to the Underworld. As with many art projects designed for Burning Man, this one is enormous in scale, 75′ square and 15′ tall. It has nine interlocking rooms, each with its own theme and style connected by secret passages and mazes. Each path leads the participant through a different sort of journey like the sexually repressed Victorian era or the wild realms of nature. This is not my first foray into the…
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January 3 2011
3D – Movies, TV’s and Video games
With the advent of the new stereoscopic 3D technology, the world has experienced a re-resurgence of the “This movie’s in 3D!” phenomenon that struck the world somewhere around the 1950’s. Back then the 3D glasses were made of two color plastic, red and blue, and the split in vision was accomplished by blocking specific colors from reaching your eyes through the differing colored lenses. Today however, the tech has evolved to use polarized light. Each lens is made of polarized plastic, blocking out specific wave lengths from your vision. The…
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November 15 2010
What makes a Monster?
Everywhere you go in film and television, comics and books, you find monsters. We’ve got the big, towering mega monsters like Godzilla and Cthulu. We’ve got the sneaky, in the shadow monsters like The Predator or Aliens. Then we have the human monsters, such as Hannibal Lecter and Prince John of Nottingham. These are some of the great monsters, but why are they so great? What is it about a monster that grips you, that suspends your disbelief in such a way as to frighten you when you’ve put down…
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September 21 2010
Villains – What Makes a Good One?
Most of my writing experience has revolved around comedy skits and hilarious scenarios for animation. I’ve written some broad epic story lines, but only in outline and concept form. I love epic stories with grand villains, but have rarely written a villain in any great detail. Recently however, I’ve been playing a table top role playing game you all have probably heard of called Dungeons and Dragons. Together with my roommates and friends, we’ve been playing through our storyline for over a year. Recently I stepped up to run a…
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March 17 2010
Reference Footage
In the days before scientists and designers invented motion capture, we character animators were drunk on reference footage. The first reference footage was taken by a photographer named Muybridge to settle a gentleman’s bet. The bet was whether or not, when a horse was running, all four of it’s legs left the ground at any moment during the run. He set up a series of cameras along the track and connected each one to a trip wire. When the horse hit the wire, the camera snapped a photo, and the…
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