Good Ole' P.U.

At Powerhouse we do internal "continuing education" classes on animation once per month. We lovingly refer to it as P.U. (Powerhouse University). It gives our younger folks a chance to learn from some of the more experienced animators and maybe pick up some new tricks and gives our older animators a chance to learn some new technical skills from some of the younger folks.

We are dedicated to keeping traditional animation alive at Powerhouse, so we decided that instead of keeping these lessons to ourselves, we would spread the knowledge with the general public also, just in case we can help inspire and teach other.

You can watch the first two classes; Frank Gabriel's on limited animation dialog techniques and Ronnie Williford's on the Bouncing Ball and Flour Sack here, from youtube, or on our site. Furthermore, we are providing the files from the classes online for you to download and use. Why are being so nice? Seriously. Why are we?

Stay tuned here and on our site at the link above for future classes.  Please do not repost the files without permission.

Powerhouse Animation Studio Tour

If you have not had a chance to make it out to our animation studio in person, then today is your lucky day! We found an old dusty reel of Super 8 film that someone shot last week that shows you the 8th Wonder of The Animated World, Powerhouse Animation Studios, Inc.'s World Headquarters.

Enjoy!

Swarm!

Finally there is some footage of the Hothead's Swarm which we did some cinematic work and UI work on:





We always love working with Hothead and are really looking forward to this game coming out. Congrats to Joel and Art and the other folks at Hothead on another great looking game.

Don't Stop Vanilla Dreamin'

Powerhouse Animation's good friends Wes Hurt (of Hey Cupcake fame) and Rebel Rebel recently teamed up to create this amazing video about the origins of the Hey Cupcake phenomenon. I love it and think you will too. Check it out:

Vanilla Dreamin from Hey Cupcake on Vimeo.

We had the great honor of working with Wes over the past year to help get his new site Mr.Spriggy.com up and running. Stay tuned to the countdown and come back in April when the site officially launches to check out some of the awesome work we did for Wes.

In the meantime, visit your local Hey Cupcake shop or airstream and chow down on some delicious treats. Oh... and keep on vanilla dreamin'...

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN!

Powerhouse Animation recently got the pleasure of working with a number of local Austin companies on a fantastic project called...(wait for it)... Hobo With a Shotgun.

Inspired by the 2007 Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse flick, local director Jason Eisener set out to make his very own Grindhouse-style trailer. When this mock trailer got picked up for a feature length film, Eisener got hooked up with the great folks at the Alamo Drafthouse to help promote it.

Luckily, Powerhouse was along for the ride. Thanks to local companies Gamesalad, Perfect Dork Studios, and Mondo, the Hobo with a Shotgun iphone game is now on the market!

Download it now and YOU too can deliver justice... one shell at a time.

Check out some stills from the game featuring Powerhouse original 16-bit style graphics:

Check out this great article about the game on WIRED!

And come check out our SXSW panel this afternoon (Monday 3/14) at the Austin Convention Center!!

San Francisco World Tour: Post 6

GDC has come to a close...

By the end of day 2 we had to sit a bit while spreading the word:

Day 3 we had our energy back

Here is a view of our booth from above.

One weird thing at the show was a device that let you "smell" games. Our very own Jason Williams found this a little discriminating:

All in all, it was a great show. We met some great people, and are looking forward to working with several of them.

After the show we quickly broke down our booth and rushed to a meeting at Goodby. Goodby is at Grant and California, on the corner of one of the steepest inclines in the city.

After the tour of Goodby, we went out with Bryan and Brian from Booyah to discuss what sounds like a fantastic potential project:

After that we headed to dinner with our good friends from Junction Point

Three years of Shane and Ryan

Today we celebrate the 3 year anniversary of when Shane Minshew and Ryan Cullen joined Powerhouse Animation! We hired them for the first Compass Learning job we did, and now Shane is heading up the Compass Learning team here at the studio.

We drank a toast to the occasion, then chained them back to their desks.

San Francisco World Tour: Post 5

GDC opened today, and everyone is taking a much needed rest. The team put in a good stretch of 9 hours of talking about animation and spreading the good news of Powerhouse.

Our neighbors, Rightscale, got a bar mid way through the day. Which helped our already pretty steady foot traffic.

The bartender was Bien, and a really good guy, willing to trade Powerhouse schwag for drinks.  Unfortunately, since we never got a chance for breakfast or lunch having too many drinks would have been very dangerous.

After the con, we went down to Chinatown with a group from Bioware

Eric Estrada ate there once, so we knew it had to be good.

San Francisco World Tour: Post 4

If you make it to GDC come find us at booth 605. Here is a map if you need it. That's our booth there:

Here is the floor marker for the booth.

The booth is setup and ready for the throngs of folks to descend on it tomorrow morning.

Some of the other booths are pretty fancy:

There may or may not be duct tape involved in our setup.

Wish us luck as the masses are invited onto the Exhibit Floor tomorrow. We hope to meet lots of new and interesting people and spread the Powerhouse message of joy and creativity to everyone in attendance.

San Francisco World Tour: Post 3

Not a lot of time to write today, here are some images until we can fill it in: