Daniel Lopez Munoz, Character designer

I first met Daniel Lopez Munoz while he was a student attending Columbia College in Chicago. Recently, I interviewed him after discovering he worked on Pixar's SOUL. Daniel designed the main character, Joe Gardner and other human characters in the film. 

Here's a recent interview where he answered all my questions and even some I didn't ask. Enjoy the interview...

 

Here are some of Daniel's designs from Robots.

Marq Evans ClayDream

Will Vinton coined the name Claymation and was a pioneer in combining clay animated characters with stop motion.

CLAYDREAM is a new documentary about Will Vinton and his studio who produced such classics as the California Raisins, several feature films and TV shows, reinventing the M&Ms characters and The Noid, which is returning to the advertising world.

Below is my Animateducated interview with Marq Evans and his new documentary about Will Vinton. The film premieres online Sunday, June 13th @ 4pm pst.

Here is the link for the Tribeca premiere screening: https://tribecafilm.com/films/claydream-2021

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Check out this post about Daniel Lopez Munoz

Meet Dino Crisanti, Toy designer!

I first met Dino Crisanti when I was a freshmen at Columbia College Chicago and couldn't get into any film production classes which were all filled up. Instead, I took a drawing for animation class with Gordon Sheehan, who used to work at the Max Fleischer studio in New York and later Miami.

Dino and I eventually became TAs in the animation department and during my final year at Columbia, I made an animated film called "Cat & Rat". 

The animated characters began as pencil drawings that become inked outlines which are then painted in color and eventually leap out of the 2d world into 3d world as stop motion characters who meet a very surprised animator/maker.

Here's a link to the film to see what it looks like in action. It won several awards back in the day including First place in animation in the Student Film awards as well as the Nissan FOCUS awards, where I won a brand new Nissan Sentra at a time in life when I really didn't need a car.  Luckily Dino did and he eventually became the owner of a brand new car. Problem solved!

Dino helped build the stop motion puppets and animated the characters when I was in the same scene with them. 

This was the early Jurassic Animation period where any colorful animated characters had to be painted with cel paint on clear acetate sheets called "cels" and shot on a large iron camera and stand called an Oxberry under very hot movie lights on 16mm film frame by frame.

A chase through color.

Dino fueling the Oxberry.

Jim rigging the Cat puppet.

Dino has gone on to become a toy designer for Big Monster toys in Chicago and is busy animating, teaching stop motion and sculpting too. I'm proud to present this Animateducated interview with stop motion animator, toy designer, educator, sculptor and my friend, Dino Crisanti

Learn more about Big Monster Toys.

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Check out this interview,