Before I dive into filling in the missing pieces for the existing content, I wanted to make the site more responsive. Bringing up the “more info” window or going to releases for the same year or shop all took seconds to load and position themselves to the correct location in the page. This was primarily for the first time that session when those pages were accessed, but it still was annoyingly unresponsive. So, I redesigned my site automation to split big files into logical sections (one page per alphabetic index, one page per release year, etc.) and redesigned the home page and the “Releases” tab to be cleaner and easier to follow. It is all a lot faster and smoother now :)

I figured that I would share my setup for maintaining a short video collection on my computer, in case someone is struggling with doing something similar.

While this site has a whole lot of information, it is still missing some things. After just quickly implementing the indexing/sorting like iTunes (so “The “ and “A “ are ignored at the beginning of titles and shop names), I will now move on to the following:

1. [Shorts] [Good] provide video links
2. [Shorts] [Good Visuals] provide images, reference links, synopses, and video links
3. [Shorts] provide Academy Awards and SIGGRAPH awards info
4. [Movies] [Favorite] provide review details
5. [Movies] [Good] provide images, video links, and review details
6. [Series] provide video links and review details
7. [Cinematics] provide images, reference links, video links, and review details
8. [Commercials] provide reference links, video links, and review details

In order to expose more people to my favorite works, I have incorporated a new “Spotlight” feature on the homepage. While I originally planned to include each spotlighted work for a whole month, I thought it would be more useful to have my automation script provide the list of all spotlight candidates (currently only focusing on shorts) and then have the page randomly choose one with each visit. Clicking on the image will take you to the review.

I added a topic called The Indie Coming of Age which provides my thoughts on early indie animation.

It is clear that many great artists have put in a lot of effort to create their shorts. There are some shorts that I consider to have nice visuals (design and animation), but that I do not find very compelling as an overall short film due to their limited concept or writing.

I decided to create a new section called Good Visuals in recognition of some really cool visual shorts that did not make my general recommendations page. Enjoy!

I was very disappointed that Avatar and French Roast lost!

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find on Comcast On Demand an HD presentation from Shorts International on the Academy Award Nominees for best animated short. I finally got to see and review: The Kinematograph, The Lady and the Reaper, and Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty.

Now that my site hosting provider, SimpleHELIX, allows me 10 domains, I decided to break out the computer animation pages from my personal site, stevebondi.com, into this new computer animation site, CG Corner.

Because I love computer animation and actively track it down (including future and foreign releases), you can be assured that this site will be pretty comprehensive and up-to-date, especially since I fully automated its updates from my personal spreadsheet that I have been updating for years (Note: you can learn about my site automation here). Enjoy!

Steve Bondi
stevebondi@comcast.net