Lakeside!

Now with Add On.

What's that? Many things, actually. But here in the east San Fernando Valley it's

The name of the Toluca Lake golf course adjacent to Warners Bros. ... from which Jack L. Warner was at one time excluded ...

The name of the building at Universal Studios that housed the beginnings of DreamWorks Animation ...

And one of the big yellow structures at the DreamWorks Animation campus in Glendale. The place has been reconfigured, refurbished and now contains many DreamWorks animators, riggers, effx artists and other folks tasked with the job of creating DWA's animated features ...

I wandered through it for part of the afternoon, marveling at how the carpeted hallways and most of the offices on the upper floors were now gone, replaced by wide open spaces, hardwood floors and roomy cubicles. (The bottom half of the building is still under construction.)

The crew members are decorating their cubes -- Jeffrey K. provided a stipend for everyone to spiff them up -- and working on Monsters Vs. Aliens (slated for a Spring 2009 release). I caught a short silent sequence on a monitor, and it looked damn good. One of the artists remarked:

We're a month away from finishing the animation. I've seen most of the whole feature a little while ago and it's got a nice, epic seep to it, even before you see it in stereo."

(He meant the 3-D 3-D animation.)

The next thing that happened was another artist came up to me and said he couldn't get TAG blog on the DWA internets, said some of his friends had the same complaint. I sat down at his desk and tapped in the TAGblog address and ...

Sure enough, you couldn't get The Animation Guild blog (this place) on the corporate intertubes.

I'm sure it's just a campus glitch, a technological malfunction, nothing at all serious. (Right?)

The poor guy will just have to click us up at home.

Add On: And here's the trailer for Monsters v. Aliens. It does look like an epic, donnit?