Joseph Gilland.

The last three months have been perhaps the most hectic in my entire life, with the vast majority of the activity taking place in the world of animation. Thus my difficulty in actually finding the time to write about animation, as it is consuming my life once again, just like the first time I ever tried to complete an animated film back in my school days.

In my last column, I wrote about how excited I was that there would be a brand new festival in Portland this summer, The Platform Festival. Wouldn't you know it? I had to move into a different house the week that the festival finally happened, and even though Portland is only a stone's throw away from Vancouver, I was far too busy to make it there at all, especially when you factor in the insane deadlines I am working against to create all of the special effects for 4Kids television cartoon Chaotic, together with moving, being a single parent, and, insanely, taking on other freelance work here and there on top of it all! Oh and putting together proposals to try and snag some other big feature animation jobs along the way, and still piecing together the final details of my book, and scrambling to get it published some time before Hell freezes over.

It's crazy, when animation gets us so busy, that we can't get out there and enjoy all the great animation that there is to experience. Instead I had to be content to read about the festival, imagining all the wonderful people there, all the great friends, the films, the panels, the picnic, the magic. And I was lucky enough to get a great firsthand report over a sushi lunch in the park from my dear friend, Anne Denman, who was the director of student programming for the festival. But even though Anne's play-by-play was the greatest, and so is she, it was no substitute for being there, and I sigh deeply through my entire being, at the tragic and silly pity of missing such an event!

And I missed Annecy too, and the FMX Conference in Germany, which I have come to love, and all the festivals all over the world, oh dear! The animation Gods have cruelly set me up with the most brutal animation series schedule in history, to complete 40 half-hour episodes in barely more than 40 weeks, egads! Of course the 40 episodes have taken a wee bit longer than originally scheduled to complete. Let's see, after 58 weeks, we are just squeezing episode 24 out the door, and there are (supposedly) 16 weeks remaining now to finish the last 16 episodes. Hmmm. Might just free myself up in time to make the pilgrimage to Ottawa! Oh please, oh please, oh please! Ottawa, my earliest and some of my best animation festival memories date back to the very first Ottawa festivals in the '70's, when it was brand new, like Platform!

Since I last wrote my column here, back in April, I had to make a quick trip to Florida, to attend an extremely emotional and moving ceremony for a dear, dear friend in the animation business, whose beautiful and very young wife was cruelly beaten by cancer. This was an animation "event" of the most powerful kind I have ever known. Many of my dearest friends were in attendance. It was an incredibly creative group of people, some of the greatest animation talent in the world, gathered to honor the passing of a wonderful woman, a powerful and very loving creative force whose life affected all of us very deeply. We played live music on the beach under the stars for her, until the wee hours of the morning.

And, now that I think of it in retrospect, and in the light of everything I just wrote about all the festivals and animation "events" I am missing, I wouldn't trade that experience for all the festivals in the world.