Red Stick brings animation vets to Baton Rouge - (l-r) Scott Johnston, Stuart Sumida, Doeri Welch-Greiner and Rachelle Lewis.

Baton Rouge's Red Stick International Animation Festival has set a high bar (or stick) for itself. Its fifth go-round just concluded, the festival serves several purposes: promoting the city as a digital media center; letting aspiring writers, producers and artists rub shoulders with industry professionals; introducing local students to the joys of animation and CG vfx work; and naturally making a name for itself as a world class animation gathering.

How are these goals coming along? Quite nicely. This year's programming covered a range of creative, business and technical topics, from advice on "monetizing" new media content to career counseling and deconstruction of high-end vfx work. It seemed like almost every school in town had a class visiting the festival, with students filling the seats at many of the sessions.

The ratio of industry professionals to eager young talent was surprisingly low. Baton Rouge is off the beaten path, a bit of a distance away from New York, Hollywood and other places where future animation talent tends to congregate; it might be worth a student, or even a self-taught artist the price of a Baton Rouge plane ticket to have one-on-one face time with Disney talent scouts, feature animation producers and vfx celebrities. (Of course, there's also the small matter of meals and lodging while you're in town, but four-plus to a hotel room and pizza deliveries are s.o.p. at the average sci-fi/pop-culture convention and shouldn't be ruled out by potential future Red Stick attendees.)

Doeri Welch-Greiner lays out what is needed for a killer portfolio.

Speaking of Disney, that venerable studio was once again well-represented at the festival. Doeri Welch-Greiner, associate producer of the studio's recent Glago's Guest CG short and production manager of the upcoming Rapunzel feature made her first Red Stick appearance at the suggestion of higher-ups who asked her to join the studio's sizeable festival contingent to talk about 2D and 3D pipelines and look at portfolios. "I showed Glago and talked through the behind-the-scenes and 'making of' bits, then we screened it again so they could watch it with those things in mind. It turned people onto the idea there are more CGI jobs than just animator."

Although Doeri talked about a specific need for character TDs, "people thinking about things like cloth and hair that are so hard to do," she added that "in spite of the amount of specialization people need to have, the pendulum is swinging back to a real team structure where you want people who are rock stars at what they do but also have enough foundational knowledge of the people on the handing off and receiving ends of their job, so they can work as a tightly knit team rather than one department handing off to another and never interacting again.

"The rigger does his best to put in everything the animator wants, but it takes 150 feet of animation before the animator realizes [the character] doesn't have quite exactly what he needs. We're trying to set up a structure where there are character teams and sequence teams so we can acknowledge the way films are really made instead of focusing on streamlining the manufacturing process.

"I reviewed dozens of portfolios from a lot of students, especially Louisiana students from ITT [a local technical college offering graphic design and digital media courses]. There are definitely some students who are going to be submitting their stuff for our summer intern program and winter artistic associates programs."

Doeri is one of several people I talked to at the festival who refer to "feet" of animation. "Visual effects people talk about frames," she admitted, "but we're still using antiquated feet. It's not an excellent measure, five feet equals approximately three seconds, but it's kind of our general measuring stick. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but we've used for so long…"