Red Stick International Animation Festival offered presentations on all aspects of TV and feature development and production. Writer Eric Shaw revealed secrets of writing for SpongeBob SquarePants. © Nickelodeon.

The Mississippi River city known as Baton Rouge, Louisiana has been around for 300 years or so, dating back to a French explorer's sighting of a red cypress pole marking the boundary between two Native American tribes.

Shape and color play a different role in 21st-century Baton Rouge, in the form of the city's Red Stick International Animation Festival. It's an event that's been growing in size every year since its 2005 debut; this April saw the city's Shaw Center for the Arts play host to its fourth go-round.

Red Stick is the joint brainchild of Stacey Simmons, head of the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium, and Stephen David Beck, director of Louisiana State University's Creative Arts and Technology Lab. "My office started after the first festival," Simmons explains. "Its job is to develop opportunities in digital media, whether it's animation, special effects or video games. We wanted an economic development engine -- we have a lot of film production here and the state is very economical for tax credits, but we haven't really pursued animation and visual effects. We're going after that now in a big way."

For his part, Beck extols Baton Rouge's "great weather, great food and great people" -- and LSU as a generator of new digital talent. "The university is stepping up to the plate with new programs and faculty. We're hiring six new people in digital media over the next two years. Having that faculty, and students who study with them, gives you a knowledgeable workforce for local companies to draw on."

Red Stick started up with some help from England's Animex festival. According to Simmons, "No other U.S. festival covers the animation community and the animation business. Animex was doing that. When we went to Middlesbrough, we found we had a lot in common in terms of demographics, population and general economic standards. They'd been doing some incredible stuff. We asked if we could partner with them and they said, absolutely. It's been great." Animex's director Chris Williams reciprocates Simmons' feelings: "Events like this are about people first and foremost. The people here in Baton Rouge share the same views as us on how an animation festival can be so much more to a community than most events of this type."

Red Stick's multiple programming tracks make it impossible for any one person to take in everything the festival has to offer. One could learn about shows in development and production, participate in scripting, pitching and character design workshops, or go behind-the-scenes of special effects work and computer animation. The reclusive could spend the festival watching shorts and feature screenings at several venues: the Shaw Center's Manship Theater, the Louisiana Art and Science Museum just down the hill, or across the street in the castle-like Old Louisiana State Capitol Building.

Comet Entertainment's Raquel Benitez.

Inside that ornate structure, at the top of its curving central staircase, a series of cut-out wooden stick figures were arrayed across the tile floor. The tiny figures were waiting to be filmed by the festival's annual Animation Workshop group, led by Gary Schwartz from Detroit's College for Creative Studies. "We're showing the footage here first," Schwartz explained, "then we take it back to Detroit and make a soundtrack. When it's done, it'll be shown at the Beijing Olympics this summer, and next year it will be the festival's TV spot." (Last year's effort is on YouTube.)

Animation scripter Eric Shaw revealed secrets of writing for SpongeBob SquarePants in a full-day writing workshop. Casually mentioning that Nickelodeon's undersea star generates $1 billion a year for Viacom, he described working with story editors, spending hours getting one line perfect, and the difference between working solo and participating in a group "table write." "There might be 20 writers in a room collaborating, but you get your script fee when your name is on the script."

Show pitching was a major component of the festival, with several sessions devoted to the ins and outs of developing and selling animated series. Rugrats scripter and Disney development exec Barbara Slade hosted "Introduction to International Television Development Track," as she and Trade Media U.K.'s Isabelle Carriere, Corus' Jocelyn Hamilton and Comet Entertainment's Raquel Benitez compared notes on what their companies look for when acquiring shows. "A character-driven show will work anywhere," said Hamilton, but cautioned that "what we find funny isn't necessarily universal."

Slade told the audience, "There's a fine and confusing line between taking things to a certain level by yourself, because it's your vision and instinct, to not having a million people breathing down your neck telling you what to do. The stronger a project is when you bring it in, the less people are going to mess with it. But at the same time, animation is a group business. You'll be working in collaboration with a lot of people -- at some point you do have to let go of it."

Benitez told the story of a series pitch that wasn't going anywhere until the folks being pitched noticed a drawing of two Santa Clauses -- one in his traditional garb and the other in a business suit -- confronting each other. "The premise was Santa retires and hires a company to replace him. It was just a piece of paper but they said 'we're on, what do you need, what's the budget?'