Beautiful downtown Ottawa and the elusive black squirrel. All images courtesy of Rick DeMott.

For me, Ottawa 2006 marked my first film festival and first time in Canada. The legendary hospitality of our neighbors to the north was well appreciated. I actually saw a driver cut someone off and the person cut off waved and smiled to the apologetic offender, assuring him that there were no hard feelings. I have never seen such behavior in Los Angeles — I was captivated. With ginger ale readily available everywhere, I just had to tell my Canadian brethren to stop trying to make me love their country, because they had me at Schweppes.

As for the festival, as a newbie, I wanted to find out why people love coming to this event, which is a statement I’ve heard from many who have attended before. For busy execs, animators and students, there has to be something more to event than just the chance to see mysterious black squirrels and “network” with people who are only an email away. Ottawa isn’t the largest festival nor is its TV conference.

One of the easy answers is that meeting someone in person is a far more effective way of getting to know that individual rather than just exchanging emoticons over IM. For students, this may be the only chance to meet and converse with professional animators and their toon heroes.

Another easy answer would be the attendees’ love of animation — whether it’s for business or solely artistic reasons. But why Ottawa and not the myriad of other events that for some may be closer to home? Why do they keep coming back and why do I find myself wanting to go back? Even though it’s hardly ever spoken and seems a contradictory statement when looking at a week of 17-hour days, Ottawa allows people with common interests to take a break from their busy work lives and remember to have fun.

Ottawa ‘06 kicked off with TAC — the Television Animation Conference. One may first think with a title like that this is the strictly business section and the fun comes later. You’d be wrong. Some veteran festival goers said there was concern about how the conference would affect the integrity of the festival. With TAC & Workshop director Maral Mohammadian bringing the same unrushed and laid back atmosphere of the festival to TAC, the conference looks like any other professional event, but feels like a club meeting.

This vibe was kicked off by having Michael Ouweleen, svp, programming and development, at Cartoon Network, give the opening keynote. First and foremost, Ouweleen is an entertainer, who makes the words “studio exec” sound more like candy than arsenic. His witty humor enlivened the topic of digital technologies changing the TV industry, dispelling the doom and gloom scenarios that TV is dead by reminding us that these changes have all happened before.

The brave TAC pitchers Chris Dainty and Stephanie M. Yuhas.

But is anything really learned from conferences? For those a bit outside the rat race for sure, but for many in the studio system it’s all been discussed at nausea during work hours. So the question is again why go? Here’s that word again — it’s fun. What busy animation exec or independent producer hasn’t at one time enjoyed reading a business trends book on their free time? When one gets to a certain position in the industry or wants to get there, they start to live and breathe this stuff. As sad as it might make us feel at times, we have fun listening to engaging speakers talk about market trends, because it excites us. More than one exec on a TAC panel referred to their children as their own private focus group. I guess there’s no difference between that and a police detective who reads true crime novels on his spare time.

This does not mean that business isn’t being done. Just walking through the lobby of the Chateau Laurier, many attendees were scattered throughout engaged in meetings between panels. For me, the most inspiring panels of TAC were “Pitch This!” and “Ruby Gloom Case Study.” The first panel featured live pitches of TV projects. Chris Dainty and Jessica Borutski pitched their property The Constellations and Stephanie M. Yuhas presented Jersey Fresh. The pitches displayed projects that were at different stages of development and received encouraging and insightful comments from the panel of studio execs. For rookie pitchers, the event was a helpful “how to.”

I heard many an artist who have optioned projects to studios tell Dainty, Borutski and Yuhas that they were impressed with the guts they displayed to put themselves out there in front of a room of strangers. (The fact that the ballroom is the very one from The Shining must have added to the scariness of the experience.) All the participants displayed their love for what they were doing and it was inspiring to watch their excitement. They showed that they were having fun.