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12th FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DU COURT METRAGE 16-21 October, 2012 - Lille, France

There is nothing that I like better than sitting in a dark theatre watching film.  Usually it is animation but during my 2 days at the Festival International Du Court Metrage (International Short Film Festival) in Lille, France I got to catch up on some live action and documentary shorts as well as the 3 excellent programs of animation.  As the name implies, no film was over 30 minutes.  The majority of the works were 15 minutes or under, so even though I was only at the festival on Friday and Saturday, I got to watch a wide variety of work.

The high points of the animation programs for me were Oh Willy by Emma De Swaef and Marc Roels, Tram from the extremely talented Michaela Pavlatova, and Hisko Hulsing’s Junkyard.  These 3 films have been garnering honors at festivals worldwide and it was no surprise that Hisko and Junkyard took the Best Animation award back to the Netherlands.  It was very impressive that Oh Willy walked away with the International Grand Prix, beating out hundreds of short films, documentaries, and animations.

Blogs

Charles Solomon Reviews the new Animation Show of Shows on KPCC

By Dan Sarto | Friday, January 18, 2013 at 11:41am

It’s nice to see our little neck of the woods get a bit of attention from mainstream media now and then, especially with meaningful and thoughtful commentary about films that while known to many in the industry, for the most part are unknown to most everyone else on the planet.

Blogs

Festival of European Student Animation - Belgrade, Serbia

By Dan Sarto | Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 1:04pm

Devoted solely to student work, the festival is the brainchild of well known animator, illustrator, and renaissance man Rastko Ćirić in conjunction with Vuk Maksimovic, master wood carver and furniture maker, who is the representative of the Fortress for this project.

Animation Blogs

Mel Blanc and How Animation Students Learn Character Development

By Dan Sarto | Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 11:34am

Strong character development is the foundation of any animation, of course, but contemporary animators might run into copyright infringement issues when they borrow heavily from existing characters in other creative properties.

Screenwriting Blogs

A Writer’s #1 Most Important Creative Tool is...

So what is a writer’s #1 creative tool? Experience? Education? Vocabulary? Scriptwriting software? Jack Daniels? It’s none of these. The #1 creative tool of every writer is...

Blogs

Five Steps To Slaughter Your Career

By Lisa Kaye | Monday, January 7, 2013 at 2:42pm

When it comes to finding ways to sabotage your career efforts think of how a poor Thanksgiving turkey wound up a sacrifice for the joys of your holiday meal. It’s not so much that you have to be plucked, sucked and tucked to fit into your turkey suit, but what have you done to help escape your fate? Here are five sure fire ways to slaughter your career in any season.

Blogs

Great Stories in Voice Over: Mike Meyers and the Story of Shrek’s Voice

What would Shrek be without his Scottish accent? Can you even imagine it? But not only was the character of Shrek NOT Scottish in William Stieg’s original books, (in fact, his name comes from Yiddish) but Mike Meyers very nearly never got the chance to play Shrek.

Blogs

The Promised Land: Part 1

The issuing reflections are probably the most complex of all of those I have written until now, difficult and troublesome for me to reflect upon and even more so verbalize. Nonetheless, I feel a deep need to face a challenge of distilling and then sharing my personal thoughts and observations on this perplexing topics.

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