What is the #1 most important ingredient of every great screenplay?

Is it great characters?

Great plot?

High Concept?

It’s none of these.  The #1 most important ingredient of every great screenplay is...

The Animation Winter Wonderland Tour was interrupted  by my crashed hard drive.

The animation masterclass I taught at Bloomfield was wonderful!

Next up the Savannah International Animation Festival.

Merida rides in this concept art from Brave. Merida does not play major league baseball for the Atlanta Braves.  All images courtesy of Pixar.

At a casual glance, anybody taking on Disney in a court of law would seem either fabulously wealthy, fabulously nuts, or both.  So, I find this news item of particular interest.  As reported on the Yahoo Sports blog Big League Stew, Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves are slinging some arrows at Pixar, challenging them over the name of the upcoming animated feature, Brave.

Sorry Film Not Ready by Janet Perlman.

Whatever you call it, abstract/experimental ruled the day in Competition 5.  Here are some highlights.

Robert was the father of one of my eldest daughter's best friends at school and this relationship became the basis of being friends-by-proxy with Robert Culp. When someone with whom you have shared time and experiences passes away, one half of your shared story dies with them.

Writer/director Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs talk with the press at the Sundance Film Festival.

The opening night selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, Mary and Max is a clayograph (a claymation biography hybrid) feature film from Academy Award winning writer/director Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs, featuring the voice talents of Toni Collette, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries and Eric Bana.

There are ten Best Picture Oscar nominees this year? Big deal, nobody cares about Best Picture... what's really important is the Best Animated Feature, everybody knows that. Who will win?

Ever have a friend, like back in college say, who was just the funniest guy you knew? Always coming up with great jokes completely out of left field, or riffing on whatever was happening at the moment? You graduate and go your separate ways, then six years later you meet up again. You can’t help but notice he dresses a lot better than he did in school. He still tells jokes, only now a lot of them are what he heard last night on Leno, or he’s quoting the catchphrase of the moment. It was fun seeing him again, but it’s not the reunion you were hoping for, the one that would recapture those great moments back in school.

That’s how I felt walking out of Hoodwinked Too!: Hood vs. Evil.

Bringing Elemental Magic to China -After flying to Philadelphia to conduct my ‘Elemental Magic’ workshop at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennDesign department, I flew back through Toronto, and then over the North Pole to Beijing and then Harbin, in Northern China, where I then conducted my workshop yet again, this time for a group of over 40 Chinese students, with extremely varying levels of English speaking skills.

Special Guest:   Joel Frenzer

This episode 15 of the Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum will shock and anesthetize your extra cognition of the outer workings of the inner minutia of the broad specifics of animation.  Alan Foreman straps the very Joel Frenzer into the special guest hot-seat to scour the depths of his animation teaching philosophy, artistic process, and his thoughts on his thoughts.  The easiest to book and most self-reverential episode in the FFAF archive to date!