Special Guests:  Sean Kenin & The Smurfs

Welcome to the most current content-ed and contented episode of the FFAF oeuvre.  Alan and Joel sit down with the very Sean Kenin, voice-actor to the stars, to discuss his unique and defining role in the hit smash cinema-kapow, The Smurfs.  Sean Kenin - made of pure magic.

PLUS, stick around for a very special bonus montage audio fantasy spectacle at the end of the end of the end music.

The canceled Comedy Central series’ feature length finale is a low-budget direct-to-video effort designed to provide its fans with, as the cliché goes, “closure” and to say farewell once and for all to its cast of animated archetypes… maybe. “Buying the DVD is a vote for the show” returning, its producers say. “Besides, there’s a part of the movie you can’t download that will change your life.”

Special Guests:    

Alex Butera & Lindsay Small and 

On this decisode of the Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum, Alan and Joel lament over the mysterious disappearance and unplanned obsolescence of The FFAF Computer, while entertaining a career in side-show freakery. Then Baman Piderman's own power-couple, shoe-illustrator Lindsay Small and shoe-phobic Alex Butera, discuss dinner, dating, working in cartoons, cartoon networking, avant-god animation assignments, and how perfectly complimentary skill sets boost both animation production and home economy.  FFAF then gets a personal invite to their wedding where Joel and Alan will release doves through inventive voice-acting calisthenics.

UPDATED

The book publishing industry, like the newspaper biz, is on a glide path to oblivion.  It's just too easy and cheap to download a book to your computer, iPad or Kindle.

And that was last year!

Now it takes less time to publish your own book than it does to write a query letter to publishers, let alone send it out and wait for the rejection letters.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is so easy it's frightening (to the publishing industry). How easy?

Special Guest: Adeline Colangelo

This week on the Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum, Alan experiments with the fine art of circular breathing and Joel achieves a record-setting number of "nows" while both puzzle over the continuing misappearance of the FFAF computer. Then, after some hard-battled man-powered guest-summoning, screen writer and Troma film starlet Adeline Colangelo enters the Forum to dish about writing for animation, how one stumbles into being a professional writer, and the finer points of like, ya know, mumble-core.  

A creator recently said to me, “You know, it’s easy to come up with a good idea.  Making it happen is the hard part.” In fact, I think both are hard!  But my area of expertise has been the later –making it happen. In this blog, I will talk about projects I am actively pitching and about my experiences taking them across the globe to find financing and get them produced.  Names may be changed to protect the innocent!

It's been an interesting time for animation this spring in cinemas. Two new features are competing for audience attention, Ponyo from Studio Ghibli and Disney Animation Studio's latest The Princess and the Frog. Their parallel release is further energised by the way they promote traditional drawn animation. This emphasis is particularly felt in the wake of Avatar, James Cameron's computer animated epic. In our first feature article, we compare the Goldfish and the Frog, and ask the question, what makes a good drawn feature in 2010?

Does self-promotion really work? 

What happens when you promote your writing via blog, Facebook and LinkedIn? 

Over the past several weeks I've done just that. 

The results are in. 

Check out this post and find out exactly what happened with my experiment in self-promotion...

A discussion of some of the ways various visual effects artists fill their time and their wallets while waiting for the current shortage of entertainment jobs to be over.

© BIG Animation

Here's a tip for professional television and film screenwriters.

If you haven't thought of this one yet it will save you time by eliminating the need to write some things twice.  But best of all, in just a couple of minutes it will let you see that you've probably already written half of your script.  And that will make most any writer feel GREAT!

What I do is this: After I've written an outline, and am ready to start the script, I cut and paste the outline directly into my script document.

But then I take it one important step further...