Film and television particularly are the paramount mediums of abandonment.  Despite our best efforts sometimes our work is connected to a film or show that sinks like a bag of kittens.  It’s all part of the whole picture. Blessed is he who goes unscathed. You have to just learn to let it go…

Special Guests: Tim Finn and Lorelei Pepi 

Author, animator, and 80's cartoon voice reenactor, The Definitive Tim Finn, stops by to discuss coffee-table books, animation based on colors, and 3D Chess. Joel and Alan then engage Tim in a very brief but colossal battle of capitalism in FFAF's newest radio game, "Two Minute Monopoly".  All is then put classier when the beautiful, the insightful, and the ever effervescent Lorelei Pepi reveals her unorthodox recipe for Italian Wedding Soup, her thoughts on animation and art, and why FFAF's other newest radio game, "Brain Cloning", is a good excuse to beat up on Joel's face.

 

 

Steven Woloshen creates animation in cars, at work, in airports, on planes… in other words wherever and whenever he has ten consecutive minutes to play. 

Let’s talk about acting!  Animators do not perceive or apply acting theory the same way that stage actors do.  The primary variable is that stage actors work “in the present moment”, and animators work with an illusion of a present moment – 24 frames make a second. Animators need to know the connections between thinking, emotion and physical action; they need to understand theatrical structure, the way that performance relates to story and how both relate to the audience.

My least favorite thing to do is lecture.  I much prefer to discuss acting theory with you.  Ask me questions.  Challenge me.

True Grit fits into the Coen Brother’s expanding body of work. Their scripts are not scripts of painful labor, deadlines, script-writing programs or marketing demands but of self-amusement. At the end of their day, they can be satisfied not only with the product but the process undergone. Within this body there is a consistency of world-view. To sit and watch one of their films is to lean forward with a combination of bemusement and apprehension. True Grit does not disappoint. It’s a lot of fun.

The Ninth Annual VES Awards held at the Beverly Hilton this year was a wonderful evening. The men were dressed in fineries ranging from the most formal to interpretations of Edwardian garb all the way to elegant Goth. The women were all pretty and covered, sometimes barely, in shimmering golds and soft greens. Fresh faces sat at each table woven in among the time-tested faces of the pioneers and near-pioneers of our business. If the VES performed no other role other than to bring us all together as a family once a year then they would have had reason enough to exist.

We are now engaged in a great change that has swept our old notions of our business out the door along with a fair number of ourselves. While the volume of visual effects work worldwide has increased a very large portion of the work is done overseas and unless we can find some way to stop electricity from being produced in China we can expect to face a continuing drain of the work - certainly out of California and largely out of the U.S. in general. Unionizing will not help unless the state and local governments put into place a large and sustained incentive program to keep the work here, mirroring what our competitors are doing. 

Certainly we must do what we can to adapt but realistically, only a certain number of us will be able to make the transition successfully. Others will drop into the visual effects past uncertain as to whether they jumped, were pushed or simply let go.

“Show, don’t tell” is a proven guideline for screenwriters but, for some reason, feature animation is still playing catch-up.  Internationally, animated films tend to have too much dialogue and/or voice over narration.  In this article, Ed Hooks makes the case for telling a story through action, not verbal description.

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?