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?

Change always accompanies the new year. And The Anime Beat is no different. That's right folks, I'm continuously expanding this little dog and pony show! 

 

 

Special Guests:  Signe Baumane & Isaac Short

On this episode of the Forum, Joel and Alan prognosticate the future of cinema and how podcasts are this century's booming artform.  Then, independent animator and bunny-lover, Signe Baumane, presents her perspective on animation as art, art as animation, sex ed, the animated short vs. feature, how to finance your independent animation career, animation as a drug-habit, and how not to be a lonely rapist.  All are then joined by 6-year old Isaac Short as he works through his unhealthy obsession with early pioneers of animation.

For the past fifteen years, the Holy Grail for most new character animators has been a staff position with one of the major studios -  Pixar, DreamWorks, Sony, Blue Sky or Disney. Today’s new animators are encountering a rapidly changing industry landscape that includes entirely new production models.  Movies such as Chico and Rita, Rango, Coraline, The Illusionist, and Waltz with Bashir cost much less to make than, say, Brave or Madagascar 3, and they play for more demographically specific audiences. New channels of distribution and exhibition are emerging, and Hollywood’s big studios are feeling the sting that accompanies a mega-budget flop like Mars Needs Moms. Even lofty Pixar is having trouble sustaining its own high creative standard while producing three movies per year on an assembly-line basis.

We can do a better job of preparing the next generation of animators for the industry realities that await them.  We can do a better job of mentoring the next Miyazaki, Lasseter or Disney. Granted, the computer has largely replaced the pencil as a primary animation tool over the past twenty years, but drawing skills are a visible marker of aptitude for animation in general.  Take that away and you are basically left with analytic computer programmer/operator potential.

 

  There is a point in everyone's life, where you look back at the last few months, years, or - depending on your age - decades, and ask yourself: Why the hell am I doing this?

For some, this might happen only once, for others once a week. It usually happens to me when I'm standing on set at 5am, freezing my ass off in some remote location. I just got dropped off by helicopter, and  now I'm standing alone on this glacier, shooting HDRI stills. Or, I'm standing in heavy rain next to a garbage dump (well, that's the location) after an 16-hour day (so far), my clothes are starting to soak all the way through, while there's a crew of 200 people buzzing around, trying to make the last shot of the day before losing the light.

 

So why the hell am I doing this?

Maybe I was in a bad mood when Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs came out. Maybe I just resented the idea of taking one of my kids’ favorite picture books and pumping it up into a full-length feature, so I passed on it in the theaters.  Meatballs was true to the book’s title, its idea of food falling from the sky – and not much else. Not that there was much else to ditch, admittedly, but at the very least I would’ve liked to have seen at least one visual nod along the way to Ron Barrett’s meticulously cross-hatched original illustrations that gave the book’s outlandish premise a real-world solidity.