Currently a lot of our colleagues are involved with “dimensionalizing” conventional 2D films into being stereoscopic or so called 3D movies. While most of the artists I spoke with tended to mumble something about “colorizing Shirley Temple” all are glad to have the work.

Still image from the animated short Diary 1 by Tsvika Oren.

Tsvika Oren has been deeply involved in animation for the better part of 30 years - creating, teaching, writing, judging, jurying…

©1999 Miramax Films

Do you write part time?  Do you write for just a few hours a day?  Are you writing a spec screenplay a few days a week or month?

If you answered any of these questions in the affirmative you may be losing more time (and creativity) than you think.

Let me give you a few suggestions that will help you get a lot more writing done...

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.

Special Guest:  Janie Geiser

This week on the Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum: a big announcement, time-travel, and special guest filmaker/animator/object-manipulator/shadow-hugger Janie Geiser.  Join Joel, Alan, Sam Olschan, and Computer as they discuss with Janie the finer points of puppet-performance, the gallery vs. the theater, funding your personal art, and how to fix your apartment or life with gaff tape.