Last month marked the third edition of the AniMazSpot Festival in Glendale, California.  It’s a small, non-profit boutique festival that celebrates the best animated short films from around the world.

The event, founded and organized by Tee Bosustow, was held over the course of one week.  It featured studio tours to fifteen area animation studios, screenings of nominated films at the Woodbury University Theatre, and an education forum also held at Woodbury. A highlight of the fest was a special screening of 20 restored, classic Mr. Magoo shorts from UPA at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.

When it comes to finding ways to sabotage your career efforts think of how a poor Thanksgiving turkey wound up a sacrifice for the joys of your holiday meal.  It’s not so much that you have to be plucked, sucked and tucked to fit into your turkey suit, but what have you done to help escape your fate?  Here are five sure fire ways to slaughter your career in any season.

Upon awakening I started to walk around the house within which I just became a visitor. Thus I came across this amazing sculptured scene contained within a small, simple box. As I swung open its flimsy doors, it unveiled to me an astoundingly fantastical realm hidden within its tiny confinements. Its thoughtfully choreographed scene bloomed with magical stories exploding with imagination and fantasy. It rightly took my breath away.

As I gazed into this enchanted world of an unknown to me artist, my mind immediately flooded with impressions of stories being spun by the horny “blue” goat seated amongst the two females, all behind a table set for what looked, one could almost smell it, like an irresistibly delicious feast, just about to begin. And so, as the ladies began to pour drinks and serve delicacies, I, as an expected visitor from outside, felt graciously invited. And thus totally transposed into my imaginary mind, I left my large clumsy human body behind to join the magical gathering within the tiny wooden boxed world of infinite possibilities.

By Matt Ployhar

Over the past few blogs, I touched on two of the four biggest game-changers I see hitting the gaming ecosystem simultaneously. First, we covered the trends and impact of mobile platforms. Second, we covered the trends and impacts occurring at the format and business levels. For this discussion, we’ll cover what I think is another enormous trend impacting the games market: globalization.

I cannot emphasize the importance of the globalization trend enough. By percentage of market share, as other geographies begin to mature and disposable income rates increase abroad, the U.S. and other traditional gaming geos become smaller as an overall percentage of market share. The primary reasoning behind this is that most of the industrialized nations’ markets have already been saturated with game systems.

Makes sense, but why should we care? There are several reasons why the entire gaming ecosystem should pay heed: source of revenue, more choices, fierce competition, and innovation and growth shifts.

It’s important to find out what makes you tick, but realizing that there are some fundamental outliers at play helps you to manage your expectations and come to the table ready to be present and make the most of what you have to offer.  If you are tired of being pushed and pulled and feel like a leaf in the wind blowing from one vacant lot to another, try applying the “Four C” principles to your career and see if you it provides you with a foundation on which to build your career castle.

A detailed description of my 2D hand drawn animation process.

Surprise, surprise back at 30,000 ft flying from London to Los Angeles after a super quick trip to the UK and Ukraine.  Since my last communication, which was all about the KROK International Animation Festival, I have been back in the US.  A return home after thirteen months on the road.  I left my home in LA in September of 2011 for a two-month road trip.  That trip kept getting extended and extended.  Resulting into the longest period away from the US since I came to America from the United Kingdom after the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, nearly 25 years ago.

 

Nature’s unsurpassed poetic, imaginative, intricate and glorious artistic ingenunity, the range of infinite design resources through which it is able to express its ideas and experimentation, are never captured visualized as magnificently as in astoundingly delicate designs Nature never seems to run out of, be shy about, or short on alternate renditions of its explorations, all in its perpetual strive for utter perfection.

What is the state of my beloved first-person shooter game today? I’ve played Crysis and Quake 4, and even tried some of these games on an Xbox 360, including Halo 1-3 and Gears of War. However, they still just don’t hold that magic for me like they used to.

 

By Nancy Phelps

Devoted solely to student work, the festival is the brainchild of well known animator, illustrator, and renaissance man Rastko Ćirić in conjunction with Vuk Maksimovic, master wood carver and furniture maker, who is the representative of the Fortress for this project.  It also received support from the Serbian Ministry of Culture.