The creator, Tom Schroeder has done some fine work since Bike Ride, but perhaps none better than his latest, Marcel King of Tervuren. It's kind of a beautiful Bukowski/Sophocles tale with roosters. Best short animation of 2013 thus far. You should see it at many festivals. If not, those festivals should have their eyes shot out.

By Ellen Besen

Social flow is particularly important at animation festivals- we all spend too much time alone at our desks communicating mostly with ourselves and really look forward to the camaraderie 5 days at a festival promises.

All this only made the NAC-less years that much more frustrating. The beauty of the NAC has always been its excellent lobby, a large inviting space big enough to accommodate the market, with plenty of room for productive milling about.  Back in the day, you could count on everyone showing up well before the evening screenings for an unscheduled cocktail party and lingering long after the screening before moving on to other venues. And that meant your chances of seeing everyone you hoped to see through the course of the festival and finding someone worth talking to on any given evening were very high, even for the shyest among the crowd.

 

By Nancy Phelps

When I last left you I was on a bus from Pristina, Kosovo headed to Belgrade, Serbia where I was planning to meet my old friend Rastko Ciric and attend the first edition of the Festival of European Student Animation that he had organized.  It was supposed to be a six hour trip.   I knew that Serbia did not recognize Kosovo as a country and people travelling on a Kosovo passport could not cross this border but I had been assured that I would not have a problem since I was travelling on a United States passport.

By Dan Sarto

The Southern California leg of Acme Filmworks’ and AWN’s annual Oscar Showcase Tour kicked off with a screening Monday night at Woodbury University, sponsored and organized by ASIFA-Hollywood.  Frank Gladstone brought boxes of cookies, containers of coffee and his unflappable and eternally upbeat demeanor.  The cold wind and threat of rain did nothing to damper the crowd, which filled the Fletcher Jones Theatre almost to capacity.  After he introduced me, sharing the fictional story of my childhood spent roaming the streets of India, I then regaled the audience with the story of the first time I met Frank, literally bumping into him within a huge room at the castle overlooking Annecy’s old town, stuffed wall-to-wall with people celebrating the release of DreamWorks’ Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.  I told the crowd, as I tell you now, the next time you meet Frank, ask him to tell you the “Seamus” joke.  And be prepared.

After the screening, John Kahrs (Paperman), David Silverman (Maggie Simpson and “The Longest Daycare”), Tim Reckart and Fondhla Cronin O’Reilly (Head Over Heels) took the stage for a 45 minute Q&A.  Some of the highlights:

The VIEW Conference has announced the European premiere of Pixar Animation Studios’ latest short film, Partysaurus Rex, to be presented by award-winning director, animator, actor, storyboard artist and writer Mark Walsh.

Walsh graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1997, winning a Student Emmy for his animated short film, Extra Crispy. At Pixar, Mark became part of a group of fellow actors and stuntmen, animating on such films as A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., the animated short Presto, and the Academy Award-winning feature The Incredibles.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Silly analogy not-withstanding, once again, Disney has done the animation community proud by digitally restoring and releasing one of its all-time classics on Blu-ray.  Almost twenty years in the making, Peter Pan was originally scheduled as Walt Disney’s second animated feature.  Work began in the late 1930s, but the effort was shelved with the start of World War II.  Picked up again in 1947, the film finally was released in 1953.  In celebration of the film’s 60^th anniversary, Disney has just released this animated classic bundled with a great selection of featurettes and some deleted scenes and songs.

By Ellen Besen

What makes an animation festival great?

With OIAF recently past and CTN on the immediate horizon, it seems like a good time to ask this question, one I’ve been asking myself in the aftermath of every festival experience for so many years I’ve lost count. I’ve also lost count of my many attempts to answer that question – most of them quite unsatisfactory.

In fact, I only started to answer the question in any meaningful way when I found myself taking over a sweet little festival- the late, lamented Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI)- from 2006 to 2009. We were charged, at the time, with taking a promising regional festival to the next level…and in the process of achieving that goal- if only for a moment before the economy, among other things, took the whole enterprise down- a great deal of what really makes a festival work was revealed.

 

Remember when we were limited by the physical nature of recording? Film, tape, vinyl? Yeah, me neither. Many of those forms of technology didn’t die out all that long ago (after all, the first voice overs are still less than 100 years old) and yet, we quickly repressed those memories in favor of the newest, most convenient technology.

From Logic to ProTools to the stuff we carry around in our pockets, advances in technology have increased our ability to create great products, to do so cost-effectively, and to cast the projects efficiently.

 

By Nancy Phelps

Arriving in Changchun, China for The International Animation, Comics, and Games Forum was a very abrupt switch from my previous weeks in Kosovo and Serbia.   Any thoughts of long, leisurely meals with friends and watching good animation went out of my head when I was handed my schedule.

When I last visited the Jilin Industrial Park 2 years ago it was still under construction.  The multilevel media school was completed but I had no idea that that the final project would be so massive.   On this visit all of the tall building were completed and seemed to be full of activity and the grounds were fully landscaped.

By John Moore

Mobile apps for tuning a variety of musical instruments are readily available, but a recently demonstrated iPad app expands the musician-helper category beyond those basic tools. The software, dubbed Celeste, helps configure pipe organs and was among the featured apps at the University of Utah’s Mobile Application Demo Day.

Celeste tackles the issue of setting up an organ’s stops, which the organist uses to manage -- allow or block -- the flow of air to certain pipes. Configuring organ stops for a particular piece of music can prove time consuming, but the iPad app lets musicians keep all the organ stop settings they need at the ready. It’s an insurance policy of sorts should someone inadvertently overwrite the preset stops in an organ’s memory bank before a performance. Rob Stefanussen, the University of Utah computer science student and organist who wrote the app, recently spoke about Celeste.