Day 1 and the contestants are already tired.

SIGGRAPH 2009 Fjorg! competition started at 9am Monday, August 3 in New Orleans. In it’s third year, the event attracted many talented animators both students and professionals.

The competition, created by Patricia Beckmann as an Iron Animator event challenges the competitors to create a short film (15-45 seconds) from concept to finish in the short time span of thirty-two hours. To make the task more demanding, distractions are scheduled throughout the day to entice them away from the film making process.

Crazy Eights creators take home the Red Baton at pitch fest.

The festival’s last day begins with Red Stick’s now-annual Pitch Contest. It might not as well attended as KidScreen’s similar event, but the presenters are every bit as passionate about their projects and after several days of tutoring from industry pros they’re ready to rock: Tim Raglan wants to turn his beautifully illustrated kids’ book Uncle Mugsy (featuring a stuffy bulldog and his mischievous niece and nephew in a Victorian canine universe) into a movie, followed by “many episodes or sequels depending on your personal preference;” Greg Farren and Jeremy Melton merge hot rodders (only their characters race spaceships, not cars), 1950’s-style sci-fi and rockabilly music into an inspired mixture called Crazy Eights; Digital Tap’s Martin Grebing presents Zap Squad, a team of adolescent superheroes (“they’re not your average kids next door”) on time travelling adventures; Patrick, a local cartoonist whose last name I missed offers Guns McMenanin, “the most bad-ass repo man in LA,” and Chris – again last name missing – does as much stand-up as pitching (“this is the most attractive crowd I’ve ever seen at an AA meeting”) while presenting two projects – Spells, a gross-out effort starring a trio of macabre witches (“mean-spirited fun for everyone”) and El Mucho Grande, Wrestler for Hire. (“He’s so big it took two women to give him birth.”)

The Festival Garden open air screening.

By Nancy Phelps

This year the sun was shining down brightly on the Trickfilm Festival in Stuttgart in more than one way.  Outside, the sky was a beautiful blue and in the screening rooms the films were as brilliant as the sun.

While the competition programs were strong and the feature films in competition offered some interesting surprises, and the highlight of the festival for me this year was the large number of special presentation screenings.

With 170 films in the competitions plus another 800 films screened in special programs and over €61,000 in prize money, Trickfilm Festival has become a major  international event.  Even though it is becoming a large festival with an audience attendance of over 50,000, Stuttgart manages to retain the very personal feeling of a smaller festival making every one of the 2,000 accredited guests feel welcome and special. 

VFX producer Randy Starr

Last Saturday the VES hosted its third annual Production Summit, this time at the quaint Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills. Despite all about VES 2.0 and the Bill of Rights to help facilitate quality of life improvements for artists and VFX companies, the purpose was to address the paradigm shift going on and to discuss better biz practices.

The latest wrinkle was starting with a series of breakfast roundtable discussions, ranging from animation trends and open source development/trends to partnering with international companies to the challenges of 3-D stereo, 48-60fps, digital color.

A Monster in Paris. Image © 2011 EuropaCorp, Bibo Films, France 3 Cinema, Walking the Dog.

By Haley Hughes

Part musical, part action, all comedy, A Monster in Paris is a fun, yet convoluted, Disneyesque feature directed by Bibo Bergeron and written by Bergeron and Stephane Kazandjian.  With the voice talents of Adam Goldberg, as the excitable Raoul, Jay Harrington, as the unconfident Emile, and Vanessa Paradis as the courageous Lucille; the plot follows the group along with their monkey friend, Charles, as they attempt to protect the title character, voiced by the brilliant Sean Lennon, from the police, all while exposing him to song and dance.

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.

Italy’s largest computer graphics conference is now ready to accept applications for entries in four contests: VIEW AWARD, VIEW SOCIAL CONTEST, VIEW AWARD GAME, and ITALIANMIX.

Tired Sundancers

If I haven’t been returning calls or emails over the last few days you will soon know why. As the festival is winding down my wife and I are on a mission to pack in as much as we can. I have a short film in the festival this year and feel like we need to give it our all (can always sleep when we get home). It's time to take off the gloves switch off the phones and hit the streets! Here is a rundown of our last gasp trying to soak it all up. If you are in a rush power scroll / skim through this info and use the ratings system to stop as you like.

Pervasive computing gets the upper hand.

Well, I’m torn. Shall I go to the presentation on “Hair shells and bi-quad transition rig on Shrek the Halls and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” or to the “Humanizing virtual agents: the role of speech technology in effective human-machine interaction?” All of this requires a certain mind-set. Maybe if they made a rule that titles had to be short, like “Beards and boundaries” and “Talk to me, Mac,” I would feel less anxiety about making these choices.