By Ellen Besen

I really thought this next piece was going to be about festival programming but fresh from CTN Expo- which wrapped on Sun Nov 18, I feel compelled to shift focus to a more pressing topic: overall spirit. By this I don’t mean so much the mood of the attendees but more the spirit in which the event was conceived and carried out by the organizers. This last factor has a defining impact on every aspect of the event including the attendees’ mood and programming as well, which is precisely why it is the more pressing issue.

This kind of spirit can be an elusive subject- one that doesn’t really show itself directly.  Instead you kind of have to look at an event sideways, to use your detective skills and also keep in mind what other choices could have been made to suss out the organizers intentions.

Competition short film, Life without Gabriella Ferri, by Priit Paarn

written by Johannes Wolters

It’s a tough job to be on a pre-selection committee. I had the opportunity to talk to Alexey Alexeev, who together with Vanja Andrijevic (Producer, Croatia) and Francis Gavelle (Journalist, France) had the gigantic task to select the programs for short films from thousands and thousands of films. They also had to put together the out of competition program. So Alexey told me about the big discussions they had, what to choose, what to select within the pressure to work for the most influential animation festival of the world. So he sought for something new, something bold, something sharp. Describing himself as a little bit cynical, he adores "South Park" and Andreas Hykade but also the old Hanna-Barbera “Tom & Jerry” cartoons. He tries to combine creativity and professionalism, which means less boring films, less long format, less is more. Alexey Alexeev himself is in the TV competition with his lovable "Log Jam" series produced by Andras Erkel and his Hungarian Studio BAESTARDS.

GDC gets serious about Serious Games.

The Game Developers Conference 2009 featured several specialty categories of videogames with strong potential for new types of creative expression and careers (read: “jobs for animators”). The GDC’s Serious Games Summit was an object lesson on how many areas of the world can be affected by games—and how effective Serious Games can be in teaching, affecting opinion, motivating exercise, and medical healing, to name but a few. A Serious Game is one where entertainment is not the primary objective—though the game still needs to be entertaining, as many developers pointed out, else no one will use it.

AnimfxNZ 3-D panel - EA's Habib Zargarpour (l to r), Adlabs/Reliance India's Patrick von Sychowski, 3ality Digital's Steve Schklair, and SohoNet's Dave Scammell.

One of the hot topics at AnimfxNZ was 3-D stereo and digital cinema. Dave Scammell, the President of SohoNet, ran a panel on the issue with Steve Schklair from 3ality Digital, Patrick von Sychowski from Adlabs/Reliance India, and Habib Zargarpour from Electronic Arts Los Angeles.

It's obvious that the move towards 3-D is slow and painful. Patrick has been in digital cinema for 10 years, and says 3-D is one of those developments that's always five years away. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem -- stereoscopic 3-D in cinema is a function of the theaters' conversion from 35 mm cinema to digital cinema. He likens the changeover process to the process of switching from left-hand drive to right-hand drive.

A behind-the-scenes look at Alice in Wonderland was one of the treats of CTN Expo 2010.

The CTN Expo has returned to Burbank for the second year. The conference has expanded a great deal from last year's event. It also has seen an explosion of attendees, which pushed off the scheduled start times of all the events as the eager guest were being registered. This created some bumps along the road for the two-year old event, which is again valiantly put together by Tina Price and her tiny staff with help from a host of volunteers.

Despite its problems, the event once again showed the real reason to attend once you arrived in the panels. First of the day for me was David Schaub, the animation supervisor on ALICE IN WONDERLAND, chronicling the process Sony Pictures Animation went through to develop the mind-bending visual effects of Tim Burton's hit film. Interestingly, the animators had a chance to experiment with the way the characters were to act, ranging from realistic to cartoony. Just goes to show you the leeway a big budget production has to experiment along the way. Burton settled on a stylized realism. In addition to completely animated characters like the White Rabbit, there were many hybrid characters such as the Knave of Hearts. One interesting challenge with that character came in the development of the costume. In all the renditions right up to the start of production, he had a large collar, so for the green screen shoot actor Crispin Glover was given a green suit with a high collar. When the final designs came, there was no collar, so the digital artists had to go in and add digital hair to fill in Glover's long hair that was blocked by the green suit's high collar.

Fluffle by Stephanie Franz

by Mo Whelan

I recently was introduced to Action On Film International Film Festival located in Pasadena by my friend, Alex Ballar. His live-action, comedy, feature film Zombie Drugs was nominated for three awards and won Best Art Direction – Feature. One of the animation community’s favorite independent animators, Bill Plympton, won the AOF 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. Both winners spiked my interest in the film festival.

One of the really smart people who presented a 60 second synopsis of their research to an audience filled with people like me, who are not smart and who had no possibility of understanding what was being said.

By Dan Sarto

Yesterday evening, I sat through the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers Fast Forward presentation. The official program description is as follows: 

The Fast Forward is an entertaining, illuminating summary of SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Technical Papers in one exciting, fun-filled hour! Authors are allowed a little less than a minute to wow the crowd with their results and entice attendees to hear their complete paper presentations later in the week. 

 What the official description should really say is:

We are smart – you are not.  Get over it.

This was not your typical gathering of wily-old geezer scientists in smocks and meerschaum pipes, ruefully rubbing their beards while thoughtfully using 10 sentences to explain things where one sentence would completely suffice. This tech paper presentation, for the most part, was a gathering of kids (I learned this form of categorization from my dad, who at age 90 would call 80 year olds “Junior”), certainly few older than I, all dedicated academics, researchers, scientists and scholars, doing research in areas of computer graphics and visualization I can’t even pronounce, let alone understand.

There was no way I could comprehend anything being said.  And I was OK with that.

Paperman Producer Kristina Reed and Director John Kahrs.

By Haley Hughes

Premiering at The Los Angeles Film Festival last Sunday June 17^th, Disney’s Paperman, directed by John Kahrs and produced by Kristina Reed, is a very sweet short  film that embodies Disney’s optimism and romanticism.

Animation students in formation in front of giant figure from their new animated feature (photo: Bill Dennis)

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.