The inspirational Sayama Forest in Tokyo needs your help.

If you haven't heard about the amazing Totoro Forest Project fund-raising exhibition/auction, which will be held Sept. 6^th at Pixar, then you are missing out on some fabulous artwork being sold for a great cause. Spearheaded by Pixar art director Dice Tsutsumi, the event features artwork from some the top animators and illustrators working today. The proceeds will go to helping preserve the Sayama Forest, an 8750-acres urban forest in Tokyo. The woods inspired Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro and the Totoro no Furusato Fund has been the Oscar-winner's most cherished charity for years.

Bob Peterson (Co-Director UP), Peter Sohn and Kevin Reher (Director and Producer from Partly Cloudy)

Sorry for writing so late. But yesterday evening I suffered from severe animation illness, information overload and heavy small talk. After seeing the commissioned film program filled with commercials and music videos up to the brink – sitting next to an equally tired Ron Diamond – I hardly reached my apartment and went into dreamland seconds later.

For everyone used to the grandeur and immense scale of the U.S. SIGGRAPH, it is important to explain that the inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore is planned to be much smaller. ACM has taken a big risk in bringing the conference abroad, no one could be certain if it would work. With the last conference day still ahead of us I would already like to call the show a success. From what I see and hear, everybody seems happy at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore. The exhibition floor is busy; the quality of talks is as high as we are used to, the Electronic Theater has been praised for its quality selection, and whether speaking with SIGGRAPH Committee members or attendees, everyone notes the intimate feeling, “stars” of the community become more approachable and there is a family flair in the air.

Provocative Ottawa 09 poster.

OIAF 2009 got off to a brisk start in equally brisk Ottawa weather of just 5°C or 41°F.

Still, it was toasty inside the Chateau Laurier hotel, where the 6^th annual Television Animation Conference (TAC) got underway. Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien made opening remarks at the TAC breakfast, welcoming delegates to the sold-out conference and remarking on the growth of the animation industry and inviting more animation companies to set up shop here.

TAC’s Day 1 keynote speaker, Josh Selig, founder and president of NYC-based Little Airplane Productions, spoke to the capacity crowd about creating personal projects that animators “want to do and are born to do” rather than those “that networks want to buy.”

This philosophy has proved a winning one for Selig, who has created such series as The Wonder Pets! (Nick Jr.) and 3^rd & Bird (BBC and Treehouse, Canada).

During his TAC keynote, Selig screened a new Little Airplane project, Small Potatoes, which featured some very cute potatoes singing about the power of imagination. The concept was recently shopped at MIP, and Selig tells AWN, “I have a buyer for that show.”

Selig described a little of Small Potatoes animation style. “We used photo puppetry for The Wonder Pets! but we sculpted the potatoes and animated them in after effects,” he says. When creating Small Potatoes, Selig fused writing the script and writing the music, which is all recorded in-house at Little Airplane.

Diner Dash's Flo is on the go to consoles.

The first thing on today’s agenda was to head over to the W Hotel to meet with Hudson Entertainment. I got hands on with “Military Madness”, “Diner Dash”, “Water Warfare”, “Help Wanted”, and some other new titles in their portable library. All titles besides "Military Madness" are meant for anyone to play, both hardcore gamers, and families alike.

Don Greenberg. Courtesy of SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008.

The inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 was formally opened on Tuesday, Dec 11, in true Singaporean style: with festive opening speeches by the Conference Chair YT Lee and by distinguished government representatives.

Highlight of the opening ceremony was featured speaker of the day Don Greenberg, Computer Graphics Pioneer and Director of Cornell University. Coming from an architecture background and using some of the earliest computer science to generate his first visualizations, Don was basically marking out the new territory of computer graphics. Yes, they did use punch cards back then to feed XYZ coordinates into the computer! Courage to try out new approaches and techniques, and find new fields to apply this technology, were the driving factors for him and his peers back then in the early days of computer graphics. Don noted that large parts of the new computer science research in the SIGGRAPH community are focused in animation, games and entertainment. While the quality increases, research topics have narrowed down to a few fields. Don calls us to have courage not to be risk adverse and venture into new areas of research and interdisciplinary practice, citing examples of applications in medical technology, earthquake and tectonic research, to ornithology where he researched the potential existence of an extinct bird species.

David Silverman talks to a packed house at TAC.

It’s a good life when your job involves watching cartoons.

Attendees at the Day 2 Television Animation Conference (TAC) address got to watch some seriously funny cartoons. David Silverman, animation director and producer long associated with The Simpsons, let Homer talk for him through selected clips screened during his speech. And with grainy black-and-white footage showing comedic inspiration as a backdrop, Silverman went on to explain the origin of Homer’s famous “D’oh!”—culled from the exclamations of such comic greats as Oliver Hardy and the Three Stooges.

Silverman also recalled how he got involved with The Simpsons back when it was first created as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. Silverman credits his admiration for the work of Matt Groening (Life in Hell) for his decision to work on the show.

“We didn’t know if The Tracey Ullman Show would get picked up or if The Simpsons would get picked up as part of the show,” Silverman recalls. “We worked hard… all hours of the night. We were trying to please ourselves.”

Years later, that philosophy still holds as Silverman has continued work on The Simpsons show – directing 22 episodes – as well as directing The Simpsons Movie. Other credits include working with DreamWorks on The Road to El Dorado as co-director and with Pixar on Monsters Inc. as co-director.

Cloudy with the Chance of Meatballs shows more 3-D potential.

The exhibition has closed but the conference continues on this last day, with 3-D screenings (including some new Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs footage) and E-Tech still attracting lots of attention, even spread out in several rooms and isolated on the third floor. The emphasis is on interactive sensory techniques. And what's hot? "The interconnectivity between the machine and human," asserted Manabu Sakurai, Emerging Technologies chair. "If you see the gaming industry, your console is not just a game console anymore -- part of your body is the game console. And the machine understands your natural movements. And then, in an opposite way, the display, what you see is also getting closer to humans. The key word is 3-D."

The Simpsons' David Silverman.Only at OIAF can you get a chance to talk about the crazy Balloon Boy escapade with veteran Simpsons director David Silverman, and get to compare that incident with a Simpsons episode where prankster Bart pretends to be little Timmy, a boy who has fallen down a well. Happily, like Bart/Timmy, Balloon Boy was safe and sound the whole time.

Silverman talks about his work on The Simpsons – both he TV series and movie – with great affection and enthusiasm. “The Simpsons challenges the intellect and stimulates the intellect,” he says. This, despite the fact that the show relies on what he calls a “double act” routine – with one big idiot leading a lesser idiot.

When asked if another Simpsons feature is in the offing, Silverman replies, “I’m sure in future there will be. Right now, we’re too busy on the show.”

Silverman advises that The Simpsons series is being adjusted for HD format. “Backgrounds had to be redesigned and updated, and that involves a lot of fine line work,” Silverman says.

In 2000, Silverman departed Simpsons territory and co-directed Dreamworks’ The Road to El Dorado and in 2001, he co-directed Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. “I had been working on The Simpsons for 10 years, and I thought, ‘This can’t last forever’,” Silverman recalls. As it turned out, after those gigs, Silverman returned to The Simpsons’ comfortable couch for another extended run.

Silhouettes of Jazz

Evening Theater’s Jury Chair’s Reel included the following shorts. Silhouettes of Jazz Dominik Kaser Martin-Sebastian Senn, Mario Deuss ETH Zurich Switzerland The first video shown was Silhouettes of Jazz. Jazz music plays as the camera takes you though a house where each room has a different 3D objects that look like a blob of plastic are turning in place. Light is casted on them to form shadows on the wall. These shadows turn out to be sculptures that highlight five milestones in the history of jazz. The music changes in each room. The first room represents field workers, the second is instruments that also turn into someone playing them, depending on how the light shines on it. The next is a dancing couple. Then a spade sculpture is hanging from the ceiling. The last objects were music notes. This video captured the jazz is a new light. The music chosen takes you through out different jazz eras.