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.

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.