Origins returns BioWare to its roots.

There’s no better way to start a day off, then with a panel of well-known press members presenting with attitude! My first stop was “Burned by Friendly Fire: Game Critics Rant.” The ideas represented by the press members in attendance were both refreshing and thoughtful. N’Gai Croal, formerly of Newsweek, opened up with a presentation on the term “Hardcore Gamer” and noted that we had to stop using it and other words like “Casual” to describe styles of play. The reason being, the game industry’s audience adapts to changes in the industry rapidly, and we as developers, journalists, and consultants need to do the same.

Prize to be handed out Sunday night to the Short Film Least Deserving of the Finances Wasted On Its Production. This year there are many films in contention.

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By Dan Sarto

Take a quick glance at some of the people I met up with yesterday while stumbling around the annual Animator's Picnic and later, while trying to get warm at the Arts Court cafe and Aniboutique.  Old friends, new friends, a pretty uninspired procession of eviscerated gourds. Oh, and have I told you, it's cold here? Aye?

Festival Co-ordinators Doris Clevens and Phillipe Moins.

By Nancy Phelps

For me the New Year really starts when I go to ANIMA Brussels each year in the beautiful, historic Flagey.  For ten days it becomes the center of the animation world.

The This is Belgium programs are always a highlight for me since they are a chance to see the newest works from of the Walloon and Flemish regions of the country I live in.  I had been curious to see Natasha, the new film by Russian born Roman Klochkov who has lived in Gent since he was seventeen.  Roman’s multi-award winning film The Administrators is a humorous, but all too true tale of government  bureaucracy run wild.  Natasha takes us into the world of immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world.

Tasty, fatty, sticky sweet char siu, or BBQ roast pork. I can't describe how perfect this moment was nor how fantastic it tasted.

By Dan Sarto

18 hours in planes, 8 hours in airports, 2 hours in shuttles, all in the quest for a chance to meet some of Asia’s brightest computer graphic technologists and to once again eat roast pork overlooking the majestic Hong Kong harbor.  A worthy goal, I must say.  My trip from Los Angeles was excruciatingly long and uncomfortable.  My bag of honey roasted peanuts had to go through x-ray twice.  For 15 panicked seconds I thought I lost my wedding ring.  The kid sitting next to me on the flight from Japan knocked his tea all over my lap. The hour I spent in Hong Kong customs was made slightly more bearable by the entertaining antics of a big huge German man who screamed at the top of his lungs for 30 straight minutes, swearing non-stop at the phalanx of pint-sized policemen who tried in vain to calm him down.  They finally handcuffed him and tried to sit him down quietly on a bench, but he would have none of that, continuing to yell four-letter invectives at everyone in range.  I’m not sure if he was drunk or just off his meds but his rage enveloped the entire hall.  I fully expected him to start swatting around cops like some mythical beast from a Harryhausen film; he was so much bigger than the assembled authorities and so completely crazed. Guess he didn’t like the food on United either.

I finally made it to the hotel at 2 am, only to find that I had no room reservation and the hotel was full.  Sweet.  Channeling my inner Adam from Mythbusters, I told the young man behind the desk “I reject your reality and substitute my own. Indeed you do have a room in this hotel for me so why don’t you call whom you need to call, confer a bit, type something into your computer and then hand me my key.”   Needless to say, “a bit” became 30 minutes but he did eventually hand me a key and off I went to sleep.

ILM VFX Supervisor Scott Farrar will present for Transformers: The Dark of the Moon.

Weta Digital’s Wayne Stables, Digital Domain’s Eric Nash, Pixar's Sharon Calahan, ILM's Scott Farrar, ILM's Roger Guyett, DNeg's Gavin Graham and PDI Founder Glenn Entis are some of the speakers slated to present next week at VIEW, Italy's largest computer graphics conference.

The Princess and the Frog to play a key role at Red Stick in April.

Back in the pre-digital, pre-xerographic days of Disney animation, the Ink and Paint department was responsible for tracing the animators’ pencil drawings onto acetate cels and filling those transparent images with color. Technological advances rendered hand inking and painting a thing of the past, but the name lived on in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit as the Ink and Paint Club, an after-hours honky-tonk where the ‘toons’ entertained Hollywood bigwigs.

Chris O'Neill - winner of the Festival's Golden Baton Award (l-r), Stephen Beck, Stacey Simmons (director, Red Stick Animation Festival)

Saturday morning. Sitting in P.J.’s, the coffee shop around the corner from the Shaw Center. Except for a handful of sessions today, Red Stick ended Friday night with the awarding of the Golden Baton. The winner (of the three candidates discussed yesterday) was Chris O’Neill’s elegiac (how many times to you get a chance to use that word?) Lilac Wine. Earlier in the fest O’Neill had described his video as the remembrance of loved one who was no longer around, whether via the end of a love affair, or death.

It was an appropriate theme sadly: Red Stick’s annual Lifetime Award was a posthumous one this year, given to DreamWorks and Disney animator Pres Romanillos. Romanillos, responsible for characters like Spirit’s Little Creek, Pocahontas, and Mulan bad guy Hun Shan-Yu, fell to leukemia in July. The collective sense of grief in the room was palpable, with presenter Scott Johnston audibly tearing up when describing Romanillos’ “passion and generosity…he was in touch with something deeper than everyone sees normally.” Glen Keane appeared via video standing in front of Romanillos’ animation table. His sadness was visible too, in an extended, heartfelt (and obviously spontaneous) remembrance of the artist he had mentored, describing Romanillos’ talent and unbridled creativity. (“We had to hold back his desire to detail every drawing – it was like trying to restrain wild horses.”) Romanillos’ widow Jeanine accepted the award in his memory.

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.

Writer/director Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs talk with the press at the Sundance Film Festival.

The opening night selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, Mary and Max is a clayograph (a claymation biography hybrid) feature film from Academy Award winning writer/director Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs, featuring the voice talents of Toni Collette, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries and Eric Bana.

The prizes in waiting.

By Dan Sarto.

The closing ceremonies bring an end to another Ottawa International Animation Festival.  And while I await my connecting flight in Newark for the final leg of my journey home, I linger just a bit longer on the images in my mind of all the wonderous activities of the past week.  Though I was constantly too warm or utterly frozen and could never get comfortable wearing layers and a heavy jacket, I was able to stop griping often enough to have a thoroughly great time.  Here are some images from the closing.