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.

written by Joe Strike

Whoops, my bad: what I called Red Stick’s ‘Best of the Fest’ award yesterday is actually their “Golden Baton” prize, and I saw all three films last night. In addition to the music video Lilac Wine, the two other contenders were a Hitchcockian spy spoof (Pigeon: Impossible) and the student effort Blackface, a mystical jungle tale.

While the creators of the first two films (Chris O’Neill and Lucas Martell, respectively) were present, Blackface was represented by Pascal Drzazga (honest to God – he wrote it down so I wouldn’t get it wrong), an instructor from the ESMA (Ecole Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) animation school in Montpelier France where the film was made.

Stephen Beck (interim director, LSU Center for

computation & Technology) (l) and John Hays (animation

producer, Howl).

written by Joe Strike

I arrive at Baton Rouge’s Belle Hotel, which until April was the Sheraton Baton Rouge. (BR from here on, saves space.) The hotel’s terrible online reviews don’t seem to apply, as the place is actually quite nice. (Wish the internet service was a little more steady, but I’m online now – for the moment…)

Evening comes and Stephen Beck, the current director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Computation and Technology (the Festival’s host) picks me up. We’re heading for the Rave Theater a ways down from BR’s Shaw Center for the Arts, where the Festival is based. Rave? I’m expecting a spontaneous dance party in some empty warehouse, but the Rave is a classy 15-screen multiplex, and they’re about to show Tangled to various invited guests and schoolkids.

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.”)

Hans Rijpkema

Friday is field trip day at the Red Stick Festival – It seems as if half of Baton Rouge’s school population has been bussed in to take part in the festivities. I share an elevator With Walt Santucci of Duck Studios, on his way to lead an all-day animation workshop with the local school kids. I bump into him again at days’ end; his group produced some 9 anti-global warming PSA’s, with some of the best work done, he says, by kids with no previous animation experience. If you teach them too much at once they start worrying if they’re doing it right or not…

Red Stick brings animation vets to Baton Rouge - (l-r) Scott Johnston, Stuart Sumida, Doeri Welch-Greiner and Rachelle Lewis.

Day 2 of Red Stick, and the multiple events begin. Oh for the power of Dr. Manhattan to split myself up into several Joes so as to cover everything, but all I can manage is to run to and fro, capturing a taste of this and that.

In an upstairs classroom at the Shaw Center Chris Williams and Dougy Pincott are handing out modeling clay to middle school students who are about to learn the rudiments of stop motion animation. Chris and Dougy are visitors from Animex, Red Stick’s partner festival in Middlesbrough England. “We’re similar towns,” Dougy explains, “we’re both post-industrial and regenerating ourselves” through a focus on digital technology and animation. He adds that their town also features a bridge running across a major river, like the one carry I-10 across the Mississippi just south of the Shaw Center.

Zap Squad in pitch contest.

Red Stick began today for real, sort of. An abbreviated session wrapped up around 4, in time for people to go out and enjoy the warm Louisiana sun – which they needed to do after spending the past several hours in the sub-zero temperatures of the Shaw Center’s Manship Theatre. (Don’t they know this is Earth Day, you’re supposed to cut back on the AC and all that?)

First session was dedicated to ‘New Business Models,’ which are actually combinations of old business models and guess what, the internet. Animation distributors and networks are on the lookout for “content that people are already connecting with,” according to panelist Leah Hoyer of the Disney Channel, adding that videos that spread virally (what they used to call ‘word of mouth’ before there was an internet) turn the internet into an ad-hoc focus group; if a comedy or animated video gets 500,000 hits in a few days, a major distributor can safely assume a lot more of that demographic will be interested in seeing the video too. Phrases like ‘branded entertainment,’ ‘monetize on-line content,’ ‘user-generated content’ and ‘DRM’ [digital rights management] were bandied about by all present. The takeaways: high-definition content is in demand – and practice your pitch on your friends before you go into a for-real meeting.

Comet Ent.'s Santa vs. Claus

You can (almost) always tell an animator by their t-shirt, so I figured the young lady in the Supergirl tee waiting for the hotel shuttle at the Baton Rouge airport had to be in town, like me, for the Red Stick festival. The Supergirl fan turned out to be Carmen Llanos from Comet Entertainment, soon joined by her partner Raquel Benitez in a Chinese dragon tee. (Me, I’m wearing my Comic Book Legal Defense Fund shirt with the tough, healthily-chested cat babe pointing her gun right atcha and politely inquiring “who you tellin’ to shut up!?!”) Last year Carmen and Raquel were here with their Santa vs. Claus feature, the screening of which I missed due to an early departure. This year I’m staying to the very end, which means I’ll get to see their new one, Around the World for Free, which they tell me started as a TV pilot, became a feature and will spin itself off into a TV series after all.

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.