Robot Chicken panel treats fans to talent and sneak peeks.

When the New York Comic Con premiered four years ago, its exhibit area was a relatively small but instantly overcrowded portion of the Javits Convention Center’s basement space. This year’s exhibitors filled the high-ceilinged main floor, a football-field sized area where you could score anything one’s geekish heart desired while dodging the multitude of Rorschachs prowling the convention.

Cartoon Network’s [adult swim] panels are usually as off-the-wall as the shows themselves, and this year was no exception. CN exec Keith Crofford, the hour’s default grown-up introduced a panel that included Seth Green, Brecken Meyer, Kevin Shinick, Matt Senreich and Geoff Johns. Jokes, ad-libs and non-sequiturs flew fast and furious, as the panel more or less explained the creative process that goes into scripting the free-form show, with the panel at one point riffing for close to ten minutes off a single audience question.

I was one of the lucky presenters at Imagina 09.

Imagina, a longstanding computer graphics conference in Europe, has transformed itself in 2009 to cater more toward the industrial and building industries, with the prior media and entertainment scope being served by one of several sub-conference tracks. The tracks in 2009 include Architecture & Urbanism, Driving Simulation, Landscape and Territory, and Media and Entertainment. Addressing this shift, the Media and Entertainment track included speakers and panels intended to address commonalities and differences between architectural visualization and feature film visual effects work.

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.

Tired Sundancers

If I haven’t been returning calls or emails over the last few days you will soon know why. As the festival is winding down my wife and I are on a mission to pack in as much as we can. I have a short film in the festival this year and feel like we need to give it our all (can always sleep when we get home). It's time to take off the gloves switch off the phones and hit the streets! Here is a rundown of our last gasp trying to soak it all up. If you are in a rush power scroll / skim through this info and use the ratings system to stop as you like.

sex, lies, and videotape director and cast celebrate the 20th anniversary of their landmark indie feature.

I am sitting in the filmmakers lounge at Sundance headquarters watching the historic inauguration of Barack Obama. I am amongst a crowd of filmmakers, and there is a clear sense of hope and relief that this day has arrived. Cheers and boos accompany politicians as they show on TV (take a wild guess who gets the boos). It’s an event that rightfully will overshadow the Sundance film festival but fitting when thinking about the 20th anniversary screening yesterday of sex, lies and videotape, by Steven Soderbergh, as a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Sundance.

Cam gets his chance to meet Sundance Buddha Robert Redford

I just got back from the Directors brunch at the Sundance institute approximately one hour out of Park City Utah. I was one of the lucky, being a director/animator for a short in this year's festival called The Real Place, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

This brunch is for many one of the highlights of the festival and though we went last year it was equally exceptional and inspiring. It is a wonderful way to get to know some of the best filmmakers in the world and hear what is on peoples mind.

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.

Genzano di Roma from across the lake. All images courtesy of Heather Kenyon.

What is it about Italians? Give any of them a microphone and invite them to speak and they immediately turn into the best public speakers known to man. Joking, calling out to the audience, laughing, and then delivering interesting insight and banter. This is I Castelli Animati. Led by unfazable festival director, Luca Raffaelli, the festival bounced along for four days, from November 26 – 30, 2008 in Genzano di Roma, a little hill town north of Rome located around sparkling blue lakes.

Eggy Robo was a favorite at the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. All images courtesy of SIGGRAPH Asia 2008.

I spoke with the Computer Animation Festival (CAF) Chair Jinny Choo about her ideas and vision for CAF. Being the curator and manager of SICAF Seoul, Jinny’s aim was to bring a similar festival feeling to SIGGRAPH Asia and sees it as an opportunity to taste other styles in a global festival. So for the animation fan there were a plethora of programs to choose from. The Electronic Theater, screening the best of the best, was, as usual, the main event, with additional submissions selected for the Animation Theatre I and II and the Special Programme I and II. An addition was the Invited Screenings, showing previous Best of SIGGRAPH Award Winners; Gobelins, K’ARTS and Supinfocom selections; an Australian and India Focus and a Studio AKA Special; complemented by Festival Talks and Panels on Productions.

Rob Cook.

Rob Cook’s featured speaker keynote took us on a journey behind the scenes of a Pixar production. Interestingly, Rob is the Vice President of Advanced Technology at Pixar Animation Studios, yet he hardly spoke about technology. He talked about story, story, story, and art. It might just be that he is so humble to rather highlight other folk’s contributions to Pixar’s final products, but it surely is connected with Pixar’s secret recipe to success – their stories.