When is it time to mourn the death of your career?  You’ve been dragging around your tired job like a mourner wears a black arm band only to realize it’s time to mourn the loss and move on.  You can’t keep wishing it wasn’t so.  Living in a state of denial about the death of your career is not going to help you move forward and join the ranks of the gainfully living and employed.

Before you turn into a cast member from “The Walking Dead” know that you can manage the loss of your career and let it RIP.

Rise of the Guardians is a major box office disaster for DreamWorks Animation.  How on earth could something with so many “right” elements go so “wrong”?  Ed Hooks does a post-mortem.

This Disney Animation Studio flick came and went in a heartbeat despite being overseen by John Lasseter.  The published production budget was US$165 million, which means the real cost was close to US$200 million.  What the studio got for that investment was the sharpest CG animation in years from Disney and 188 merchandising opportunities.  The animation is brilliant, and the animators that did it deserve more applause than they probably received.  It's not their fault the movie is mediocre. 188 characters 'with names" in a single movie is bound to come up short because the audience can't keep up with them all. Neither Star Wars nor Tora! Tora! Tora! had so many characters.   Let's put aside the discussion about whether or not Wreck-It-Ralph is a variation on Toy Story, which I think it surely is.  The plot involves what happens when the character Wreck-It-Ralph decides he is tired of being the villain.  He goes on a game-jumping quest to be a hero, finally discovering that ("surprise!") one is never a villain in one's own life.  "To thine own self be true."  Ralph's journey includes plenty of maniacle careening around accompanied by loud video game noises.  If empathy was evoked for any character, the moment escaped me.  In other words, Wreck-It-Ralph is a concept in search of a worthwhile story.

I wanted to pass along this notice from Women in Animation's LA Chapter, announcing a fundraising effort to support Rusy Mills, Exec VP at Studio Kinate, animation teacher as well as award winning director/producer for Animaniacs/Pinky & the Brain, who is fighting a difficult battle with colon cancer.  We are all saddened to hear of his illness and our thoughts are with him and his family at this time.

 

“Rise of the Guardians” is a great film, full of rich, colorful, and well-developed characters. Santa, or “North”, as he is called in the film, compared his personality to that of a Russian Nesting Doll. He is a tough and fierce warrior on the outside, but inside, he has a heart of childlike wonder. Bunny is calm and proud, although annoyed by North boasting how Christmas is more important than Easter. Tooth, the tooth fairy, is an energetic and excitable character, constantly hovering in the air. Sandy, the mute Guardian of Dreams is calm, but can be very fierce and strong when he has to. Finally, we have Jack Frost, a smart, mischievous, fun-loving spirit who can control the weather and snow, but has yet to learn about his purpose and responsibilities in life.

By Ellen Besen

I really thought this next piece was going to be about festival programming but fresh from CTN Expo- which wrapped on Sun Nov 18, I feel compelled to shift focus to a more pressing topic: overall spirit. By this I don’t mean so much the mood of the attendees but more the spirit in which the event was conceived and carried out by the organizers. This last factor has a defining impact on every aspect of the event including the attendees’ mood and programming as well, which is precisely why it is the more pressing issue.

This kind of spirit can be an elusive subject- one that doesn’t really show itself directly.  Instead you kind of have to look at an event sideways, to use your detective skills and also keep in mind what other choices could have been made to suss out the organizers intentions.

Last month, the whole team at Resnick Interactive ventured over to the studio for a Motion Capture (MOCAP) test for a video game we’ll be working with in the near future. With the help of the always charming JB Blanc, we all had a great day in the studio filled with new technology and lots of eyeliner. Eyeliner? Yep, eyeliner. The MOCAP camera uses dots (in this case, provided by liquid eyeliner) to pick up on and track facial movements. Phillip from MOCAP Design was the lucky gentleman that got to dot eyeliner all over JB’s face. For those of us not getting outfitted with little black dots across our faces, the entire process was pretty hilarious.

By Tim Kridel

Android has a bigger market share than iOS, so a bigger pool of potential users should mean that Android apps drive more revenue, right? Not necessarily. For example, at the LeWeb conference earlier this year, Evernote CEO Phil Libin said that his app’s average revenue per user (ARPU) for Android is $1.06 versus $1.79 for the iPhone and $2.01 for BlackBerry. Its iPad ARPU, meanwhile, is $2.18.

Why such big differences by OS and form factor? To find out, we asked Ken Gullicksen, Evernote’s vice president of corporate development. One takeaway echoes our Q&A with FourBros Studios earlier this year regarding Windows Phone: When developers fixate on OS market shares, they risk overlooking nuances that point to revenue opportunities.

We all like to be right.  Some like it for the sake of being right as others like to just make a point.  When you are on a job interview or perhaps when you are presenting to a client, you may not always see eye to eye. It’s okay to disagree because guess what, despite what you may have heard, the client isn’t ALWAYS right.  It may be hard to put yourself in a position where you have to argue your case, especially if you are on a job interview, but knowing where you stand and what you stand for depends upon how secure you are in your beliefs.  It might be nice to placate your client but in some cases, realizing you know best and following your instincts may be your best defense.

 

 

 

 

Much has been written about the subject of BE-DO-HAVE in the self-help arena. But applying it to screenwriting can be very helpful as well.