We are excited to announce the date for FMX 2012, the 17th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Transmedia: May 8-11, 2012.

In Ukrainian, KROK means “step”, but to animators, KROK means watching animation, making music, dancing and meeting friends, both old and new. For me KROK is summer camp for animators and the best ten days of my life every year.

From December 3-10, film fans flock to Leuven. For the 17th year straight, the International Short Film Festival Leuven offers a broad and very colorful selection of the best short film has to offer. Expect hundreds of new shorts, animation films, videos, documentaries and innovative cross-overs, selected out of thousands of international entries. The festival is a round-up of a great year in cinema, but also looks at the future. Besides being a platform for the short film medium, it also acts as a major talent hunt, where tomorrow’s filmmakers are able to present their first professional productions.

Festival Highlights

EUROPE IN SHORTS: Sundance, Clermont Ferrand, Regensburg, Hamburg, Locarno… our festival team travelled all over the world in search of the very best European short films. Once home, we go through over 2000 entries and select only forty, the cream of the crop of European shorts. The European competition shows films from over 17 countries.  In the non-competitive programmes dozens of new European shorts will be screened, in sections as "The Labo", "Short Films for Children", "Animation Nations" and "Finest Irish Shorts".MILESTONES IN SHORT FILM HISTORY: Milestones in Short Film History” is a collection of the most influential short films made throughout a century of cinematic history. It entails thirty movies produced between 1900 en 2000 that are typical of certain movements and evolutions in movie history or that introduced new techniques, procedures, styles, genres or directors. Together with the programma, the ISFFL presents a publication with the same title (Dutch-English) in witch all films are discussed.SHORT FILM COMPETITION:The ISFFL organises a Flemish and European Short Film Competition in which audience awards and jury awards are being granted. Besides the ISFFL awards the Flanders Audiovisual Fund grants 5 “Wildcards” for new Flemish film talent. The value of the prizes reaches almost 300.000 euro. The winners are announced at the award ceremony, on the last day of the festival, December 10thINDUSTRY ACTIVITIES: Each year, the International Short Film Festival welcomes countless young filmmakers and film professionals from all over the world. This edition boasts quite a few professional activities this year: an info session about Crowdfunding (organised by MEDIA Desk Flanders and SACD), a 2-day seminar about the Short Film in Flanders, a lecture by the Danish-American short film professor Richard Raskin “Story Design in Short fiction Film” and many more.

Joel and Alan sit down with the very Linda Beck, newly inaugurated ASIFA East President, Animator, Producer, Actress, and Former Temp, to talk about those roles and birthing a human. Plus a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, which, if you are reading this online, trumps it's impact: the new Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum website revealed at long last!

ANIMATION VOLDA is a unique festival run by animation students at Volda University College in Norway. Volda is a town of roughly 7,000 people of which 3,000 are students and the festival is primarily for students and festival guests.

Call of Duty is much more than a video game; it’s a cultural phenomenon. Nowhere was that more evident than at Raleigh Studios in Playa Vista, Calif., where Activision threw a shindig unlike anything ever done in the game industry. For three days in early September, Call of Duty invaded the 12-acre compound Howard Hughes created, the Spruce Goose. Unlike the world’s largest plane, which failed miserably in flight, Call of Duty has soared to new heights with each successive game.

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.

Coming November 18-20, 2011 to Burbank, California, CTN brings you a variety of business, creative, technical and inspirational presenters from various walks of life to reaffirm that CTN-X as that jewel in the crown, that "one of a kind" show where we get to rise out of the production trenches for 3 whole days to experience visual stimulation, fantastic connections and powerful inspiration.

Wayne Stables, visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital for Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin has chosen to give the world’s first presentation of that studio’s work on the film at the VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy.

The festival brings together everything uniquely interesting about the animation industry. Art, commerce, tattoos, the best and worst of kids cartoons, unintelligible films from Asia, alcohol, great student films and big studios walking hand in hand with little studios, agreeing they'll refrain from poaching talent except at the parties. The Ottawa festival brings together big and small, have and have not, legend and newbie together in a unique way - cozy, intimate, unpretentious, inviting.