Starting on Sept. 16, the site Flipnote Hatena (http://flipnote.hatena.com/) will feature shorts made by Aardman Animations using Flipnote Studio, the free animation tool available for DSi.

Festival date: 9th – 11th April 2010
Submission deadline: 15th January 2010 (postal stamp)

In order to participate, films must be produced after 1st January 2008 and made by children or youth.

Festival has no entry fee.
Films must be sent in DVD - PAL format.
The number of submitted films is not limited.
Every film has to be on a separate DVD.

Festival has three categories:
a)MINI (children under 10 years)
b)MIDI (children from 11 – 14 years)
c)MAXI (youth from 15 – 18 years )

Festival will prize five awards per category – one first prize and four equal second prizes.

Web-site: http://vanima.hr/vafi/eng/index.html

AWN's Editor in Chief Bill Desowitz walks us through Day 5 of his SIGGRAPH 09 adventure.The key word is 3-D

Press reports have attendance at about 10,000, which is extremely low, of course. But, as I previously noted, it's resulted in a very appropriate quaintness. You can tell that the people who have come here are very passionate.

A look at some of the short films from the Evening Theater’s Festival Chair’s Reel.

A breakdown of the Evening Theater’s Jury Chair’s Reel, which included the following shorts.

Naturally Autodesk had some big announcements, including 2010 versions of Maya, MotionBuilder and Mudbox and along with new suites for digital entertainment creation and new education initiatives.

Day 2 of the animation competition kicked off at 9am with a loud drumbeat and Afro Brazilian performers. The sound drew a large crowd in to watch the performances. The animation teams had worked through the night on their films so the very lively dancers lent some much needed energy to the competitors.

Monday nights' Evening Theater began with the introduction of host Miles Perkins, senior staff at Industrial Light and Magic. He kicked off the award ceremony by paving the way for Scott Farrar, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic.

SIGGRAPH's Fjorg! competition, created by Patricia Beckmann as an Iron Animator event challenges the competitors to create a short film (15-45 seconds) from concept to finish in the short time span of thirty-two hours. To make the task more demanding, distractions are scheduled throughout the day to entice them away from the film making process.