Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation have bought the rights to the series pilot of SICKCOM from comic book artist Robert Steven Rhine (MY BRAIN ESCAPES ME, CHICKEN SOUP FOR SATAN) and his partner, animator Frank Forte (LI'L PIMP movie, THE VAMPIRE VERSES, THE CLETUS AND FLOYD SHOW).

ZODIAC MEDIA founder/president H. Paul Gill died suddenly of heart failure while playig basketball on June 25, 2003 at the age of 28 in Toronto, Canada.

Matt Jones, in-house director for Uli Meyer Animation in London, recently completed a new promo, CLAPPING SONG, for Nickelodeon UK. Animated in Flash, it promotes the Nick Junior shows DORA THE EXPLORER, THE HOOBS, LITTLE BILL, BLUE'S CLUES and YOU DO TOO.

Jones designed all the new characters and storyboarded the promo, working with Nick Jr. producer Maria Timotheou, in just under six weeks. The colorful & simple style is intended to appeal to kids under five years old. Flash animation was produced by Jon Jones and Jason Kotey.

Flash specialty studio ANIMAX is producing a 35mm-animated short film for Jellyman Prods., CATCHING KRINGLE, in a mix of 2D techniques. ANIMAX is using Flash, USAnimation and traditional hand animation for the holiday themed short, featuring the voices of Danny De Vito and John Rhy-Davies, with a cameo by Larry King. The film will be ready to exhibit at film and animation festivals in time for the holiday season.

Macromedia has launched Macromedia Authorware 7, the dedicated solution for creating highly interactive rich media e-learning content. Macromedia Authorware 7 enables e-learning developers to import Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, play back content on Mac OS X, use industry standard JavaScript scripting and easily integrate content with learning management systems. Macromedia Authorware 7 is available for immediate download from the Macromedia Online Store at www.macromedia.com/go/buyaw7/.

Atomic Cartoons has retooled its original all Flash Website, www.atomiccartoons.com. "We figured it was time to update our already extremely successful Website, so we went for a total redo. I think it is a cleaner, easier to navigate site now," said Atomic ceo Trevor Bentley.

Utah-based Strata once again makes it easier for designers, illustrators and animators to create high quality content with Strata 3Dpro3.8, which runs on Windows 98, Me and XP as well as Apple's OSX.

New features include:
_ Photon light refraction and reflection
_ Stochastic sampling for enhanced realism in Raydiosity?
_ Toon rendering for quick, high quality cartoon images
_ Enhanced deform for modeling and animation effects
_ Jiggle enhancements for more realistic motion
_ Power user features for streamlined workflow

Video Symphony, one of Hollywood's leading TV, film and DVD education centers, has been awarded a two-year, $1.5 million contract by California's Employment Training Panel (ETP) to retrain professionals employed by the state's digital media production companies.

ETP funds are awarded to a select group of training centers, such as Video Symphony, to help keep California's digital technology companies competitive, and to diminish export of production work to other states and nations.

FINDING NEMO, the computer-animated underwater comedy/adventure from Disney/Pixar, exceeded all expectations with a record-breaking bow of $70.3M last weekend. That's the best opening ever for an animated feature, topping the $62.6M grabbed by MONSTERS, INC., the fourth Pixar/Disney movie from 2001. It's also the best three-day gross for any Buena Vista feature, live action or animated.

Bent Image Lab has just finished production on the first Reese's Pieces ad in more than two decades for Hershey's and agency partner DDB New York. For the CENTER OF ATTENTION CAMPAIGN, it was Bent Image's job to bring to life an action-packed world where the center of the frame always contains a Reese's Pieces candy as the focal point. The style has been done in live action before where camera harnesses lock the person attached to camera in the center of the frame like in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, but this is the first time it's been done in mixed-media or 3D stop-motion animation.

The Ink Tank has wrapped on a new stylized documentary for PBS entitled FASHIONATION. The 30-minute program takes a tour of the high fashion world using animation, archival material, runway footage and original interviews with curators and designers Karl Lagerfeld, Sonia Rykiel and Christian Lacroix.

The Comedy Central test of showing via a series of interstitial spots pulled from the HOUSE ARREST pilot worked as the cablenet has given the show a greenlight for 13 half-hours to premiere in 2004. The new animated show, from comic Denis Leary and Jim Serpico's Apostle studio, started airing as spots at 9:58 pm on May 1, 2003.

Wildform, creators of video and animation software, have released Wild fx 3.0, a major upgrade to its Flash text animation software, previously sold under the name SWfX. The new version has more than 100 new effects, including 45 that are infinitely customizable. These custom effects can also be used as templates to create new effects, which can be saved and added to the Wild fx library. All the effects can be moved, deleted and organized in a drag and drop folder tree.

New York City-based Animation Collective, Inc., has appointed Aundrea DeFur to the newly created position of head of production. She will oversee the studio's production slate and manage client relationships.

Call for Entries

ANIMATED SHORTS for SDAFF2003

(San Diego Asian Film Festival 2003)

The 4th Bitfilm Festival for Digital Film and New Media is looking for entries for the event that will take place in Hamburg, Germany on September 19-26, 2003. Prize money totaling 45,000 Euros will be awarded in five categories:
Digital Features
Films that run 90 minutes, which use 3D animation and digital effects as an artistic means.
Bit Shorts
Short films, music videos and ads which use 3D animation and digital effects as an artistic means.
Flash
Linear films and interactive works made with Macromedia Flash.
Machinima

COO Joan Vogelesang has been appointed president of Toon Boom Technologies Inc., replacing Jacques Bilodeau who has left the company. She now takes complete charge of the company's direction and will continue to spearhead sales, marketing and operations, according to Hubert Manseau, chairman of board. Regarding Bilodeu's departure, Manseau said, "The Board of Directors would like to thank Mr. Bilodeau for his past contributions at Toon Boom Technologies and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors."

Chel White, Ray Di Carlo and David Daniels have combined strengths to form an artist-driven studio Bent Image Lab, in Portland, Oregon. "Our mission is to generate the future in 'mixed media/animation/live-action'," said partner/executive producer Di Carlo. "We are artists doing business, not businessmen trying to make art." Di Carlo however, has a successful business background and will operate Bent under a highly unique business model.

Ex’pression Center for New Media has named one of its state-of-the-art digital media labs in honor of late animation legend Chuck Jones. The Chuck Jones Lab in Emeryville, California will be used by Ex’pression Digital Visual Media students to create 3D animation and modeling using Maya, After Effects, Flash, Vicon Workstation and Kaydara FiLMBOX software, plus Dell precision workstations with 2.2GHz processors and Trinitron monitors.

Nominees for the 1st Annual International 3D Awards have been announced and Jason Schleifer, animation lead at Weta Digital (LORD OF THE RINGS), will host the Short Films category at the ceremony to be held in the evening, May 9, 2003 at the 3D Festival 2003 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Schleifer also chaired and oversaw the judging process for the Short Films category with an international panel of jury members from the 3D industry. The short film nominees are:
- SHOW & TELL, Kapow Pictures, Australia
- THE CHUBBCHUBBS, Sony Pictures Imageworks, USA