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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.9 - DECEMBER 2000
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Support Ottawa! Dear friends, We are facing continual economic pressures in organizing the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Despite our obvious importance within the animation community and our role as the most prestigious and influential animation festival on the North American continent we are continually forced to deal with very low support from our local, provincial and federal levels of government. Our student festival, SAFO, has been run almost entirely without government support and Ottawa '00, for all of its success, faces a modest financial challenge. As such, we are asking influential members of the animation community like yourselves (animators, teachers, producers, recruiters, executives) to take a few minutes and write a letter of support on behalf of the Ottawa Festival. It can be addressed, "To whom it may concern," and we suggest that it mention our industrial and cultural contributions and effectiveness and can address both the OIAF and SAFO. I thank you all in advance for your support and if you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at your desire. Sincerely, The Animatics History? First let me say that I enjoyed Mike Wolf's article, "In the Spotlight: Creating Prime Time Animation" (Wolf, 2.12), on how primetime television animation works. I am glad that he has documented how differently this form of animation production is handled vs. the traditional Saturday morning and feature systems. I worked two seasons on King Of The Hill and it took me awhile to get used to this writer driven, live-action like format, but we, and The Simpsons crew, produced some of the funniest sit-coms on TV. However, I would like to point out an inaccuracy which may or may not have been a typo. In the article it appears that Mike is crediting the invention of the animatic to The Simpsons' production, which just is not the case. When I was a student at the UCLA Animation Workshop in the mid-1980s we were doing animatics, which we also referred to as Leica reels, of our storyboards to try to work out our timing. After that, I worked in the interactive animation world where we created animatics of our boards for every program. Finally, Disney has been using them for many, many years, albeit on film where as each scene completes animation it is dropped into the animatic. By the time I went over to King Of The Hill, the animatic was something I was already familiar with. The Simpsons and KOTH have made successful use of this production process and I cannot imagine creating a show without this step, but the history of the animatic predates these programs. Regardless of this inaccuracy I intend to share this informative article with our students. Thank you. Dug Ward Really...Is This Necessary? I was really excited to see the article, "Last Exit on St. Laurent Street" (Robinson, 5.08), about Ryan Larkin in Animation World magazine. However, after reading it, I am extremely disappointed. The writing of Chris Robinson leaves much to be desired. It is decidedly illiterate, and his opinions do not have a place in this type of article -- a lesson most of us learned in English 101. I expected better things from a person of Mr. Robinson's stature in the Canadian film community. If he "likes writing better than cartoons," why is he immersing himself in the world of that medium? I would love to see more articles of this kind, but written in a professional manner. Is profanity necessary in the title of an article presented in Animation World? I'm not offended easily, I just don't think there was a place for it. As a professional storyboard artist and animator, I look to awn.com daily for news, career info and discussion, as do most of my friends and co-workers. I would like to think it is being presented by professional, respectful people as well. I appreciate your attention. Respectfully,
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