Thirty-year animation veteran Ellen Besen is the new creative director of the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI) to be held May 17-20, 2007, in downtown Kalamazoo. Michigan. She will oversee the competitions, screenings, professional development and networking interaction between todays and tomorrows animators booked for the four-day festival in the southwest Michigan community.
Besen, who spent more than 10 years on the faculty of the Sheridan College School of Animation in Canada, between 1987 and 2002, has directed award-winning animated films shown around the world. In addition to her creative and teaching activities within animation, Besen has been a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio, involved in film curating for institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario and in festivals, such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) She has written articles on the role of storytelling in animation for a variety of magazines, including ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE.
Besens workshops on film analysis and storytelling first brought her to Kalamazoo in 2002 to take part in the first KAFI. The KAFIs have been sponsored by Kalamazoo Valley Community College (KVCC) and its Center for New Media.
She has served as director and head mentor of The Zachary Schwartz Institute for Animation Filmmaking, a school specializing in writing and storytelling for animation. Besen was affiliated with Sheridan in the fall of 2000 when it established the Sheridan Centre for Animation and Emerging Technologies to offer advanced technology training in animation, design, multimedia, journalism, television and film, computer-animation programs and telecommunications.
Besen is nearing completion of her first book, an examination of how people communicate with animation.
As creative director, Besen said, I will be working with the existing KAFI planning team at KVCC to develop programming, arrange for guest speakers, and set the schedule of workshops and retrospective screenings for both the KAFI Educators Conference (scheduled for Thursday of KAFI week) and the festival itself.
This year, she said, we plan to broaden our scope with even a greater variety of programming and new faces mixed in with already popular speakers from previous years, such as John Fountain (a Hollywood-based cartoonist who is a graduate of Western Michigan University).
Competition screenings sit at the heart of the festival, she said. People want to see new films and thats what we are all about. But KAFI also has the potential to be a gathering place for animators, educators, studio reps, software reps, students and the general public.
Presenters from past festivals have come from Walt Disney Prods., DreamWorks SKG, PIXAR, Sony Pictures Imageworks, the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, as well as those who have helped create the Warner Brothers stable of cartoon characters. Animators involved in such hits as THE POLAR EXPRESS, SOUTH PARK and SHREK, plus the SPIDER-MAN series have spoken at the Kalamazoo event, which has attracted entries that went on to win Academy Awards.
One of the festivals unique attractions, The Cartoon Challenge, selects 10 teams from animation programs spanning North America who engage in a 24/7 cartoon-creating competition prior to the convening of the festival. Over a four-day period, their objective is to conceive, script, design and produce up to a 30-second, animated public-service announcement on a topic chosen by the events sponsor. The winning school receives scholarship funds for animation students.
One past participant earned an internship at Nickelodeon Animation Studio in California, which led to a full-time position. Another was hired to be part of the team assigned to create SHREK 3.
The 2007 festival is being guided by an advisory board whose members come from the animation industry and from college programs. The festivals industry liaison is Kate Swanborg, a production manager at DreamWorks.
KAFI is now a biennial event, sharing the every-other-year format with the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival that brings world-famous performers to downtown Kalamazoo for two weeks in May of even-numbered years. In its off year, KAFI organizes animation workshops for K-12 students and other events designed to show the applications of this art form to business and other professions.
Information and updates about all KAFI activities and the Cartoon Challenge is available at this webpage, www.kafi.kvcc.edu or by calling Maggie Noteboom at the festival office at (269) 373-7883.
