Sprockets

It was quite a change from cold Estonia and Latvia to arrive at the sunny Rome airport. I had the honor to be invited to be a juror at the I Castelli Animati, 28 November through 2 December. This year the festival was held on the Cinecitta Campus, home to the legendary Cincecitta Studios, in honor of the 70^th anniversary of the founding of this famous studio which stands as a symbol of Italian cinema. After a month where I traveled back and forth across Europe and Nik stayed in Gent working on music we were finally reunited when my driver left me at the festival hotel.

The festival encompassed many facets of the animation world from workshops, competitions for special effects, television series and web to the International Competition where I was on the jury. There were also a multitude of special guests from all over the world. The opening evening gala served as a sampling of the diversity of the festival that awaited us. Bruno Bozzetto’s new animated theme for the festival was premiered. The Pierce Sisters, winner of the 2007 Cartoon D’ Or was followed by the first four competition films. Nik performed his score for Fetch! as Nina Paley’s animation was screened and David Silverman talked about the birth of THE SIMPSONS on the Tracey Ullman Show.

Nik and I do love Portugal - so when we were invited to participate in the FIRST INTERNATIONAL STUDENT MEETING FOR ANIMATION ARTS we jumped at the chance. I was very pleased and honored to be invited to be a part of the International Jury along with renowned Ukrainian animator Evgeniy Sivokon and Portugal’s animation treasure Sepe. Nik gave a three day workshop with music students from the school during which they composed and performed in live performance two programs of music with animation.Needless to say I recommend this festival to all students and animation schools. Your work will be given serious consideration and if selected screened in the lovely theatre on the campus and on a DVD which will be shown at other festivals. HURRY THOUGH, the DEADLINE is near.Students can enter both Monstra and First.

New developments in this controversial situation are in the bold brackets below:

Teat Beat of Sex, Signe Bauman’s widely acclaimed take on sex exclusively from a woman’s point of view, and Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People, directed by Kenneth Ti and Kin Hung have been censored by iTunes from their Sundance Film Festival on-line shorts program. [ NOTE: This is still true, but Sundance is in discussion with iTunes to try to change this situation]

I intend to let Apple/iTunes know how I feel about this kind of censorship. You can also contact them with your feedback at http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html [Sundance has written Signe to tell her that in their opinion, it is "harming" their relations with iTunes and their ability to get them to change their position]

Whenever Nik and I travel schools to do our workshops, it’s always interesting to see how each school has set up its curriculum. Recently, we had the pleasure of getting acquainted with the workings of the animation program at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth in Bournemouth, England. I was already familiar with the high quality of the students’ work from festivals such as Annecy and by viewing the 2007 Graduation reel, and was very pleased to receive an invitation to visit the Animation Production Department from Professor Peter Parr and his charming and talented wife Astor. This gave me a chance to find out how their BA (Hons) Animation Program was structured.

I like to bring promising young animators from all over the world to the attention of my readers. Alex Siqueira is definitely a young animator to watch. He is featured in the new book PURE ANIMATION: Steps to Creation with 57 Cutting Edge Animators by Spencer Drate and Judith Salavetz, with an introduction by J. J. Sedelmaier. This beautifully illustrated book spotlights the innovative, cutting-edge work of 57 established and emerging animators from around the world.

Nik and I first met Alex in 1991 in Porto, Portugal where we were attending a Normand Roger workshop. Whenever we are in Portugal, we try to get together with Alex and I have followed his career with a great deal of interest. His student film, Sopa Fria (Cold Soup) is still one of my favorite pieces of puppet animation.

This year at the Cinanima Animation Festival in Espinho, Portugal Alex and I spent a great deal of time together, usually over food and drink. When Alex asked if he could create an illustration for my blog I was delighted to accept. His very comic drawing of the ANNECY PLUS BAND (Nik, Rolf Bächler and Jesper Fleng) is in the style of a group of illustrations that he is working on for a group exhibit.

I am back home in Gent after my odyssey across Europe that took me to festivals in Espinho, Portugal; Bradford, England; Tallinn, Estonia and Rome, Italy. I was also lucky enough to visit major animation studios in Riga, Latvia and invited to give workshops in Riga, Rome, and Bournemouth, England. I flew back and forth across my home country Belgium four times before finally landing again in Brussels.

While my stalwart husband Nik worked away composing music in cold and sleety Gent, I spent 5 through 11 November in Espinho, Portugal. Espinho is a charming fishing town located on the Atlantic Ocean, with long sandy beaches and plenty of sun. As my good friend, Russian animator Leon Estrin once told me “Sometimes it happens, several days could give you years of memories”, and this festival has certainly given me that. Evenings spent with Leon, Jimmy Murakami, and Ginger Gibbons sitting at a beachfront café drinking and talking, or basking in the sun watching the from the little fisherman’s bar at the far end of the beach the sardine boats come in. These are memories that will never fade. One very late night as Leon was walking me back to my hotel, we happened upon the young festival staff members playing football on the beach, and their sheer joy and enthusiasm was contagious as we sat on the beach wall and watched the game. All of the festival guests took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy traditional three and four hour lunches and dinners of the exquisite Portuguese cuisine and to heartily drink the delicious and inexpensive red wine.

I am in Switzerland, as a lecturer at Art & Design branch of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Hochschule Luzern, formerly HGK Lucerne School of Art and Design), staying in Zurich with my dear friend Rolf Bächler. This is the second time Rolf and I have taught a course together titled “What’s Cooking?” which we created last year for the newly introduced Design Management class. As the first instructors at the beginning of the studies, our task is team building while exposing the new group of students to a real-life management and design assignment.

In the process of this project, the group must define what needs to be done, break into small task groups to execute the duties and yet work as a total team to complete the task.In a morning lecture, Rolf and I outline the task, but after that we are only there to give advice when we are asked for it, and jump in if we see that anything is going terribly wrong. We want the students to set up their own structure, think and plan through the process and execute every task themselves.

I will be happy to receive comments from any readers as well as question and of course I expect to get e-mails from those who don't agree with what I say. I welcome all of the above.

As most of you know Nik and I lost our beloved 15 year old Dalmatian Kirby earlier this year and he was soon followed to dog heaven by our equally beloved 15 year old Molly. It was very painful for us to lose both of them so close together but we are dog people and we knew that somewhere down the road there would be another dog that needed a good home and a lot of love. We had planned not to even think about a dog until after we returned from KROK in the Ukraine in early October but low but as we all know life does not always go the way we plan.

Last Sunday Nik and I saw a sign on a tree in a little park near our house for a homeless 4 year old West Highland Terrier that was free but must be taken before the next day or it would be go to the pound. It turned out that his mistress is dead, the master is in jail and their two sons put the dog out on the street. The family that took him in after a week on the streets already have 2 Skiperkeys and couldn't keep a third dog but they did take him to a vet to be checked out and an implanted chip was found. The vet tracked down the children who said that they didn't want anything to do with their father, the dog, or anything that the father had ever touched! Please do not write for more details -- we don't have any and don't really want to know what happened.

Dear Animators:

This year Bill Plympton will be attending THE PLATFORM FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION in Portland, Oregon instead of The Annecy Festival of Animation. Bill has asked Nik, Jonas Raeber and myself to carry on the ANNECY PLUS tradition that he started two years ago. If you had a piece of work rejected by Annecy please send it to us so that we can consider screening it at the ANNECY PLUS show.

We are now into day 15 of a postal strike in Gent and no one is sure how long the strike will last so it is best to send DVD's via UPS or Fed Ex to:

Nancy Denney-Phelps

Donkersteeg 31

B-9000 Gent Belgium

We will be leaving for Annecy on 8 June so please send your work right away!!!

Nik and I want to thank everyone who sent us such lovely e-mails of condolances about Kirby's passing -- they have made us feel so much better but even though we miss him terribly he did live to a ripe old Dalmation age and spent the last year touring Europe with us (he could bark very expertily in Flemish which is more than we can do).

Through the miracle of modern computers I will be reading my story about my train trip to Russia on the radio show TALES FROM THE EARTH, KUSF 90.3 FM on Wednesday, April 11 at 7:30 PM (San Francisco time -- everyone else has to do the time conversions if they want to hear it). For more information visit www.talesfromearth.com - web cast www.live365.com/stations/kusf and iTunes. The guest the week before me is poet Laurence Ferlinghetti.