AWN Headline News

Tuesday, November 13, 2001 - Sunday, February 03, 2002, Los Angeles, California USA. Through nearly 400 objects from the 17th century to the present, Devices of Wonder explores our long and playful entanglement with the magical technologies and artful instruments that we have placed between our eyes and the world. Centuries before the advent of cyberspace, humans created a host of gadgets to enhance visual perception.

Saturday, February 23 - Sunday, February 24, 2002, York, UK. Entry Deadline: Saturday, January 12, 2002. Call for Films! York Independent Film Festival is an annual competitive festival held in York, England. The 2002 festival will be held at the University of York on 23rd and 24th of February, and entries are now being accepted. Deadline for entries is January 12th 2002, and entry is FREE. Awards are to be given in the following categories: Best Animation, Best Documentary, Best Feature, Best Short, Best in Festival.

According to a VARIETY news report, layoffs may be imminent at newly acquired Fox Family Worldwide. The Walt Disney Company recently completed their buy out of Fox Family for a final purchase price of $5.2 billion and the changes have already begun. The companys flagship Fox Family cable channel has been renamed ABC Family and it will be rebranded with an interim ABC Family logo starting this weekend.

Animac 2002, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. Thursday, February 14 - Sunday, February 17, 2002. Entry Deadline: Monday, December 31, 2001.Animac 2002 is a non-competitive animation festival that is a platform for screening the best animation from around the world. Animac has extended their deadline for submissions until December 31, 2001 in order to allow a larger participation. For more information contact Alfred Sesma & Margot Besora: Email: animac@paeria.es; Website: http://www.paeria.es/cultura/animac

Ring of Fire provided visual effects for Sony Walkman Personal Audio Products new three-spot campaign via Young & Rubicam/New York. The spots all feature Sonys mascot Plato - a blue-furred extraterrestrial -- interacting with his live-action co-stars. One of the new spots titled "Wrestler" shows athletes in a college locker room weighing in for their upcoming event. Plato is informed that he still needs to lose several pounds. He goes to the sauna with his five-hour Sony Mini Disc Walkman Recorder to sweat off some weight.

The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television announced the winners of the 16th Annual Gemini Awards, celebrating excellence in Canadian English-language television. Best Animated Program winner was the Collideascope production OLLIE'S UNDER THE BED ADVENTURES. The series, about a young boy who invents a world under his bed, has been picked up by Teletoon in Canada for an additional 13 half hours (in both English and French), and is being distributed internationally by Decode Entertainment.

Alias|Wavefront announced that its recently unveiled mental ray for Maya technology will be available as an optional plug-in renderer for Maya before the end of the year 2001. mental ray for Maya, currently in beta testing, is an optional and fully integrated plug-in renderer for Maya that offers all the features and tools available in mental images' mental ray renderer version 3.0. It will be available to customers in either node locked or floating license configurations. Alias|Wavefront will make mental ray for Maya and the mental ray Stand Alone renderer available in December 2001.

The Gnomon Workshop has released six new training videos on inverse kinematics and dynamics in Alias|Wavefront's Maya. This series, which includes two tapes on Inverse Kinematics and four more tapes on Maya's Dynamics engine, marks the fourth round of video releases and brings the total number of titles available from The Gnomon Workshop to 24. Each tape has 110 minutes of instruction. The objective of the tapes is to explain the tools with a focus on workflow, using a wide range of example effects.

Over the next six weeks the U.K.s Channel 4 will be showing a wide variety of animation, including illustrator John Callahans new project QUADS, experimental animation from Animate! and the U.K. television premiere of the acclaimed anime feature BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE. Also premiering will be a new series called CELMATES. The animation worlds answer to reality shows like BIG BROTHER, CELMATES follows a group of animators shut in a small room, competing against each other (and the clock!) to create an animated film in a sleepless 72 hours.

Activision, Inc. has teamed with mens lifestyle magazine MAXIM and Hollywood Records on a million dollar, multi-media promotional campaign to support the launch of id Software's PC game RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN. In this sequel to WOLFENSTEIN 3D, one of the original first-person shooter games, players infiltrate the Third Reich to battle horrific super-soldiers, zombies and mutants forged in the unearthly experiments of Heinrich Himmler. One component of the launch campaign includes the bundling of more than 1 million promotional interactive CD-ROMs with the December issue of MAXIM.

Corus Entertainment's Nelvana has acquired all proprietary rights to BABAR. Laurent de Brunhoff, son of BABAR creator Jean de Brunhoff, made the deal through The Clifford Ross Company on behalf of the de Brunhoff family. The Nelvana acquisition includes 100 percent of all trademarks and copyrights to the BABAR property, as well as the de Brunhoff family's financial interests in the brand. The de Brunhoff family has reserved certain publishing rights, which will allow Laurent de Brunhoff to continue publishing his own BABAR books.