Dan Sarto's Recent Posts

With over 11 million subscribers worldwide, Blizzard Entertainment keeps online gamers coming back for more World of Warcraft (WoW) by consistently adding to the virtual world of Azeroth. Cataclysm is the most ambitious expansion to date for the massively multiplayer online (MMO) fantasy role-playing game. While most of the attention has been focused on the new 3D facelift that the game has undergone, Cataclysm is pushing the linear aspect of interactive entertainment forward with its Hollywood-inspired, in-game cinematics.

Last Saturday the VES hosted its third annual Production Summit, this time at the quaint Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills. Despite all about VES 2.0 and the Bill of Rights to help facilitate quality of life improvements for artists and VFX companies, the purpose was to address the paradigm shift going on and to discuss better biz practices.

An upbeat Cartoon Forum, recently ended September 16th in Sopot, Poland- seems to have made a tremendous impact on the European animation business scene.Sixty-six new animation series from 19 European countries were presented to over 800 participants at this year’ three-day event. “The best Cartoon Forum in years” reverberates in post-Forum conversations with broadcasters, co-producers, distributors, investors and creators. It’s unanimous. Everyone loved Poland, and has had little time to go home and catch their collective breaths before heading to Cannes, France.

Recently, I had an opportunity to talk to Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi, whom many of you know as a driving force behind the Totoro Forest Project and most recently, the Sketchtravel charity art project. An accomplished artist who spends his days applying his formidable skills as an art director at Pixar Animation Studios, Dice gave me an inside look at the unprecedented Sketchtravel sketch book, a historic collection of sketches which is being auctioned off this coming October 17th.

At Gamescom 2011 in Cologne, Germany, Gearbox Studios unveiled the follow-up to its critically acclaimed first-person shooter, Borderlands. Running on Unreal Engine 3, the 2012 PC game is adding more depth to the story and improved visuals and gameplay to the open world experience.

Another OIAF Grand Prix gets awarded, another Phil Mulloy feature takes top prize, another grumbling voice can be heard complaining about the winners. Much like the start of Ontario’s moose hunting season, which I watched in awe Sunday on a TV at the back of a bar, as the Nelvana Grand Prix is announced, "second-guessing the judging" season once again begins in the province. Hopefully, you won’t see too many animators hanging upside down, suspended from a crane over the bloody bed of a pickup truck. But you never know.

The Animator’s Picnic is inspired event programming – stop all proceedings, go to a park, eat, drink, see and be seen. On this unseasonably beautiful Autumn day, as I gaze out on the crowd of young animators, I can’t help but think…I feel so old. Nothing like a large gathering of energetic young hipsters, free from the burdens of metabolic decline and hearing loss, to remind you just what a sorry-ass geez you are. The crowd gets younger, the walk to the Bytowne Cinema gets longer and no amount of Advil or Scotch can change that. Sometimes I wonder, if I start talking to a young female animation student, am I perceived as someone who has something useful to say, or just a perve? Can one be both?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been cleaning out my contacts database. This is something I’ve been dreading for a long time, since the database currently has something like 16,000 contacts in it. That’s right: 16,000. Well, after three solid days of cross-checking to see who was where and what the status of the company was, my ISV contacts tab alone went from nearly 13,500 contacts down to a little over 10,000. I’m guessing only a third of my entire database still contains what I’d call “active” contacts. So what happened?