Reviewing a Review or Two

Just got the February Animation Magazine in the mail yesterday. It has two articles on the Annie Awards. An overview article by editor Ramin Zahed on page 18 and article devoted to the 3-year-old Gaming Animation Annie Award written by Ryan Ball that appears on page 10.

There is one mistake in the overview article. In the Certificate of Merit list they put an of between Gemma Ross and Woodbury University. Gemma did not attend Woodbury, Woodbury University is getting the Certificate of Merit for all of they kindness and support to ASIFA-Hollywood over the years.

Now on to the Gaming Article, it is so good to see this new award getting the recognition it deserves and not just because when they start quoting you in Animation Magazine it means that you have somewhat arrived a little.

Gaming is giant, a whole new animation field that has gone mostly overlooked for far too many years. And yes, I was a broken record on the board for years about getting this award on the slate but everyone knew it was an over due category. The Board just didn`t know how to get the Gaming Industry to take notice of the Annies and submit games. I think there was some early fear that it would be embracing to offer an award and have no one submit games.

Somebody had to take the message out to the game companies. A lot of the credit for chasing down the Game Developers in the first couple of years goes to Tom Hanson, the then manager of my local game store, for going out and beating the bushes in the first couple of years of this category. He called a lot of Developers and emailed all of his game store sales contacts to try and get through to the people with the power to submit games. We also did E3 a couple of years in a row and approached as many Developers as we could get the ear of.



It is still an up hill battle to get a wide spectrum of games submitted. We still seem to be running to games licensed from animation films. Note this year`s nominees (above).

There is still a need for a more diverse slate of games. We will have pasted the major milestone when we get to the point where the majority of the games submitted are not tied to a current animation feature. At that point we will be a more mature award. It takes time. But it is getting better every year. We well get there.

Meanwhile check out the current issue of Animation Magazine, (if you are an ASIFA-Hollywood member you should be getting a free issue in the mail) make sure you vote for the Annies before the voting deadline and come on out to find out who wins on Feb. 8th at the 35th Annual Annie Awars.

Plug From the Haunted Email:

Here is a question from the old email bag that gets into the technical aspects of building an animation wheel.



It also gives me a chance to plug my ebook, Animation on a ShoeString (tm) which has all kinds of cool trick for putting together an animation studio without going broke http://www.agni-animation.com/shoestring.html

My ebook comes with reviews of animation products and links to lots and lots of animation supplies and suppliers. Along with how to paterns for building stuff like the Animation Wheel project. All for just $15 and handling. (if I am going to plug myself I am going all the way, it slices it dices, it cuts through led pipes)

Hi Larry:
I intend to build, or commission to build an animation light table with the rotating disk on top. You are the first to give details on the subject. I understand that the disk is not absolutely necessary, but I would like to make a try. If it turns to be rather expensive or difficult, I know I will get along with a simple illuminated surface. The problem is that I could not find a single reference or detailed description of the intimate mechanism for which the disk rotates and is assembled onto the tabletop. Yes, I find several guys who gave more or less detailed instructions to build the table, but not the disk. You are the first to give details on the subject. Your instructions are great, and really inexpensive. Nevertheless, I have some doubts. How many wheels or rollers do I need? Is it that I need only two rollers against the lower edge of the disk? If the disk is placed over a wooden tabletop, how could the rollers be installed? Thank you very much for any additional help you may give me.

Gustavo S_ _ _

I am going to assume that you have bought a copy on my ebook, Animation on a ShoeString (tm) and are not just trying to figure it out from page 25 of the abbreviated sample http://www.agni-animation.com/blog/shoestringsample6.pdf that I have up on my site. If not, I could use the $15 and any way you will find lots of other cool tips for animation studio building. So I might be bias but I truely think it is worth it.



That being said, the portable table I built for last year`s 6th edition can be improved on. I took the cheapest way as per my norm. I would replace the sliding door rollers with radio controlled airplane tires and I would use 4 of them, two at the top corners and two at the bottom.

The top two would be spring loaded so they hold the wheel in and the wheel can still be released and use separately.

I would also replace the plastic milk box base with a nice wooden base. It will up the cost but not that much. The cost now would clock in around the $200 mark, which is much better than the $2,000 plus you can expect to pay if you go the normal special order route of having a carpenter build a table around a $500 wheel from Cartoon Colour.

As for the wheel itself I would not change my pattern at all. A functional animation disk, without table, for about $35 and labor is a good deal. You can even use it without the table if you want to carry it with you to school. Although I would get a thicker Plexiglas face plate than I used on my prototype and I know I would take a little more care cutting the circle out of that Plexiglas. (I rushed it to have my new edition ready for the Stop Mo Expo in April)

Tale of Two Students

No names here. Two students have approached me in the last 2 weeks with tales of outside activities impinging on classroom time. That is neither here nor there because the class is the class and outside activities do not change this fact.

The reason I am mentioning this is the reasons each had. One was spending time on the WGA picket line meeting animation showrunners. The other has a screenplay that has just been green lighted because of this same strike. Which has the better long term game plan?

Taking a big break at the expense of your future peers is tempting but, ethics aside, is it worth it? People do not forget these lapses.

Tom Sito tells the story of inviting Bill Hurtz to Disney for lunch during Beauty and the Beast and Bill telling him that he would not set foot on the lot because he did not want to run into Frank Thomas who he might have to hit. That was 50 years after the Disney Strike and the feelings did not die in all that time.

I know the money is tempting but are the studios going to give a damn about you once this strike is over? As a teacher of Animation History I know the answer to this. I am not taking sides here, just stating facts.

The Deviousness of My Evil Plan

Anyone who has read these pages on a regular basis will be well aware of my on going campaign to get copyright, trademark and contract law education into animation programs. This was a major lack in my schooling 30 years ago and it remains a major failing of all art programs.

Again I say, a lawyer does not have to know how to draw but an artist better damn well know the laws that apply to the ownership of their own creativity or someone else will gain and control the fruits of that creativity.

For the past 12 years that I have been teaching animation to college and even high school students I have had the same response from all the programs I have been involved with. Basically we don`t have the resources, time, and knowledge to cover non-art subjects in our art curriculum.

The later is the key. I have come to understand that what is really being said is that they do not know the subject themselves and feel that anything that is too complicated for the administrators of the program is too hard for the students. This is reinforced by the number of times I get frantic copyright questions from, not only my students, but from my fellow educators. These laws control their very livelihood and you better believe that artist are interested in something this important to their wellbeing.

The latest volley in my 12 year up hill copyright education battle is on the table. I am currently busy writing a Short Animation Copyright Clearance Guide for the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Educators` Forum Student Animation Festival that is in the final planning stages.

Most film festivals require that the filmmaker sign an affidavit of copyright ownership for the elements of their film. This covers the festival and only the filmmaker is left responsible if the statement proves false. But it is well within the rights of the festival to demand proof of copyright ownership, and since our goal is to improve animation education that is what we plan to do.

We plan to give the animation programs the tools to teach creator business law with a short concise Copyright Clearance Guide containing fill-in-the-blank Work-For-Hire contacts and Non Exclusive License Agreements, a tutorial on the use of these documents, and a copyright hotline email address to field questions. And then we plan to require that each film is submitted with copies of these documents.

Here is the deviousness of my evil plan. The teachers and administrators will become exposed to the copyright law in the process of helping their students prepare the documentation for film submission. They will come to understand that the copyright law is understandable. And maybe, just maybe, they will incorporate it in their curriculum.

I have to go now because I feel like laughing maniacally while twisting my handlebar mustache.

Blood Tea for Valentines

Got this email from christiane cegavske. You may remember her from the Stop Mo Expo last April. Her single handed 15 year animation of her stop motion feature BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING is a model of what can be done with enough drive. If you are in the Portland area do not miss this chance to she her film.

Hi Everyone,

Great news for all of you in or near Portland, Oregon!

The 16 mm print of BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING
will be shown at the Clinton Street Theater on Valentine`s Day!

Thursday, February 14th at 7 pm. (ages 21 and up are welcome)

I will be in attendance for Q & A and hope to see you all. Clinton Street Brewing is connected to the theater. They have beer, wine and a full menu and encourage you to take your drink with you into the theater!

Come on out with your Valentine!

Come on out with your friends!

Come chat with the director over a glass of wine!

See you there!!!

I like the idea of a theater you can drink a glass of wine in. It seems somuch more civilized than the low rent popcorn palace I an force to go to.

Fernonoke: The Lost Opportunity

I watched Princess Mononoke yesterday. First time in a very long time I watched the English dubbed version. The Lady of Iron Town is part good and part evil and therefore very un-Hollywood. She is good to her lepers and former brothel girls but determined to kill the Forest Spirit and cut down all the trees in the name of progress. She is complicated, a study in grays. Even at the end of the film.



Even Princess Mononoke, the titled character, is flawed. All humans are bad, in her eyes, even the one that wants to help her. The only character in the whole movie with out major character flews is cursed with the mark of a demon and (like the forest) is slowly being eaten alive by evil that others have done.

So why am I bringing up this 1997 overlooked masterpiece at this late date. Because I followed Mononoke by watching Ferngully something I have always meant to do. I have always connected these two movies in my head for very obvious reasons.



Princess Mononoke and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest are thematically the same movie. One is told by a Hollywood insider working under the constraints of the Hollywood animation system and the other by a Japanese Master filmmaker in complete control of his vision.

Let me start out by saying that I am well aware that this is an unfair comparison, apples and oranges. Let me also say that I respect the Kroyers, Bill, who I bump into around the industry, and Sue, who I teach with at a couple of schools. I even like Ferngully in its own right when not watched so close to Miyazaki. I approve of the spoon-fed environmental message that Ferngully tells in its own limited way. But a movie like Ferngully, like most Hollywood product, must suffer in comparison to a film like Mononoke.

These two are worlds apart even if they have the same message. The 1992 Ferngully is a Hollywood product with all that that means. Committee created, prerequisite Disney like songs, focus group driven, Robin Williams as a rapping bat, comic relief characters to the right and left, black and white morality, a villain that is pure evil and a female hero that is all good, a confused human who doesn`t know what he is doing but learns by the last reel and a sugar coated happy ending aimed right at a grade school demographic.

A product that is designed to sell but does not take chances, a Hollywood product for American kids with all the corporate Happy Meal tie-ins lined up before it going into the theaters.

That is what distributor demands and that is what the smart director better deliver. And Bill is smart. He damn well knew going in what kind of movie he would be allowed to make. He is a pro, he knows what sells. He knows that he can only be himself in short self produced animations. As he has proved in the past.

The overall American viewpoint is naively simplistic. The idea of a bad character doing anything good or a good character doing something bad it foreign to our pop culture and our one dimensional politics. (Clinton had sex with someone he was not married to therefore all his policies are no good. Throw him and them out!) We do not like to see shades of gray in the people who rule us or the movies that entertain us. If you are part bad, you are all bad. It is the American way.

In a Hollywood animated movie the bad guy could never be allowed any noble traits. It will confuse the suits. It is always all good or all bad in a Hollywood movie, no room for complications or more then one dimension in our characters. Thank you very much. The lack of formula in Anime in general and Miyazaki in specific is what makes for popularity in the dimensionally starved young American viewing public. There is an American market for thought provoking film.



Animated movies for sophisticated adults. What a concept! Mononoke is dream like with dark and evil nightmare elements. The characters have dimension. The message is not spoon fed with all the lose ends nicely tied up. There is not one simple answer. The viewer is left to think about the film after leaving the theater.

Even Walt Disney scared us and made us cry with his Snow White. Why are Walt`s intellectual children so afraid to serve up anything but eye candy and formula? Or more rightly, why are the people in charge of what Walt`s intellectual children get to make so afraid of making animated films with real meaning? Why won`t Hollywood filmmakers (live action or animation) make films that make us think?

Thomas Edison: Inventor & Thief

There is a star in the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard, there are hundred of stars, but this one bears the name Thomas Edison. It is there to honor the great inventor for an invention he didn`t think was worth inventing.

Everyone expected Edison to invent moving pictures. He was the great savior, the messiah of the machine age. Movies didn`t just pop up over night. As early as 1872 Eadweard Muybridge was doing motion studies in California. And in 1888 he asked Edison for help in perfecting the Muybride film projecton system.

What most people do not know is that Edison ran a sweat shop think-tank and brought out all the fruits of his hired labor under his brand name and patent. In 1890 an English inventor named William Friese-Greene, hoping to join this invertor`s club and wrongly thinking his moving picture process was protected by patent, set copies of his research to Edison.

Edison did not give Friese-Greene a job but he did give Friese-Greene`s research to W. K. L. Dickson. Dickson was the Edison wage slave that had the movie bug. He was the driving force behind film. Edison was against projecting images in a theater setting. Edison was looking for a better nickelodeon device.

In 1890 Emile Reynaud opened his Theatre Optique in Paris with projected hand painted film. Some think of Reynaud as the first film animator even if he did work before film was invented. When Edison got the patent on moving picture Reynaud threw his equipment and films into the Seine and ended his days in the mad house.

Maybe Old Tom Edison didn`t think there was any money in showing moving pictures to a crowd. That didn`t stop him from undercutting the competition by announcing in the early 1890s that he already had moving pictures working in his lab but was not going to release them until he had sound attached. In later days this practice of false P.R. as a way to crush the competion would be know as vaporware and would be considered unethical if not illegal.

When Edison came around to the view that he needed a projection system he bought one from Thomas Armat. When the first Edison (sic) moving picture was displayed in 1896 at Koster & Bial`s Music Hall in New York City is was Armat who played the projectionist in the back of the room for his own invention the Vitascope. It was he that made the Leigh Sisters do their Umbrella Dance in the projected light. It was Edison who stood in the front of the room and took all the credit.



Edison then protected his stolen idea with a hired band of club welding thugs who would bust up the equipment and the operators of movie cameras not paying him for use of his patent. One of the reasons that the film capital of the world is in Hollywood is because filmmakers were trying to get away from edison`s club welding thugs who chased them across the country.

Even on the other side of the country filmmakers had to fear Edison`s thugs. Samuel Goldfish, later Goldwyn, use to sleep with all his exposed film under his bed and a shot gun propt agaist the night table for fear of the look arm of this beloved inventor.

So when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and I come to the name Thomas Edison inventor of Motion Pictures looking up at me all pompous in his manufactured image I step right on his star and I grind my the ball of my boot into the metal trying to grind off some of his stolen glory.

Voting Update:

I have finished my voting on the Annie Awards. Lots of great clips. But I have heard from a number of ASIFA-Hollywood members that have not gotten the email with their username and password for the Annie Voting Site. https://eballot3.votenet.com/annieawards/login.cfm

Most times this seems to be because of a change in email address. So if you are an ASIFA-Hollywood member and you have not got your voting notice in your email box then you might need to contact ASIFA at membership@asifa-hollywood.org .

Don’t miss your chance to see and vote on the best animation of 2007.

Annie Voting:

Today is the first day of Annie Award voting. If you are a member of ASIFA-Hollywood you should have gotten your username and password in an email.

Again this year we are voting online. There are advantages and disadvantages to all voting systems (as we well know in this country). But before I veer into a political rant on chads and e-voting machine companies bought up by major political supporters let me say that I think in the case of the Annie Awards the advantages far out weigh the disadvantages.

It is a very good thing if everybody gets to see the films that they are voting on. I am not sure that that always happened in the past. With voting on line that happens now. And I love the fact that I don`t have to take yet another long drive into L.A. to see every screening.

I spent a couple of hours viewing clips today and making up mind on said clips. Some of them are hard calls.

1st Day of Class - Welcome Back LCAD Students

First day of classes at Laguna College of Art & Design, this is one of my all time favorite schools. Total student body of about 300. Small classes where I get to know my students and even my students` names. When I teach this same class at the University I have over 80 students in a giant lecture hall and I don`t even try to learn names.

I have been running the LCAD class at about 15 students for the last couple of years. That is a great size. Lots of time for one on one. I get to know my students, their work and their work ethic and that makes it easier to recommend them for jobs and internships that always seem to come my way.

I got my student roll at the end of last week and I was a little shocked to see that have 24 students enrolled. Still a good size class. Okay, a little harder to learn all the names. Still a very workable number. But here is the thing; my class is 1/12th (8%) of the whole student body of Laguna College. So in LCAD terms I have a very, very big class but in University terms I wouldn`t have a class at all.

Don`t get me wrong. There are joys in teaching at the lecture hall leave. It is a different dynamic and if you can tap the energy you can really drive home a point. But it really is different working the big rooms as any mid leavel rock band can tell you.

Pixar Story get A.C.E. Nomination

Leslie Iwerks sent me an email about the American Cinema Editors nomination of her documentary for an ACE award. Congratulations!

Editors unveil their Eddie noms
Winners are precursors to Oscars
By Carolyn Giardina
Jan 12, 2008

American Cinema Editors have announced 10 feature film nominations for the 58th annual ACE Eddie Awards, set for Feb. 16 at the Beverly Hilton.

. . . . (lots of other movies removed from email because I only want to talks about Leslie`s film)

Competing in the documentary category are Edgar Burcksen & Leonard Feinstein for Darfur Now, Leslie Iwerks & Stephen Myers for The Pixar Story and Geoffrey Richman, Chris Seward & Dan Swietlik for Sicko.

. . . . (More movies and TV stuff removed - sorry for messing with your writing Ms. Giardina)

Animation Educators` Forum

Aki Umemoto (Base Station)


Patrick Despres (Brooks College)


Linda Lee


Aubry Mintz (Cal State Long Beach)


Jack Bosson (Woodbury)

. . . and Larry Loc behind the camera. The Animation Educators` Forum had a very productive meeting at Cal State Long Beach yesterday. Most of the time was spent dealing with the details of the upcoming student animation festival. The one final step is ASIFA-Hollywood Board approval. Budget time and then cross our fingers and straight on to morning.

Great Moments in Videogames:

Now that I have got my Spring classes in good shape I have been back working on my lesson plans for my upcoming Fall History of Videogames class. I have just got to 1983. A very important year. The Videogame Industry was still ruled by arcades. Home consoles where coming in but there was a major downturn on the way. The in battles in the console wars were still a few years off.





Don Bluth and Rick Dyer 1983, up until this time game animation in videogames was done by engineers, pixels moving across the screen. Beep, beep. beep! Dragon’s Lair was the first major coming together of real animators and game engineers. Breath taking animation and a storyline, what will they think of next?



Dragon`s Lair was 50 cents a try with 5 lives per turn. I didn't play much because of the cost but I was in the crowd of on lookers. You could always tell where the Dragon`s Lair machine was in the arcade by the crowd. Dragon`s Lair was the only arcade game that people would watch like a film. It pulled players away from other machines.





It seems so logical today, but up until this time no one ever thought there was any need for people with a knowledge of movement involved in the creation of movement in the, then, 9 billion dollar game industry.

Pong had come out 11 years before, back in 1972, and in all those years in between no one had ever thought; Hey, there is animation in this damn game, maybe game designers needed to know something about movement?

After Bluth and Dyer very few would make that mistake again. Today`s games are story driven with scripts and character designs by top people. Writers and testers and producers, oh my.

Game animation and cut screen animation is now done by people who know how to make things move in a state of the art manner. The game pipeline has been modeled on the film pipeline. There are storyboards and continuity meetings. And a lot of film animators have moved into this once engineer driven field.

In the long run Dragon`s Lair was a dead end. Very few games are done with traditional board animation these days. It may not have been the game of the future but it was the first game to call attention to the need for professional storytellers in the process. Don and Rick are heros and pioneers.

So if you are thinking about following them into this field (a field that still brings in more money every year than the movie industry) you need to plan your training. The ideal school would teach programmers beginning animation and animators beginning programming. What will they think of next?

AEF Online:

Animation Educators` Forum web site officially opens. http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/aef/index.html The AEF Web site has been up for a while but we have just linked to it from the main page of the ASIFA-Hollywood site. I have also added a link from this site. (See the right hand side of the page)

The Animation Educators` Forum is made up of a group of concerned Southern California Animation Instructors from a vast array of colleges and universities. We have banded together under the natural umbrella of ASIFA-Hollywood for the betterment of animation education.

As Animation goes into its second hundred years the state of training is still haphazard at best. Animation education has moved from studios to schools. There is no standard core skill set that is taught across the board in the schools. The august bodies responsible for program accreditation often force schools to mix and match skill sets from other disciplines to cover our own discipline which frankly may not be very well understood by these accrediting bodies.

This is because Animation has only recently come out of the shadow of studio apprenticeships into the realm of higher education. Animation program heads, who learned under the old system, have to scramble for qualified faculty, often in the face of accreditation obsessed administers who need to look degrees not skills.

At some schools non-animating degreed academics are preferred to non-degreed animators with the hands on knowledge and experience really needed, thus doing a great disservice to students.

The entry-level jobs of old; inbetweening and animation camera operator are gone from our shores and / or industry. Students are trained in the physical craft of animation but not the business of animation and then released to make their own way into the marketplace.

AEF has been meeting for the last 6 months to address these and other areas of concern to animation educators. Our first major project is a Southern California Student Animation Festival scheduled for Oct. 18th 2008.

Next Animation Educators` Forum Meeting
Jan. 10th at 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM
Room 108 Fine Arts Building #4 (FA4-108)
Cal State University Long Beach

Driving directions: http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/aef/csulbmap3.pdf

Ramblings On a Theme:

I was over at the Tom Sito web site http://www.tomsito.com/blog.php this morning where I found this: 1929-With the approval of Edgar Rice Burroughs, artist Hal Foster began drawing the Tarzan comic strip.

When I was a student at the Kubert School Uncle Joe had 4 or 5 full size stats of Hal Foster Tarzan Sunday pages up on the walls of the school. He had the originals at his home.

One day somebody broke into his house and stole all his TV sets and other loose valuables leaving a fortune in artwork hanging on his walks.

This tells us two things: first the art education in the public school system sucks, second it wasn`t one of the Kubert students breaking into the master`s house because we would have known the value of the artwork hanging on the walls.

The early comic strip art, like the early animation art, was all destroyed as a routine. There use to be this guy at King Features whose job it was to destroy all the artwork from all of the King Features comic strips. Instead he would take it home and put it in his spare room. Strangely enough, he became a very successful art dealer in his later years. Go figure.

I am not sure where I am going with this rambling but anyone who saves artwork from corporate stupidity is my hero and deserves all the success they receive.

Animation Jam: Music

Animation Jam Update: (see below for project details)
I am deep in music discussions with Fletcher Beasley, the composer for the Comic Con 2006 Animation Jam Project.

I find myself talking about the reference to Beethoven’s 9th at the end of Mahler’s 1st Symphony in one breath and the eerie feeling Bernard Herrmann created in Psycho by following the fractured insane driving beat of the opening title music with a pastoral music of the first scene in the next breath.

I love music and have given a great deal of thought to how sounds enhance visual image. But I am unable to create true music on my own so I am in that place that so many people find themselves with visual artists; knowing what I want but not being able to convey it to the person who can create it.

Film without a score does not work. Have you ever heard a film without the music track? Nothing works. Even silent film needed somebody to create music to go along with it. How do you think Carl Stalling got started? When Walt Disney got the spotlight for early sound cartoons it was Stalling in the background making the sounds, making the skeletons dance.

So many students do their animations without thought to sound. Sure they will lay down a voice track for lip sync and maybe even some mojor Foley but they get the project done and then think of music. Grab something and tack it on. Far too many times without rights to music they are tacking.

But who am I to talk, tacking it on afterwards is what we are doing, out of necessity, with the animation jams. There is no way to create an animation jam to music. Okay, Eric Goldberg could most likely animate to a beat that could then be composed to but the students in the project wouldn`t have a chance. So I am hoping to do a much better job of retro fitting sound by working with a professional composer who can function as a music retrofitter.

Animation Jam Project Details:
On July 21st, 22nd, 23rd 2006 ASIFA-Hollwood held an Animation Jam at our booth at San Diego Comic Con International. 13 Animators took part in the Jam over the 23 hours that the convention doors were open to the public. These animators are:

• David Burgess


• Dan Weeks


• Francine Prestininzi


• Meredith Gran


• Pedro Santana


• Larry Loc


• Eliza Frye


• Alice Lin


• Jenny Bettis


• Eric Goldberg


• Federico Oropeza


• Tobias Loc


• Lou Scarburough Jr.

It is my hope to have at least the first Animation Jam finished by Comic Con 2008. If it is good enough and I can get the board`s approval I would like to submit it to at least the Comic Con Film Festival. We will see.

PERSEPOLIS Screening

Sony Pictures Classics & ASIFA-Hollywood
invite members and a guest to a special screening of...

Sony Pictures Classics
PERSEPOLIS



Nominated for Four Annie Awards (Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Music Score)

Thursday, January 10th at 7:30 PM
Laemmle Sunset Five Theaters
8000 Sunset Blvd. (at Crescent Heights)
West Hollywood, CA 90046
Note: please Park underneath the building.

Q/A after screening with co-writers and co-directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

RSVP Required (Members Check your email)

Iron Knee:

Copyright. Okay I know I bitch about the lack of knowledge and training in this area. But if you are going to be an artist you better know the law. But gods and little fishes people really need to smarten up quickly.

I just changed web-hosting companies over the holidays. It was a nightmare. The site was down for 2 days. But that is not what I want to talk about. The new hosting company seems to be a much better company. (It would be hard to be worse than the last group on incompetent fools - bitter? no, truthful)

So the first thing I do is read all of their legal stuff looking for the fine print. They have a whole section on copyright infringement that covers everything from soup to nuts and them this is their image on their placeholder index page.



Do you see any copyright notices on this image? Do you think that they are paying Fox for the use of this image? Me nether. But they sure had their own copyright at the bottom of the page with all rights reserved.

Am I using this image illegally? Maybe? But I think I can squeak by under fair use. Lawyers don`t have to know how to draw but artist better know the law. No one said that being an artist was going to be easy or fair.

Avatar the Last Mold Bender:

Bryan Konietzko & Michael Dante Dimartino Creaters of Avatar the Last Airbender







I have just finished viewing the first season of Avatar on DVD. I am a big fan and even more so when I get to view it back to back.



TV seems to be the last true strong hold of 2D Animation. But most of that is Flash Animation. And flash is flat not because of style choices like UPA but because it is digital cut out stop notion animation. It is one thing to decide on a flat look and design esthetic, it is another to forced into it by the software.



The subject matter should dictate the look of an animation. Far too often I fear the show look and feel is determined by the software.




The mega-cool thing with Avatar is that it is a story about a character out of time that is very well done is a long missed style of another time, full 2-D Board Animation just isn`t happening anymore.

The Avatar animation staff are learning how to do martial arts because they are animating martial arts. What a strange old fashion concept.




Bryan Konietzko & Michael Dante Dimartino are my new heros. Great job guys. Keep it coming.