108 Comments »   posted in Disney

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I attended a couple year-end animation school screenings yesterday in Manhattan—one for NYU students and the other for School of Visual Arts students. The focus of this piece today will be on the latter school, which are called the Dusty screenings. School of Visual Arts has the largest animation program in New York. They presented forty-five thesis films last night. The films were a mixed bag, as most school programs are, but the gap between poor and well done was wider than usual, partly because of the size of the program, but also because the bad films were really bad and the good films were jaw-droppingly spectacular.

The weakest of the bunch made your eyes pop out. It made me angry to think how somebody could have just spent four years of their life and $150k, and not understand the first thing about filmmaking, storytelling, drawing or animating. (To be fair, I had the same reaction for many of the works at NYU’s screening so the reaction is not exclusive to SVA.) The bottom line is that something is clearly wrong, either with admission standards or instruction.

On the other hand, the good films coming out of SVA are outstanding. In a few cases, the films exceeded the quality of anything I’ve seen recently from schools like CalArts and Sheridan, which are considered the North American standard-bearers in traditional animation instruction. The most unique thing about the SVA films I saw is that they don’t rely on conventional student cliches like copying Disney-style expressions or Fifties-style character designs. These students have found their own groove and are exploring personal styles of movement and design not often seen in student films; their inspiration seems to come less from Milt Kahl and more from indie comic artists and illustrators along the lines of Ghostshrimp, Jordan Crane and Tom Herpich.

I was unable to sit through the entire four-hour screening, but I think I caught some of the most solid entries, which included Cat by Peyton Skyler, Metromorphosis by Mikhail Shraga, Juxtaposed by Alex (Wager) Myung, The Chicken Prince by Ioana Alexandra Nistor, and Fantastic Plastic by Lev Polyakov.

Another entertaining short, Metal Boot by Paul Villeco, has already been posted online:

There were two films in particular that floored me last night. The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9 by Jake Armstrong (first image below) and Singles by Rebecca Sugar (second image below). The visual inventiveness of both these films, and their sophisticated marriage of design and animation, was absolutely mindblowing. If Rebecca and Jake represent the future of hand-drawn animation, then the art form is in safe hands.

32 Comments »   posted in Shorts, Student

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Yooouuutuuube.com

May 8, 2009 9:08 am

Yooouuutuuube.com is a site that allows users to create a frame-by-frame video wall display using any YouTube video link. The effect is striking if you plug in a fast-cutting video like the one for this electronica song that uses sounds from Alice in Wonderland. I can envision animators coming up with some novel ways of utilizing this display format.

16 Comments »   posted in Internet/Blogs

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Pixar opening shorts studio in Canada

May 8, 2009 3:00 am

Pixar is opening a satellite studio in Vancouver which will be dedicated to producing short subjects. According to a story in The Vancouver Sun, the new studio will not work on Pixar’s feature films, but will make shorts which, general manager Amir Nasrabadi hints, could include TV series.

“First and foremost for us is to concentrate on Pixar legacy characters,” said Nasrabadi, citing Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, and Lightning McQueen and Mater from Cars as four of its legacy characters. “We want to keep these well-known and well-liked characters alive without creating a distraction to those working on the full-length motion pictures in California.

“The types of products we produce will be niche products, such as short films, whether they are standalone or episodic in nature,” said Nasrabadi, a 12-year veteran of the digital entertainment business. “They will be helpful to all of Disney’s ancillary businesses, such as television, compilations on DVD, Internet broadcasting, as well as theatres.”

It sounds like the new studio will be producing DVD bonus materials, at least to start with. After that… who knows?

UPDATE: Canadian animation director and historian Mark Mayerson offers his take on Pixar’s new studio. Historically, he writes, “[S]atellite studios tend to stay satellites. Rather than regard the satellites as minor league teams, where talent is developed and then moved up to the majors, the satellites are walled-off as facilities for lower budget work.”

50 Comments »   posted in Books, Disney

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Max Fleischer’s Screen Song Patent

May 8, 2009 12:30 am

Submitted for your educational pleasure – another historical find from our friends at the Van Eaton Galleries: The patent for Max Fleischer’s bouncing ball cartoons (filed in 1925, granted in 1926).

Click on thumbnails below to read the convoluted legalese that Fleischer uses to describe his new technique. Note they use Daisy Bell (“A Bicycle Built For Two”) as a sample lyric. Great find – thanks Mike!

4 Comments »   posted in Classic

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Forbes Magazine on Animation

May 7, 2009 4:00 pm

Forbes.com just posted a rather flimsy column about animated features, discussing how much money they make and claiming there are “45 or 50 fully 3D feature-length, computer-animated films in production today, ready for release over the next couple of years”. Really? That many?

They also posted a slideshow of 10 Animated Movies Worth a Billion. Seems to me they left a few off the list… but why quibble over a couple of billion more or less?

10 Comments »   posted in Business, Internet/Blogs

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