We’re launching a new—and hopefully regular—feature on the Brew today where you ask the questions, and we find the answers. I wanted to kick things off with a question that I’ve been asked repeatedly by animation students and short filmmakers, and about which there seems to be an endless amount of misinformation and confusion.

Here is the question as it was posed to us by filmmaker Eric Bates:

I’m just writing to see if you had any advice in regards to submitting a short animation to festivals versus posting online. I remember the status quo while I was a student at the Emily Carr University of Art in Vancouver, was, of course, to submit to festivals, but I remember a negative view of posting online, as if posting online took away from the credibility of the piece. Times are changing, but I’m still not so certain what is the best way to go. Do you have any views on whether posing online before showing in a festivals may be a good thing or a bad thing? Would posting online first negatively affect acceptance in a festival?

For some opinions, I decided to ask two people who program animation festivals: Chris Robinson, the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Film Festival, and Susie Wilson, the Festival Director of Projector and a member of film selection committees at festivals like Annecy. (Also, see the UPDATE below from Mark Osborne.) Here’s what they had to say:

CHRIS ROBINSON
Dear Eric,
I don’t really see why it has to be an either/or situation. Granted, it’s nice for a festival to have a film that few people have seen because it creates excitement, but it’s really not a huge deal if it’s not a premiere. I certainly don’t punish a film because it’s been screened online. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Amid here at Cartoon Brew posted a couple of films this year that we hadn’t received at the festival. I liked both of them, contacted the filmmaker, and invited the films to be in competition. If those filmmakers only went the festival route I might not have seen their films.

I guess the negative side of posting things online is quality. There’s nothing like sitting in a cinema with a thousand people watching a film on a big screen. People talk about the increased connection you get between artist and audience online, but nothing is more immediate that the reaction you get (or don’t get) in a cinema.

It’s also a bit of a different audience. The bulk of the audience at animation festivals are animation professionals or students. Online screenings can open you up to a slightly different audience.

Short film animators have limited opportunities to get there films out there so take advantage of everything available to you.

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SUSIE WILSON
No, Web exposure is not high on the list of factors I consider when programming. If a film is absorbing/funny/gorgeous (in short: good) enough, then even if it’s been seen a million times online, I’d still want it in my line up. The viewing experience is so very different from cinema to computer that even if I’m pretty sure my audience has seen it on the Web already, I’d still program it. Also, because it will be quite another film depending on what sits either side of it in the program. It’s definitely the quality of the film and what it contributes that counts, not its previous exposure. (In selection at Annecy last year, it was one of the few things all three of us agreed on!)

What do you the film-maker want for, and from, your film? It’s your answer to this question that will guide you in managing its exposure.

Some initial elements to consider:

Is the volume of viewers important to you? Quality vs. quantity. Yes, the Web might reach more people, but also think about the cinema experience which can be far superior, no matter how hi-res the computer screen or how woof the speakers.

Is your film non-narrative, experimental, abstract? If it’s a difficult piece, festival audiences can be more open. (Ok, not counting the notoriously impatient Grand Salle crowd at Annecy.) However, there can be more cohesion in groupings of films online, and the viewer can make up their own private festival. But wait, they can also stop watching it if it’s not satisfying them whereas in a cinema situation, they’d have to sit through the whole damn frustrating prickly amazing piece!

Think a year ahead when you’re planning on where to send your film and read the requirements of what you consider to be the most significant festivals in the upcoming twelve months. If they demand virgin births or non-line pedigrees, and it’s an event that will introduce you to what you consider to be an important audience, abide by their rules.

The clearer you are about where you want your film to go, the easier it will be for you to navigate all the festival and Web opportunities out there. Sit down, think about the ultimate destination, then chart your course. It’s your film, it’s your call.

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A closing thought from myself: the trend clearly favors filmmakers nowadays, and most festivals don’t require filmmakers to keep their films off-line. Whenever somebody poses this question to me on the Brew, I always encourage artists to post their films online. The benefits of having your film on the Internet far outweigh the potential (and increasingly unlikely) exclusion from a handful of film festivals. (On a sidenote, the administrators of animation schools that require their students to keep their animation off the Internet should be slapped. They are performing a disservice to their students at a crucial time when these young filmmakers are trying to make a name for themselves.)

Even festivals that require films to be offline, like Sundance, are not enforcing their rules strictly. Last year, Sundance selected a number of shorts that had already debuted online. One of those, From Burger It Came, was a film that was available on Cartoon Brew TV, and at the request of the filmmaker, we removed the film for the period of the festival to comply with Sundance’s rules. However, another short film in Sundance competition, which was already an online hit, remained online throughout the festival without any repercussions.

UPDATE: Director Mark Osborne wrote to say that if you’re trying to get an Oscar nomination, then posting the film online is a bad idea. Mark says:

In regards to the issue of posting films online, please, PLEASE point out that if any one posts their film online they may DISQUALIFY themselves for Academy Award consideration. This is a very tricky issue and the Academy has made it very clear that it wants to honor theatrical production and so they are holding firm to the notion that if a film is on TV or online before it is in theaters it is not a theatrical production. (Article III-b of the Academy rules states: A short film may not be exhibited publicly anywhere in any nontheatrical form, including but not limited to broadcast and cable television, home video, and Internet transmission, until after its Los Angeles theatrical release, or after receiving its festival or Student Academy Award. Excerpts of the film totaling no more than ten percent of its running time are exempted from this rule.) I suspect this rule is why some schools don’t allow posting of films online, which is totally understandable considering this rule. And this is not to say that every film is an Academy contender, but I believe it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I just got back from Seoul, Korea, where I spoke at a conference called DICON 2009, a digital conference that was part of the International Creative Content Fair. I liked that this event had its own slogan, “Show the Spirit of Creative Content!” since I rarely attend events that have slogans these days. I don’t think the Ottawa Festival has a slogan. I can only imagine what it would be. (”Sit down, shut up, listen to Chris?”)

While at DICON, I gave a presentation on the elements of quality cartoons. I was happy they had asked about that particular topic since it’s a fun topic to talk about. No one in the US seems terribly interested in pondering this anymore. I guess we have it all figured out here.

The Korean animation industry is an interesting case study. After years of doing service work for the US, Canada and Europe, throughout the 2000s, the animation industry in Korea shifted its attention to creating cartoons. Schools added programs in animation, and beautiful, moody Korean short films began showing up in festivals worldwide. Within a matter of years, original Korean series began showing up on the air in Korea.

The Korean animation industry’s most recent focus has been how to sell these cartoons outside of Asia. It is hard to sell to the US, even for people who live here, I assured them. There’s not a lot of space on the air and there are a lot of shows out there.

The American animation industry has a long and interesting relationship with the Korean animation industry. Through the 1980s and 90s, a great deal of animation service work was sent to Korea. Most animation executives, creators and producers participated in a particular rite of passage, a trip to Korea to visit the production studios. Reeling from jet lag, you would then have the surreal experience of seeing hundreds of people you had never met sitting and drawing or painting various series you worked on. Actually, some would be working on your series, and the people next to them would be working on series for rival networks, which would make it even more surreal.

I was always impressed with the work of the studios we worked with, Rough Draft, Yeson, Sae Rom, and several others. I remember thinking over the years that it was just a matter of time before these animators and studios would want to create original content, shows in Korean that they could watch on the air. By the early 2000s, much of the Korean animation industry had jumped head first into the murky waters of intellectual property development, along with a great deal of help from the Korean government, by way of KOCCA, the Korea Creative Content Agency.

The focus on service work had come out of a long history of Korean manufacturing. Conversely, the desire to create and own intellectual property probably came more from the marketing and publishing areas of Korean business and the desire to own the rights to the series they are producing, as well as the honor of seeing these Korean series get sold internationally.

I have met several newer studios over the years, through pitches and visits, and I have always sensed that frustration you have when you first start out doing something and you want everyone to appreciate what you are doing right away. I got a sense that the Korean government was looking at the American and Japanese industries and wondering why after six or seven years, Korea’s animation industry hadn’t caught up yet.

I have taken a number a pitches from these Korean studios over the years and one thing has been consistent — the amazing artwork. They make CGI look effortless and almost each show I’ve seen features amazing artwork. Direction and design in the pilots I look at is always topnotch.

However, I have watched a number of pilots wondering whether I’d watched something with a plot or characters, or just a study in movement. I often feel the same way watching Japanese animation, and I’ve always chalked it up to the idea that the way Japanese animators tell stories is just different from the way we westerners tell stories. No problem, I’d think, every culture deserves to have a national film style. But the issues kick in when the Korean studios want to sell these series to the US, Canada and Europe. Some of their series that remind me of independent films, but then I see they are targeted to preschool or 6-8 audiences. I guess that’s why we were invited there to give our speeches.

There was a mix of speakers from the US at DICON: Max Howard, David Voss from Mattel, Christopher Skala of HIT, Josh Selig of Little Airplane, Brian Konietzko and Seung Hyun Oh of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a long list of other speakers from Asia and Europe. I did my session with Celine Chesnay from France Television. Kevin Rafferty, the well known feature film visual effects supervisor gave a keynote speech along with Rintaro (aka Shigeyuki Hayashi), the Japanese director of Galaxy Express 999 and Metropolis.

They didn’t just cover the film and television industries. Other sessions focused on mobile and internet content, social networking, co-productions, financing, and the music industry.

For my speech, I did walk through a long list of things you must do to make a cartoon a good cartoon. After my presentation, I received a number of smart and well-thought-out questions. The most direct was, “be honest, what do you think are the weaknesses of Korean animation?” I said what I’d been saying right along, “You create amazing artwork here and direction is always great. You need to focus on character and story.” A few of the studios pointed out they had hooked up with British writers. That’s a start, I suppose.

All in all, it was a fun trip. There was a store called Aniland right near the hotel, with Totoro right on the sign next to the store’s logo. I bought some great toys for my kids. The Korean aesthetic is all about extreme cuteness. Their toys and designs are even cuter than Japanese characters. That’s good news if you have a four-year-old daughter. I bought all the toys from vending machines that looked like gumball machines. We have a good collection of Tofu-head magnets now.

However, I slept no more than ten hours in three nights so I have been spending the week catching up on that all important sleep.

This one’s worth a few guffaws…

(Thanks, Roque)

Danny Antonucci (Lupo the Butcher, Ed, Edd n Eddy) posted this refreshingly frank piece of advice on his Facebook page, and he’s allowed me to share it with everybody on the Brew. Even with all his years in the biz, Danny hasn’t forgotten what it’s all about:

Danny Antonucci’s 4 “C”s to Great Cartoons
1. CREATE (…new territories through art not technology)
2. CONTRIBUTE (…to the art form, not rape it for cash!)
3. CHALLENGE (…everything currently being done)
4. CHANGE (…don’t redo, copy, or repeat)
If you can’t adhere to any of these 4 “C”s, get the fuck out of animation.

One of the most interesting animated-related pieces I’ve read in a while: David OReilly discusses his technical and aesthetic approach to the short Please Say Something. His ideas are a polar opposite of mainstream computer animation:

My central idea in constructing the world of the film was to prove that something totally artificial and unreal could still communicate emotion and hold cinematic truth. The film makes no effort to cover up the fact that it is a computer animation, it holds an array of artifacts which distance it from reality, which tie it closer to the software it came from. This idea is in direct opposition to all current trends in animation, which take the route of desperately trying to look real, usually by realistic lighting and rendering, or by forcing a hand-made or naive appearance. At the time of writing, this trend shows no apparent signs of ceasing.

There has been a lot of growth in site-specific animation over the past few years, and artists like Blu and Pablo Valbuena are finding different ways to incorporate the built environment into animation. The video installation “Tetragram for Enlargement,” created by the Italian visual artist collective Apparati Effimeri, is set against a medieval castle, and it’s one of the trippiest marriages of architecture and animation I’ve seen to date.

Here’s something you don’t hear often: an analyst on Wall Street admitting they’re wrong. Richard Greenfield of Pali Research told the New York Times that he was “dead wrong” when he suggested that investors sell their Disney shares, in part because UP would flop. Prior to the opening of the film, Greenfield had said, “We doubt younger boys will be that excited by the main character,” and he also claimed the film lacked commercial appeal because there was no female lead. Now that UP has become Pixar’s second-highest grossing film domestically, Greenfield is backtracking. It’s worth noting that Greenfield has a history of being wrong about Pixar and Disney. In 2008, he’d been hesitant about the potential of Wall-E, and in March of this year, he predicted that Disney’s stock would crash to $12.50 a share whereas it has jumped to over $22 in the past couple months. There is no animation business plan more foolproof than creating work from a foundation of creative integrity. Pixar gets that; it’s too bad the analysts on Wall Street don’t.

(via Michael Sporn)

It was announced yesterday that the Academy will now nominate ten films for Best Picture. From their press release:

For more than a decade during the Academy’s earlier years, the Best Picture category welcomed more than five films; for nine years there were 10 nominees. The 16th Academy Awards (1943) was the last year to include a field of that size; “Casablanca” was named Best Picture. (In 1931/32, there were eight nominees and in 1934 and 1935 there were 12 nominees.) “Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,” commented Ganis.

One might coin this “the Wall-E decision”, as there was much speculation and controversy last year over Pixar’s Wall-E — that it could (or should) have been nominated for Best Picture.

This move to include more movies as nominees will allow more commercially successful films (i.e. big budget Hollywood fantasies) to compete with the artier fare (Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Milk, etc.), no doubt to help increase the ratings for the Oscar broadcast. Ten nominees could also boost box office gross and DVD sales for twice as many films.

But how will this affect the animated features? Will Pixar’s Up have a shot to go one-on-nine against the likes of James Cameron’s Avatar, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Sam Mendes Away We Go? Industry pundit Jeffery Wells thinks not.

Hollywood still places animation in a ghetto and nothing is going to change that. I hope Up, Coraline, The Fantastic Mr. Fox or some animated film can somehow crack the Best Picture category - but I won’t bet on it. Until perceptions change, I’m just glad we have the Best Animated Short and Best Animated Feature categories.

Speaking of which, at the mid-way point it’s looking like a great year for the Animated Feature category. There are already 13 releases set for 2009 (14 if you count Jim Carrey’s mo-cap Christmas Carol - I don’t). If a few more “dark horse” foreign films get submitted, as they usually do at the end of the year, that could trigger five nominees (I’m rooting for Mary & Max and Secret of Kells to get a legitimate U.S. release). However, recall that last year three eligible studio films were not submitted to the Academy (Fox ignored Space Chimps, Warner Bros. withheld Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Universal omitted The Pirates That Don’t Do Anything), thus forcing the Academy to consider only three nominees. It just goes to show, the major studios still control the process no matter how you perceive the results.