Awards

Short of the Week Selects Best Short Films of 2013

The website Short of the Week, which has established itself as one of the preeminent online forums for short film discourse, has announced the winners of their 2014 awards, honoring projects that "took the torch of short film and charged into the unknown [and] explored new genres, new characters, new styles, and left an impression upon us we can’t ever shake."

Interviews

Animation Breakdown’s Alex McDonald and Kevin Sukho Lee on Launching A New Festival

The Los Angeles indie animation event of the season takes place tomorrow, Saturday March 8th, at The Cinefamily. Animation Breakdown Roundup! is a collection of over two dozen shorts by seasoned indie stars (Vince Collins, Emily Hubley), current filmmakers (Kirsten Lepore, Takeshi Murata, Devin Flynn, Allison Schulnik, Galen Pehrson, Amy Lockhart, Matt & Paul Layzell, Garrett Davis, Charles Huettner, Caleb Wood, Alex Schubert) and next-wavers (Peter Millard, Sean Buckelew, Quique Rivera Rivera.)

Award Season Focus

‘Feral’: The Art of the Oscar-Nominated Shorts

In this special Cartoon Brew series, we asked the five nominees of the 2013 Best Animated Short Academy Award to discuss the artwork of their films. Today we begin this exclusive look at the shorts with "Feral," an independent film directed by Daniel Sousa.

Animators

“When the Wind Blows” Director Jimmy Murakami, RIP

Japanese-American animation legend Jimmy Murakami, who played an important role in the development of Ireland's animation industry, has died at the age of 80, reported the organization Animation Ireland. The cause of death is unknown.

Cartoon Brew Pick

“RGB” by Meinardas Valkevicius

RGB" is an unusual animated film that conveys the story through forms, movements and colors. "RGB" tells a modern story that can happen or already happened for many of us.

RIP

Michael Sporn, A Passionate Film Director, RIP

Animator and filmmaker Michael Sporn, a man who represented the spirit and vitality of New York's animation scene as much as any other single individual, passed away from pancreatic cancer on January 19. He was 67.

CGI

Pixar Makes Painterly CG: New Research Could Change The Look of Their Films

Last summer at SIGGRAPH, Pixar presented a paper offering some clues about one of the major new directions that CG feature animation is headed. The paper, "Stylizing Animation By Example," explored how filmmakers could achieve more expressive rendering styles that disregard the perfect boundaries of computer graphics rendering and mimic traditional painting techniques.

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