The “How to Make a Baby” festival tour continues, starting this coming Saturday with the first annual Stop Motion Film Festival in Los Angeles. This is the first festival I’ve heard of that’s dedicated entirely to stop motion animation. It’s in a tiny venue (55 seats!) in Echo Park, so if you’re in LA and love the medium, be sure to get there early! Here’s the whole schedule for the next few months:
So it looks like I’m going to be speaking at SIGGRAPH, which means… I get to go to SIGGRAPH! Woot! I’ll be on a panel about Animal and Creature Animation, alongside Jim Brown of Tippett Studios and Glen McIntosh of ILM, and moderated by my pal Luci Napier of Animation Mentor. I’m still giddy from the experience of animating Toothless and the other dragons in How to Train Your Dragon, and I’m intensely curious about what the other two panelists have to say about their work, so it should be a really fun conversation all around. The whole thing is happening on Wednesday, July 28 from 1:30-3:30pm in Hall K at the Los Angeles Convention Center. See you there!
Update: unfortunately, the SIGGRAPH panel had to be canceled due to a lack of space at the convention center. We may find another venue for this panel in the near future though– the fine folks at AM are working on it, so stay tuned!
We received our first official film festival rejection letter this morning via email. It was kind and gracious and encouraging, and beautifully written. I was so touched by the letter, in fact, that I wrote back with a quick note thanking them for the courtesy of letting us know.* I wasn’t expecting a response, it just felt like the right thing to do. Minutes later, I got an answer back from the festival director. They had sent me the wrong letter by mistake. Our film was accepted after all!
That festival was the Nevada City Film Festival, where How to Make a Baby will play in late August. Over the next two months it’ll also screen in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and New York City. It looks like the festival organizers have put together some amazing programs, so if you live near any of those cities, I highly recommend checking them out in person. You can click the images above for the dates and details, and as always, see our festivals page for the whole list of events.
*Many festivals don’t bother to inform filmmakers that their films have been rejected: you have to wait ’til they release the list of accepted films, and then search for your film in the list, a rather heartbreaking process if you were hoping to get in and didn’t!
I swear I’ve experienced things exactly like this during hypnagogic moments (those naturally occurring dreamlike hallucinations that sometimes happen as you’re falling asleep) as a teenager. But this guy actually spent five months in front of Flash with a tablet and stylus, making it real for the rest of us. This is what animation is all about. (via Cartoon Brew).
If you liked this video, you might also want to go back and watch Mathieu Labaye’s Orgesticulanismus one more time. That link takes you to a high-quality version I just found, with subtitles, which clarifies the intent of the film and makes the slow part just as enjoyable as the fast part… give it a look!
For someone with colored-letter synesthesia, these kids’ toys are usually a frustrating thing to look at, because they generally get my colors completely wrong. So when I see one that gets more than a couple of letters even close to correct, I notice. This one nails the colors of B, P, S and Y, and is well within reason on M, R, and W. Given that orange and pink aren’t in this set’s pool of colors to choose from, even the E and the U are pretty close. Would I buy this set because of that? No, but it did make me stop and take a second look…
Andy James works with Chautauqua students, including Shayla Malm, left, during a recent music class. Photo by Elizabeth Shepherd
My friend Andy James teaches elementary school on Vashon Island, a rural community a short ferry ride from Seattle. He’s got a real passion for teaching, and my conversations with him about it always leave me inspired. His latest project is no exception: faced with a new role as music teacher, he decided the thing to do would be to get the kids to compose, perform and record an entire album. And they did it. Not just any album, mind you: a concept album made entirely of original songs written by the kids, based on a South American folk story called “The Whistling Monster”. Now they’re selling the CD to raise funds for the school (and in the process help save Andy’s job, which like many teachers’ is on the chopping block). I haven’t heard the music yet, but if I know Andy it’ll be worth a listen!
The whole operation is pretty low-tech, so as of now you can’t buy the CD online.Update: Chautauqua Elementary School has made the CD available online! You can order it here in MP3 form or as a physical disk. Take a listen, and leave a comment below if you’ve got anything to say!
Two more festivals will be screening How to Make a Baby next Saturday night (May 22nd) in two different cities. The Santa Fe Reporter’s 3 Minute Film Festival (at the Lensic Performing Arts Centre, 211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe, New Mexico), and a reprise screening of the Santa Barbara Minute Film Festival (at Samy’s Camera, 614 Chapala Street in Santa Barbara, California). Apparently last week’s SBMFF was so popular that they sold out the entire theater, so they’ve scheduled a second screening for everyone who was turned away at the door the first time.
The film has also brought home some accolades: it earned an Honorable Mention from the Disposable Film Fest, and was voted in the Top Five by the jury at the SBMFF. We’ve submitted it to a bunch of other festivals, so stay tuned for updates. If you want to keep track of the all film’s screenings and awards, you can find the whole list on the project’s festival page.
The DFF was such an overwhelmingly fun experience, it got us completely hooked on the film festival buzz. So over the past month I’ve been submitting “How to Make a Baby” to various festivals, and we’re starting to hear back from some of them. One of them, the Santa Barbara Minute Film Festival, is right around the corner! It’s happening on Saturday, May 1st at 8pm at the Faulkner Gallery (40 East Anapamu Street) in Santa Barbara, California. I won’t be able to make it to the event in person, unfortunately, but if you happen to be in the area, stop by the screening and let me know how it goes!
Hey “How to Make a Baby” fans: remember that super cool film festival we were in last month? Well, they’ve opened up their competitive shorts program to voting by the public. If you liked our film, please:
If you can see the embedded video above, just click the little heart to let them know you “like” the film. Also, one voter selected at random will win something called a “DFF Survival Kit”. (Personally, I didn’t find DFF particularly hard to survive, but I’m sure it’s a very cool kit, whatever it is!) Voting closes May 31st.
Just got back from the wrap party for “How to Train Your Dragon” in Hollywood. At one point, a bunch of us animators were hanging out on the dance floor, and there was this line of people all taking photos of us at once. These two photos, by Jen Stern and Lilian Ku, must have been shot within a fraction of a second of each other. So I stitched them together into an animated gif. Check us out in 3D!
