Stuff From Today...

The Zeldin...

I've been informed that Gerry Zeldin will have an opening reception for his new show on Sunday, October 14, from 2-4 PM (remarks at 2:30). The show is at the the AGH on 123 King St. West in Hamilton.

Life...

Feels good to be back...

John Lounsbery Linetest

Embedded at left and found here.

Assisted by Chuck Williams.

Ottawa (Last Day)

First thing I saw today was the amazing panel on the making of the Goofy short. It was paneled by Stevie and Kevin (the directors), Marlon West (FX), Mark Henn, and Tamara Boutcher (Producer)





Also, there was the final showing (best of festival)

The list of winners:
Best Animated Feature: Persepolis

Best Independant Short Animation: Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor

Best Student Animation: Milk Teeth

Best Commissioned Animation: Golden Age

Best Canadian Animation: Sleeping Betty
Honourable Mention: I Met The Walrus

School Showreel: Bezalel Academy for Art and Design (Israel)

Independant Shorts:
Narrative Short Animation under 35 minutes: Madame Tutli-Putli

Experimental / Abstract Animation under 35 minutes: Framing (Bildfenster / Fensterbilder)
Honourable Mention: Teat Beat of Sex [2007] Signe Baumane, USA

Student Animation:
Adobe Prize for Best High School Animation: Herbert

Undergraduate Animation: Doxology

Graduate Animation: t.o.m.

Commissioned Animation:
Promotional Animation: National Lottery ‘The Big Win’

Music Video: OOIOO ‘UMO’

Television Animation for Adults: John and Karen

New Media:
AniBoom Prize for Animation Short Made for the Internet: L’eau Life

Animation Made for Children:
Best Short Animation: Zhiharka
Honourable Mention: Nightmare at School
Honourable Mention: Aston's Stones

Television Animation for Children: Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends 'Squeeze the Day'
Honourable Mention: Pocoyo 'Dance Off'

NFB Public Prize (Voted by the Audience): Sleeping Betty (Isabelle au bois dormant)

And with that, Ottawa's done!

Ottawa (Day Four)

Second last day of the festival! It's been awesome so far!



First thing I was able to catch was (most of) the Kids Competition (Shorts). Bora Moon's film, "Special Delivery" is pretty great.



The Teletoon award winners were also announced today. 1st prize in the high school division was Aven Fisher's stop motion flick about a Chameleon, "Herbert". Continuing Education went to Nathan Boey's "Family Picture", and Most Promising Student went to Trevor Jimenez's Key Lime Pie. For those wanting to know about Sheridan winners, James Higuchi's "Babushki" won third place in the Con. Ed, and Brandon Scott's "Cruel Fauna" won third place in Most Promising Student. I don't remember all the rest of the winners, but congrats to all who got in! Here is the full list of screening.



Short Competition 4 was probably the weakest of the pack, but still featured some great films. Matthew Walker's funny situational comedy "John and Karen", Ariel Belinco & Michael Faust's "Beton", Marc Craste's "National Lottery", and Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol's "Mauvais Temps" were the notable films.



I also attended the "Blogging and Animation" panel consisting of Jerry Beck, Jeff Hasulo, Michael Barrier, and Mark Mayerson, and discussed motivations for posting, the volatility of the medium, its benefits and shortcomings, among many other things. Quite the intelligent panel.



The international showcase is always a packed powerhouse, and this year was no exception. Standouts were Stefan Eling's "Cyber", Rune Christensen's "Down the Road", Arnaud Demuynck's "Breakout", Anna Solanas and Marc Riba's "Violeta", Grzegorz Jonkajtys's "Ark", and of course, Disney's Goofy short, "How to Hook Up Your Home Theater". Disney's new foray in 2D looked great and packed lots of gags - I just wish it were longer!

Anyways, looking forward to the last day here in Ottawa!

Ottawa (Day Three)

Caught quite a bit yesterday and what's turning out to be a great festival.

The fairly strong showing included standouts like the hypnotic "A Country Doctor" by Koji Yamamura, The manic "Exit 2" by Satoshi Tomioka, and "I Met the Walrus" by Josh Raskin. Check out the full list here.


Marlon West from Walt Disney Animation Studios was in attendance yesterday to give a presentation on the Paperless system in "How to Hook Up Your Home Theater". Of note, the Disney studio chose to use Toon Boom Harmony with Wacom Cintiqs for the rough animation, cleanup, and color of their animation level and plan to use it for future productions (such as the Princess and the Frog). I noted too that there were still holdouts (Such as Andreas Deja) against using the paperless system, so they have also designed a traditional workflow that eventually ends up in harmony as well. Cool stuff.

I also caught the Saul Steinberg and Animation screening and the Animator's Picnic, both of which were exactly as expected. If you're a fan of Saul Steinberg, definitely check out the screening!

Ottawa (Day Two)

Caught three short showings this time round.



The Canadian Showcase consisted of mostly more abstract work. The standouts for me were Casper Konefal's "Kat Fight", Chris Walsh's "The Magic Projector", and Julie Rocheleau's "The Flour Face Ballad". If you plan to attend, check out the full lineup here.


Short Competition 2 was probably the best I've seen all festival (so far). Standouts were the clever "Paradise" by Jesse Rosensweet, the Supinfocom short "8848", and Claude Cloutier's "Sleeping Betty" (Probably the best short I've seen here so far). Full list here



I also got to check out Short Competition 5, featuring the notable "Moodbot" by Rob Shaw, NFB's "Madame Tutli-Putli", and Aardman's "Pearce Sisters". Full lineup here.

Ottawa (Day One)

Just got in to catch Short Competition One at the OIAF.

Standouts (for me) were Gabriela Gruber's "Strange", Ian Mackinnon's "Adjustment", Trevor Jimenez's "Key Lime Pie", The Gobelins Short "Cocotte Minute", And Kazuto Nakazawa "Hairy Tale" (Produced at Production I.G.).

It was great to see some of the shorts I have seen in the past up on a film screen and a treat to see all the films that I hadn't seen at all.

Though, for the first time since I've been at Ottawa, they ran into technical difficulties that put the showing to a halt and one short was only partially screened, with the last not being screened at all.

The whole list of films screened in Competition One can be found here.

Life

I'm heading to Ottawa tomorrow for the festival. Hope to see you all there!

Some Trash...

Unused and unusable designs for the short.









More to come from Joe in the future...

Sheridan Animation Links...

Mark Mayerson has started an informal and unofficial Sheridan Animation blog setup mainly to point to people who are currently in the Sheridan Animation Program. It's split up by year and is a very handy resource.

Check it out here.

If you are a Sheridan Animation student and not on this list, make sure to email Mark Mayerson @mark(dot)mayerson(at)sheridanc(dot)on(dot)ca.

Back in Action!

Just a quick post....

JibJab released two new Starring You! Shorts - Cancan and Square Dance. I worked on both of these and it's great to see them out.

And by the way..

I am one of the default heads on both of these videos (Diana's the other). Pretty disturbing. I guess now know what it felt like for Mr. Worrel to be the default heads for the rest of the dances...



I'll be back to regular posting in a jiffy! Sorry for such a long dry spell! (Probably one of the longest ever (or at least, in a long time...)

Coming up soon is the OIAF (Ottawa Internation Animational Festival). I will for sure be blogging from there starting this wednesday. I hope to see you all there, and hope to post about the Festival for those who can't make it. For all students who haven't gone to Ottawa before, I'd highly recommend it - It's a great way to get some inspiration heading into the year!

JibJab!

Well today is my last day at JibJab. I'm heading back to Sheridan to kick off my last year!

So what to say? I can't believe it's been four months already - it literally felt like two weeks - that I was just here and now I have to leave.

Being in California has truly been an eye-opening experience. I would highly recommend to any of you Sheridan readers or anyone in Canadaland to visit the L.A. and Bay areas to check out the animation scene. Everything is truly happening in California and you don't really appreciate it until you see it.

As for JibJab, some of you may be wondering what they do, who they are, and what I did with my time in sunny Santa Monica.

JibJab was started on October 1st, 1999 and can only be described as a fast-moving, manic studio creating content specifically for the web. I'm definitely fresh full of links to educate you guys about JibJab. First, check JibJab's own About page to see a brief history of the studio. JibJab has also been featured on Cartoon Brew (What JibJab Could Teach TV, JibJab's Big Box Mart, as well as other great blogs like Mark Mayerson's (Get Out of the Kitchen, The Great Sketch Experiment, and Here).

But what's really all the hubbub? What makes JibJab different than any other studio? I'd recommend checking out those links, as they'd be able to express it better than I, but its quite clear that JibJab is a novel example of creative web economics.


What JibJab is doing by creating content for the web is bypassing permission or guidance from anyone but themselves, to an increasingly captive audience (over 275,000,000 jokes have been served on JibJab.com, has an active mailing list of over 750,000 viewers who are constantly updated with the latest from JibJab, and their latest hit, Starring You, has been a resounding success (If you don't believe me, check out the "public heads" tab on Starring You - there are over 600 pages of heads uploaded to be used publicly by users - with 24 heads on each page. That's a lot of heads! - And this doesn't even count the much larger sum of privately created heads, nor the amount of Starring You! movies created in total)).

JibJab's Starring You was recently featured on Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" (I can't believe I prepped a file that would have been seen by so many people!), the company's work has been repeated featured on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and has partnered with large media empires like MSN in the past (and continues to do so).

I think many artists can appreciate an audience like that, and especially not having to answer to any of the gatekeepers who run those businesses. A lot of people are convinced that blogs, social networks, and the new "Web 2.0" is a new frontier and that there's money to be made (Even these old fogies think so!).

JibJab never stays still. You can see from Starring You! that they are already integrating themselves into social networks and blogs, with a built-in embed feature that allows users to easily post these videos to their myspace and facebook accounts, as well as to their blogs. While JibJab.com essentially is the YouTube.com for joke videos, they differ in that they create original content as well. It's pretty clear, though, that Starring You! is a step up.

Starring You! is a flash app that allows you to cut out a picture, and paste it onto one of five premade dances, to much hilarity. Starring You! lives and relies completely on JibJab.com, even if it pops up on another site. The fact that a) the content is personalised, and b) the content is stored on JibJab's servers means that the hits and viewership is always allocated to JibJab. This is far cry from the big networks, who have seen their shows being repeatedly uploaded to video hosting sites like YouTube, where they lose their viewership and ad revenue from content that they funded. And the networks don't really seem to be getting much better at integrating into the new landscape - they are simply using the medium to advertise content on their other platforms (Such as metacafe.com's Bourne Ultimatum Mashup Channel). Users can do creative things with JibJab's content (like this, I guess), but it's definitely limited and hardly stealing content or popularity away from the brand. But that's enough about JibJab as a company. What's it like to be an animator working for them?

JibJab's forward thinking isn't only really limited to just their content, but the creation of their content. Because they don't have to answer to any other higher powers and money grabbers, the heads of the studio call all the shots. And in this case, those heads are the maniacal (in a good way) balls of enthusiasm that are Evan and Gregg Spiridellis. The brother team of animator and business person works extremely well, and having the guy you're working for is versed in the ways of animation himself is a never-ending blessing. But because an animator is calling the shots, there aren't really those unnecessary revisions from higher-ups, or producers grabbing for control - just the Spiridellis Brothers a few steps away in the office. While production is a small group of people, it's pretty closely-knit with everyone working together on just about every project, with Evan upstairs coming up with even more maniacal things to do with his studio. In the time I've been at JibJab, I've gotten the chance to work on projects (in some capacity) that featured live action, puppets, stop-motion, flash, 2D, After Effects, and the innumerable combinations of all of the above.

The other fantastic thing were the people working at Jibjab. Kevin, Nate, Will, and Dave in production were great to work with (you guys in programming were really swell too - there's just so many of you!), but just as exciting was working with a bunch of students from Calarts (Matt, Ian, Diana, Joe, Dimitri), as well as meeting so many more (Lorelay, Brigitte, Ed, Christian, Mario, Adrian, Sue, Alex, Minkyu, Matthias, and Nick). These people were all great artists and I hope to work with them sometime in the future.

I will definitely be missing SoCal! San Diego Comic-Con was absolutely incredible, I loved both San Diego and San Francisco (and to a lesser extent - Los Angeles), and possibly best of all, got to check around the studios like Sony, Dreamworks (The picture to the left is the beautiful fountain on the DW campus) and Pixar, as well as Calarts. And I will most certainly be missing living on the beach.

Anyways, this post was overly-huge because I'm about to set off on a cross-country road trip from Vancouver to Toronto before (and maybe even a little after) school starts. I doubt I'll be blogging much (if at all) in this week-or-so time that it will take to get to Ontario, so see you guys on the other side! As a parting shot, here is my awesome business card (both sides in one image):

Fantasia...

Michael Sporn has posted some amazing drawings from a Fantasia Book by Deems Taylor published back in 1940. Check it out..

Also, check out the new linetest I found of a scene in Fantasia for Tin Soldier. Embedded at left.

Ahh Venice...

My last weekend in California.

Makes me sad.

Ma Joe

A failed attempt at a design for Mama Joe

Quick Sketch:


A different approach:

Today in featured videos.. (and stuff)

Check out Robota, embedded at left.



Also, check out the work of the french animation school, La Pourdrière.



Last, but not least, check out The Cold Rush, a supinfocom short.

Thanks to Deep for the heads up about La Pourdrière.

A Beegee

Schedule...

So, I've got my schedule for this upcoming year at Sheridan, for those who want to know.

Monday
Senior Animation Project Lab with Bruno Degazio (11 - 1PM)
Senior Animation Project Lab with Michel Hannan (2 - 4 PM)

Tuesday
Advanced Figure Drawing and Art Direction with Gerry Zeldin (9 - 12 AM)
Social Movement and Protest with Paul Angelini (1 - 4 PM)

And that's all folks! 5 day weekend!

Let me know if you're in my class or pop me your schedule in the comments. Definitely gearing up for the year to start!