The festival’s last day begins with Red Stick’s now-annual Pitch Contest. It might not as well attended as KidScreen’s similar event, but the presenters are every bit as passionate about their projects and after several days of tutoring from industry pros they’re ready to rock: Tim Raglan wants to turn his beautifully illustrated kids’ book Uncle Mugsy (featuring a stuffy bulldog and his mischievous niece and nephew in a Victorian canine universe) into a movie, followed by “many episodes or sequels depending on your personal preference;” Greg Farren and Jeremy Melton merge hot rodders (only their characters race spaceships, not cars), 1950’s-style sci-fi and rockabilly music into an inspired mixture called Crazy Eights; Digital Tap’s Martin Grebing presents Zap Squad, a team of adolescent superheroes (“they’re not your average kids next door”) on time travelling adventures; Patrick, a local cartoonist whose last name I missed offers Guns McMenanin, “the most bad-ass repo man in LA,” and Chris – again last name missing – does as much stand-up as pitching (“this is the most attractive crowd I’ve ever seen at an AA meeting”) while presenting two projects – Spells, a gross-out effort starring a trio of macabre witches (“mean-spirited fun for everyone”) and El Mucho Grande, Wrestler for Hire. (“He’s so big it took two women to give him birth.”)

Tim Raglan and his creation Uncle Mugsy.

Although Raglan’s project and pitch are charming (and his characters would definitely shine in animation), Crazy Eights deservedly takes home the Red Baton award. Beyond its fresh/retro look, the complex interrelationships (and conflicting agendas) of the show’s main and supporting characters promise plenty of juice beyond their week-to-week adventuring; if I ran Comedy Central I’d sign Farren and Melton up tomorrow.

Igor was Max Howard's first indie production with Exodus Prods.

The festival is in wind-down mode as producer Max Howard intros a screening of the independently-financed Igor. Afterwards Howard does a q&a, describing its labor-of-love creation headed up by former staffers of Disney’s shut-down Paris studio and the challenges – and freedom – of producing animation without major studio backing.

Howard outlines his career move from the London stage to American animation, beginning with allocating animation resources on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (“it was an 18-month job versus uncertain theater gigs”) and eventually heading up Disney’s Paris operation and exec-producing DreamWorks’ animated Spirit feature. According to Howard, Steve Buscemi signing on as Igor’s suicidal rabbit Scamper attracted other actors from the independent animation community, including Igor voice John Cusack and Molly Shannon as his monstrous (but charming) creation Eva.

All that’s left are screenings of Comet’s Around the World for Free and Nina Paley’s one-woman animated feature Sita Sings the Blues – before the evening’s Lifetime Career Achievement dinner in honor of Disney’s Mark Henn. It’s more than appropriate, considering the Disney/Princess and the Frog-centric tone of this year’s Red Stick: Henn is the animator of P&F’s Tiana, not to mention Ariel and Belle from you-know-which movies.

The event’s waiters are whisking our plates away before we have a chance to finish our meal when Max Howard intros Mark by calling him “the engine of the film” with the personal career goal of “having more personal footage onscreen” than anyone else. Howard adds that Henn’s way with Disney heroines has earned him the nickname of “the leading lady of animation.” Stacy Simmons presents the award, warning him that when Andreas Deja took home last year’s trophy it was mistaken for a bomb at airport security – “be careful how you wrap it.”

Henn comes to the podium, praising Red Stick as “up there with the world-class animation festivals…I thought you had to be 80” before receiving a lifetime award, then adds “I’m glad it didn’t take that long.” He acknowledges his debt to Frank and Ollie and calls himself “the tip of the iceberg” compared to the animators working on the film under him. He looks down at angled top of the trophy: “Andreas said it was sharp and pointy.”

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Friday is field trip day at the Red Stick Festival – It seems as if half of Baton Rouge’s school population has been bussed in to take part in the festivities. I share an elevator With Walt Santucci of Duck Studios, on his way to lead an all-day animation workshop with the local school kids. I bump into him again at days’ end; his group produced some 9 anti-global warming PSA’s, with some of the best work done, he says, by kids with no previous animation experience. If you teach them too much at once they start worrying if they’re doing it right or not…

I head down the hill to the Louisiana Art & Science Museum (aka LASM) auditorium where Rhythm & Hues’ Hans Rijpkema is waiting for a few field trippin’ classes to arrive so he can begin his session on how R&H built last year’s bigger, better, hulkier Incredible Hulk. We see the test clip the studio produced to snag the assignment (it goes on for a while as Hulkie smashes his way thru an office skyscraper), low-rez motion & anatomy tests, live-action video reference of the R&H animators grunting and snarling, and their after-houses goofball reel, starring a two-legged moose wearing a Speedo, the Hulk making funny faces and exploding into a half-dozen mini-Hulks, a quick glimpse of Cheney that draws boos from the crowd and Wilbur the pig transforming into a package of Oscar Meyer bacon.

Illusion of Life has taught a many an animator.

I meet Disney’s Doeri Welch-Greiner, hiding out in the Shaw Center intern’s lounge, editing down her next presentation to fit inside an hour’s time slot. The subject of Thomas & Johnston’s Illusion of Life pops up again, and Doeri talks about how Prince Naveen’s (from the upcoming Princess and the Frog) animator taught himself out of said book, not to mention the fellow from Brazil who did the same and in spite of knowing no English, showed up at the front door of Don Bluth’s Ireland studio and got himself a job.

Across the street in the ornate Old State Capitol Building (a fanciful structure perfect for that evening’s ‘Princess Ball’ – make sure your tiara’s on straight, girls!) Stuart Sumida offers a kid-friendly anatomy lesson on the topic of What Makes for Cute. Somebody give this man a cough drop! He’s growing hoarser by the second as he explains it’s all in head-to-body proportions and jaw-to-head ratios. He reveals his favorite Disney scene is when Tarzan realizes he’s been adopted (thanks to the difference in finger length between his and his mother ape’s hand) – “I freaking cry when I see this scene.”

Back at the LASM, Marlon West (P&F’s effects supervisor) is recapping a career path that led him to Disney. (Seems that animating nasal hairs for Encyclopedia Britannica was the perfect training for becoming an effects animator.) Rachelle Lewis takes over, sternly shushing a yakky crowd (“shut up or leave!”) to show a series of outstanding student reels that earned their creators industry employment. “7200 people applied for [a Disney] job and I had to watch all their reels – that’s why martinis are my friend.” Her final words of warning: “anything worth doing is hard.”

The disembodied voice of Blue Sky animator Jason Sadler (a sudden family emergency kept him home) fills the Shaw auditorium, narrating the slides onscreen tracing the conceptual and development art behind their Horton Hears a Who adaptation to the biggest crowd I’ve seen at the festival so far. The best photo reference for Horton’s elephantine wrinkles: chubby babies with overlapping rings of body fat. In a fascinating scientific tidbit, too long to go into detail here, Sadler explains how the visual impact of an endless, hot pink field of flowers was enhanced via ‘successive contrast.’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successive_contrast)

Technical whiz Scott Johnston surveys the use of three-dimensional objects and backgrounds in 2D animation, including those that preceded CGI (Cruella DeVille’s Rolls Royce in 101 Dalmations – a high-contrast miniature photographed and Xeroxed onto cels for painting) or clever use of distorted perspective going back to Pinocchio.

Bolt redesigned anatomy might have trouble walking let alone running.

Sumida returns, his voice all but gone as he outlines ‘The Biology of Bolt.’ The animal’s original, full-sized look would not have sold many plush toys, but a real-life dog with Bolt’s cuter look and redesigned anatomy might have trouble walking. (“His limbs are so short his knees would bang into his elbows.”) Sumida, a real-life biology professor who’s served as advisor to any number of animated features admits that thanks to his sideline “I get to hang out with incredibly cool people.” (Kinda like me, but don’t tell anybody.) By the way, the secret of giving animals human expressions: “it’s all in the eyebrows,” even when the real-life animal doesn’t have any).

Marlon West is back with the goodie we’ve been waiting all day for: story sketches, animation tests and a few finished shots from The Princess and the Frog. The transformed Prince Naveen, now a frog but still quite impressed with himself, kisses Prince Tiana with unfortunate results. (Fans of cool movie transformation scenes will be disappointed that neither metamorphosis takes place on camera.) A Bolt screening is supposed to follow the P&F preview, but first a bunch of plushie Bolts are tossed into the audience. (I had to elbow a grandma out of the way to snag mine.) I had intended to stay for the action sequence that begins the movie, but whoever was running the PlayStation was having a bit of trouble; for all I know he’s still in the Manship Theater scrolling through the machine’s endless menus and submenus in search of the blu-ray ‘play’ button…

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written by Joe Strike

Day 2 of Red Stick, and the multiple events begin. Oh for the power of Dr. Manhattan to split myself up into several Joes so as to cover everything, but all I can manage is to run to and fro, capturing a taste of this and that.

In an upstairs classroom at the Shaw Center Chris Williams and Dougy Pincott are handing out modeling clay to middle school students who are about to learn the rudiments of stop motion animation. Chris and Dougy are visitors from Animex, Red Stick’s partner festival in Middlesbrough England. “We’re similar towns,” Dougy explains, “we’re both post-industrial and regenerating ourselves” through a focus on digital technology and animation. He adds that their town also features a bridge running across a major river, like the one carry I-10 across the Mississippi just south of the Shaw Center.

Heather Kenyon gives the animation devoted a bible lesson.

Heather Kenyon’s bible clinic is well attended, as the AWN and Cartoon Network alum provides a PowerPoint primer into the mysteries of assembling a book that will help you sell your show to a skeptical executive. Her impression of a clueless would-be producer going on an endless discursive ramble is pitch-perfect, in all likelihood honed from hearing variations of it dozens of times. “People bring in their pet Chihuahua, or play their ukulele. One time an animation ‘Manly Man’ [she leaves unnamed] insisted on singing a romantic song” as part of his movie pitch.

A session on “The Future of the Content Market.” One panelist (you come in late, you miss the introductions) refers to a cable channel as “linear,” as opposed to non-linear, pick-&-choose online sites like YouTube and Hulu. Another notes her 22 year old stepdaughter isn’t just a multi-tasker but a “mega-tasker.” Tina Satomaro (I got her card at a session yesterday) advises that character development and story arcs don’t play online, where people are looking for a quick, free-standing entertainment zap.

Gerald's Last Day tugs at the heartstrings.

The first program of entries in the Student Film Competition takes place across the street at the Louisiana Arts & Sciences Planetarium auditorium. The room’s already dark when I arrive, but there’s no mistaking the presence of a reasonably sized crowd – perhaps 50-60 people, as opposed to the smaller turn-outs (perhaps 20-30 people) for the sessions at the Shaw Center’s Manship Auditorium. The films are mostly cgi, with some nice moments of performance, lighting and effects animation. My favorite of the bunch is cOcO nut, starring two characters who look like aboriginal drawings come to life, battling over the biggest coconut on their tropical island. I’m also impressed by Gerald’s Last Day, a stop-motion Chaplin-esque tearjerker about a pound-imprisoned bulldog scheduled to be put to sleep at 5 o’clock if he’s not adopted beforehand. (I’m told the extended freeze-frame happy ending was a technical glitch and not a lead-up to an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-type surprise.)  There’ll be several other screenings of competition entries (Stephen Beck, the festival’s host at the LSU Computational Center says a record 450 films were entered this year) but it looks like I won’t be able to attend them.

At lunch Stephen and Clint Ourso of the Illinois-based game design company ‘volition’ discuss video game platforms. Who knew the Wii doesn’t have enough computational power to support photorealistic games? (They did, not me.) Turns out its better at low res arcade games and its charm is in its simple interface, the one you wave around in your living room to play tennis on your TV screen.

Rachelle Lewis hosts a killer session: Hooray for Hollywood: Getting a Job in Animation. The secret: figure out what you’re good at and become very good at it, whether it’s modeling, rigging, lighting or personality animation. No talk of monetizing content here; instead Rachelle offers nuts-and-bolts advice and screens way-impressive student films that won their creators early entré into the business. She advises the attendees to study Thomas and Johnston’ The Illusion of Life (“carry it with you at all times”), find yourself a mentor, and oh yeah, “it’s very difficult to get a job right now.” Becoming a conceptual artist for an animation studio? “It’s the cherry on top of the cupcake on the yacht in the harbor.”

Stuart Sumida gives his presentation to an intimate crowd.

Speaking of small turnouts, why are there only seven people attending Stuart Sumida’s session on animal anatomy? Are the rest of the aspiring animators at the Festival crazy or just lazy? This guy has been an advisor on almost every animal-centric Disney film from The Lion King through Ratatouille and they’re missing out a million dollar opportunity to learn from a master. (Did you know that 70% of a four-legged mammal’s propulsion comes from its hind legs? Now I do.)

Doeri Welch-Greiner lays out what is needed for a killer portfolio.

It’s the same at Doeri Welch-Greiner’s Disney portfolio review: a mere five people gather to hear Doeri’s advice on assembling a killer portfolio. (Make sure to include a range of art styles and characters conveying emotions – and you might be in trouble if you can’t come up with “orthographic” drawings of how a character will look from a variety of angles.)

Deborah Todd lectures on story and character development, and how to make your characters more than stereotypes. (New age guru Deepak Chopra, motivational speaker Anthony Robbins and horoscope books were suggested as sources for ideas on infusing characters with specific personalities.)

Burnt out reading all this? Imagine how I felt spending all day running to one session after another. It was time to rest up at an umbrella-covered table at the Shaw Center’s outdoor café and gossip with some of those folks who needed a break too.

Finally got back to my hotel room to type this up & send it to AWN. An Email – sent out at 7:23 pm – is waiting with some interesting news not in the Red Stick program book:

Disney’s upcoming feature film, The Princess and the Frog, takes place in Louisiana, and audiences in the state’s capital will be among the first in the world to get a sneak preview as part of the Red Stick International Animation Festival on Friday, April 24, at 5:30 p.m. in the Manship Theatre.

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written by Joe Strike

Red Stick began today for real, sort of. An abbreviated session wrapped up around 4, in time for people to go out and enjoy the warm Louisiana sun – which they needed to do after spending the past several hours in the sub-zero temperatures of the Shaw Center’s Manship Theatre. (Don’t they know this is Earth Day, you’re supposed to cut back on the AC and all that?)

First session was dedicated to ‘New Business Models,’ which are actually combinations of old business models and guess what, the internet. Animation distributors and networks are on the lookout for “content that people are already connecting with,” according to panelist Leah Hoyer of the Disney Channel, adding that videos that spread virally (what they used to call ‘word of mouth’ before there was an internet) turn the internet into an ad-hoc focus group; if a comedy or animated video gets 500,000 hits in a few days, a major distributor can safely assume a lot more of that demographic will be interested in seeing the video too. Phrases like ‘branded entertainment,’ ‘monetize on-line content,’ ‘user-generated content’ and ‘DRM’ [digital rights management] were bandied about by all present. The takeaways: high-definition content is in demand – and practice your pitch on your friends before you go into a for-real meeting.

Comet’s Carmen and Raquel walked people thru the process of preparing one’s project for said meeting. (Register it with the US © office and – one I haven’t heard in a while – mail yourself a copy to prove your ownership)  Oh, and make sure you have a lawyer looking over any contract you’re thinking about signing, because there are people who will slap you on the back with one hand – and pick your pocket with the other. (Nobody actually said that, but it’s the catchphrase of Racket Squad, a TV show I used to love way back when – and it’s kind of appropriate anyway.)

Hi Dan! AWN’s own Dan Sarto was there, leading a panel on ‘Catching Audiences in the Net,’ a panel that included – Hi Heather! – formerly AWN’s own Heather Kenyon, now a globe-trotting animation and programming consultant. Way too much to summarize here (the opening night reception is starting in 5 minutes!) but guess what: the internet is vital in launching any kind of animated project, not to mention putting yourself on the map as a creative content creator; like the better mousetrap, a catchy, funny (and viral) video will have the online world beating a path to your door.

Red Stick is most definitely a pitch-oriented gathering. In fact, the festival would make for a great reality show: the through-line is 15 would-be animation producers preparing their pitches in workshops overseen by industry pros for the closing day’s Pitch Contest. The day-ending “Profiles of New Content” turned out to be an early pitching session with three hopefuls and one on-the-air-in-Korea series presented by their creators. (Synchronicity moment of the day: tween superheroes Zap Squad, meet teen gal superheroes .) Unlike the upcoming showdown, these folks shared their processes and frustrations in the course of creating their pitches with the freezing folks in the audiences.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network

written by Joe Strike

You can (almost) always tell an animator by their t-shirt, so I figured the young lady in the Supergirl tee waiting for the hotel shuttle at the Baton Rouge airport had to be in town, like me, for the Red Stick festival. The Supergirl fan turned out to be Carmen Llanos from Comet Entertainment, soon joined by her partner Raquel Benitez in a Chinese dragon tee. (Me, I’m wearing my Comic Book Legal Defense Fund shirt with the tough, healthily-chested cat babe pointing her gun right atcha and politely inquiring “who you tellin’ to shut up!?!”) Last year Carmen and Raquel were here with their Santa vs. Claus feature, the screening of which I missed due to an early departure. This year I’m staying to the very end, which means I’ll get to see their new one, Around the World for Free, which they tell me started as a TV pilot, became a feature and will spin itself off into a TV series after all.

Now here in the hotel lobby business office filing this entry, I’m sitting back to back with Marlene Sharp of Enemes, Inc., a Korean animation studio that’s done Higglytown Heroes for Playhouse Disney and the Stitch! DTV movie. She’s here - in a Barbie tee - to be one of the judges in Red Stick’s show pitching competition (and she types faster than me…)

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Reported by Joe Strike

Back in the pre-digital, pre-xerographic days of Disney animation, the Ink and Paint department was responsible for tracing the animators’ pencil drawings onto acetate cels and filling those transparent images with color. Technological advances rendered hand inking and painting a thing of the past, but the name lived on in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit as the Ink and Paint Club, an after-hours honky-tonk where the ‘toons’ entertained Hollywood bigwigs.

There’s a new Ink and Paint Club in town, the town being Baton Rouge Louisiana, and the ‘Club’ the outreach arm of the city’s Red Stick International Animation Festival to the local business community. On January 16 the Ink and Paint Club held its premiere luncheon with Walt Disney Animation Studio’s Emily Hoppe on hand as the guest of honor. Hoppe, the studio’s senior manager of creative marketing outlined the role Disney and The Princess and the Frog, the studio’s first 2D animated film in five years, will play at Red Stick’s April festival.

It’s a natural team-up for the festival and the studio: Red Stick is well on its way to becoming the pre-eminent animation event in the U.S., while Disney is looking to pump up the buzz for the New Orleans-set movie’s Christmas Day 2009 premiere. (The studio’s plans also include a six month program of Disney “Fairy Tale Classics,” running from November through March of 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art.)

The Princess and the Frog “celebrates the legacy of classic Disney animation,” Hoppe said, mentioning the studio’s more recent and ultra-successful 2D efforts like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. “It’s a return to the 2D fairy tale,” she added, “back to our roots.” Hoppe ran down the film’s “iconic” elements, including a prince, a princess, a wicked witch and a fairy godmother, all transposed to early 20th century N’awlins and set to a Randy Newman score. (The film is also Disney’s first since Mulan where the characters perform the film’s songs on camera.) The studio’s return to 2D is courtesy of directors John Musker and Ron Clements, the team responsible for mega-hits The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, the successful Hercules and the commercially disappointing Treasure Planet.

Hoppe screened several in-progress scenes from The Princess and the Frog to the audience. “This is the first time this level has been shown outside the Disney premises,” Hoppe told the audience, warning them the preliminary footage was “really rough,” switching between pencil test and finished animation or storyboard frames from shot to shot. The animators’ relish at bringing 2D back to the studio was clearly evident, their work evoking moments from the Disney classics including Peter Pan’s on-the-loose shadow and Baloo’s “Bare Necessities” Jungle Book strut. The clips also featured a pair of sly nods to the 2D process itself, with the pictures on a shuffling tarot deck turning into a flip book and later, a pair of illustrations on succeeding pages of a fairy tale book compared like animation extremes. The film’s Louisiana setting drew an appreciative laugh from the local audience when one character explains he’s “from far away,” which prompted a second one to ask “Shreveport?” (the state’s northernmost big city, some 340 miles north of New Orleans.)

Directors Clement and Musker have put Disney’s best 2D animators to work on the film. Bad guy Dr. Facilier, animated by Bruce W. Smith easily holds his own against the Jafars and Captain Hooks of Disney past; Eric Goldberg (Aladdin’s Genie) is responsible for the trumpet-playing alligator Louis, and superstar animator Andreas Deja (recipient of Red Stick’s first Lifetime Career Achievement Award at last year’s festival) animated Mama Odie, the film’s swamp-dwelling ‘fairy godmother’ stand-in and her pet snake Juju.

Even with all this talent working at full tilt, one wonders if The Princess and the Frog is the rebirth or the last gasp of Disney 2D animation. “It’s definitely the rebirth,” Hoppe says without a moment’s hesitation. “The studio has two separate pipelines in place, one for 2D and one for 3D. There’s a warmth in 2D you won’t see in CGI.” She credits Pixar’s maven and Disney animation head John Lasseter – the man whose CGI talent helped put 2D on the skids – for the studio’s return to hand-drawn animation. “John said 2D became the scapegoat for bad scripting.”

Hoppe described Red Stick as “our number-one priority” because of the festival’s artistic rather than competitive focus. “We’ve been keeping an eye on Red Stick,” she noted, adding that some of Disney’s “foremost animators” as well as several of the studio’s top technical people will be attending the festival in April; “it’s a battle to the death to see who gets to go.”

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