Paper, What Paper? The Annies are a project of love. Almost all of the labor is donated by hundreds of industry pros giving their time. The judging material is passed from hand to hand. From Nominating Chair, to Nomination Judges, back to Event Programming, then on to the Editor who selflessly cuts together the reel for the Nomination Screenings and the Annie reel for the Award Show.

There is a lot of handling by a lot of people and a lot of chances for something to go wrong. Surprisingly, very little does go wrong with the filmed categories. The problems always seem to happen with the paper categories, something always seems to get miss placed or out of order with Feature and TV Character Design, Production Design, or Storyboards. These people have worked hard they deserve to have their work seen.

The Annie ballots have to be in today at ASIFA. I turned mine in last night at DreamWorks. The sad thing was that I had to turn mine in with a couple of things incomplete, as did most of the other voters who had come out for the screenings. There was some mess up in the process with some of the paper categories and somethings could not be seen for judging.

Now I know that all of the work is done by volunteers that have real jobs and real lives and there is a lot of work and there is a basic chaos that sets in, in that kind of setup. Things are beings scanned and edited, and moved from volunteer to volunteer. The volunteers do a great and thankless job and are heroes but the paper categories have always been a problem by their very nature, always been the red haired stepchild. We know how to handle and produce film but paper is just a step in that process, not a finished product.

It is time to change the process. I would like to see the Pixar model followed in the future. They posted everything on a web site this year. It was right there for anybody to see. We wouldn`t have to paw through all the entries looking and comparing and holding up the start of the screening. I would like to see this done by every studio that has Character Design, Production Design, and Storyboards in competition next year. Then these people, these masters of visual storytelling, would truly get their due, would get a fair vote from their peers.
  ¶ 7:30 AM