Volunteer Call: Animation Bookmarks Here is another Volunteer Call for the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive...

We are now networked with a high speed DSL connection. We need someone to put together a bookmarks file with web resources related to animation, organized into subfolders by categories. This set of bookmarks will be available at the three iMac workstations in the Archive office.

If you would like to help us create this bookmarks file, please email me at sworth@animationarchive.org.

Thank you
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive  ¶ 9:14 PM   

  Friday Catch Up:

Cool things happening at the ASIFA Archives. Glad that Steve Worth is taking time to address all the great progress in these pages. It is also nice to have someone else writing in this blog.

I spent the day brooding on not being able to see Were-Rabbit with my peers this next Monday. If you haven`t RSVPed then you will not be able to either, they filled up in record time. DreamWork, with a great hit like this on your hands you really need to put on a couple of screenings for the Annie voting public at ASIFA.

I also, while brooding, managed to worked on my animation, re-rendering all of my work reel just so that I could see what is missing. Looking good. Having a good time. Still missing some vital scenes.

Several months back I helped Fred Ladd pitch his Kimba Reunion to the ASIFA board. I then got very busy with Comic Con and left Fred and David Derks to put the whole project together. Which they did very will. I love projects like this where I don`t have to do any of the work. Here is a message from Fred about the event.

2005, marks the 40th Anniversary of KIMBA, The White Lion, which is our version of Osamu Tezuka's Jungulu Taitei Leo. I was recording the Pilot Film in New York City on November 9, 1965, when -suddenly!- all the lights went OUT! It was the day of the awful POWER FAILURE in New York! We had to stop recording, and return the next day, November 10, to complete the filmtrack.

So, on November 10 2005, 40 years to the day after we completed our version "The Birth of Kimba", ASIFA-Hollywood (the animated film society) will sponsor a 40th Anniversary Celebration that I'll be producing in the

Glendale Central Library
222 E. Harvard Street
Glendale, CA
7 PM.

We'll be showing that historic 1/2-hour program in its entirety.

Guest panelists will be:

• Famous animator Sadao Miyamoto (alumnus of Tezuka's Mushi Production)
  
• Jared Cook, translator & interpreter for Tezuka himself, plus
  
• Hollywood animator-and-Kimba-expert Shawn Keller - and
  
• Mrs Sonia Owens, original voice-cast member from that classic series (flying in from her home in New Hampshire!)

Tickets are $6 for ASIFA-Hollywood members, $8 for non-members. This event will be THE DEFINITIVE REVIEW of the famous KIMBA Series, and a frank look at charges made even today that Disney's "The Lion King" was inspired by Osamu Tezuka`s "KIMBA, The White Lion,".seen on U.S. television 30 years earlier.

Kind Regards,
Fred Ladd

Who lives down in deepest darkest Africa? Come out to the Glendale Library and find out.  ¶ 9:01 PM   

  Volunteer Call: Archive Blog Redesign Now that we've begun work on the archive, we need a way to quickly communicate with the public about our progress. A static website won't cut it for that, and a separate blog splits our message into two separate URLs. I'm looking for a volunteer that is familiar with HTML, CSS and Blogger to create a cutom template to merge the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Homepage and Blog Page into one Blogger driven website. If that sounds like something you would like to help out with, give me a call Tuesdays or Thursdays between 1pm and 9pm at the Archive office... 818 842-8330.

I will be posting more Volunteer Calls soon, so if you want to help but this particular project isn't up your alley, more possibilities will be coming.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive  ¶ 2:12 PM   

  Archive Update: We're Networked I'm posting this from the main Scanning Station at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. Today, a tech type person came out and networked all four computers and installed DSL. Paul Abramson stopped in to help burn backups of the Clampett cartoons... broadcast quality copy of Coal Black included! We updated all of the system software on all five computers. They're running like a dream now. Wendell Washer is going to come by sometime next week and help install cards and RAM into the iMacs.

Things are moving along nicely. I'll be ready to start working on the database next week.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive  ¶ 7:46 PM   

 


Were-Rabbit Screening Cursed with Personal Bad Timing:

I am so major bummed out. I love Wallace and Gromit. I have been in love with them since Grand Day Out. I have been following The Curse of the Were-Rabbit for almost 2 years. But I work Monday night October 3rd. I am teaching a class that night at Cal State Fullerton. Nick Park is god and I am going to miss the ASIFA-Hollywood screening of his new movie.

That means that I will go to a screening with little sticky faced kids that talk through the whole film and parents with cell phones and I will be taken out in handcuffs because I tried to stuff a large size popcorn container down the throat of some one who is telling her best friend Beth about her new fall wardrobe and when Were-Rabbit finally comes on the TV in the pen somebody named Bubba will want to watch Martha Steward. It is not fair.

For those of you not fore-doomed to a life in the big house, the screening that I can`t go to is:

Monday, October 3rd 2005
Cinerama Dome at Arclight Hollywood
6360 W. Sunset Blvd.
Hollywood, CA

7:30 PM

RSVP 818-695-6506

You and your family are invited (limit 4 tickets)  ¶ 8:29 AM   

  Calling All Volunteers:

Tonight, Sept 28th, is the monthly ASIFA Volunteers Meeting at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Center.

2114 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, CA

The meeting is at 7 PM.

With the start up on the archive this is an exciting time at ASIFA. Come be part of the excitement. We will be signing up people to work during the times that the archive is open. (Tuesdays and Thursday 1 to 9) This is your chance to be part of this important project. This is your chance to touch the history of animation.

(If you are one of my students this is your chance to get 2 points of Extra Credit - and if you volunteer to work at the archive then that is another 4 points)  ¶ 11:11 AM   

  Vintage Mickey a Must Have:

Walt liked to claim that it all started with a mouse. Of course before it started there was a rabbit, and before that a little girl named Alice, and even before that a cat named Puss-N-Boots.



I just picked up the DVD Vintage Mickey at Target - $14.95. For years I have made due with The Spirit of Mickey edited version of Steamboat Willie. The scene where Mickey uses the mother pig`s undercarriage as an accordion was sadly missing from the earlier version. (above on the left)



What Walt failed to say when he was talking about it all starting with a mouse was that said mouse was a bit of a rat when he first hit the screen. In Plane Crazy, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon animated and also on the Vintage Mickey disk, Mickey tries to force himself on Minnie.

Minnie slaps him and he dumps her out of the plane, catches her by doing a loop and tries to force himself on her again. So she jumps out of the plane to get away from him and uses her bloomer as a parachute. Not the Mickey I remember from my childhood.



This is a very important cartoon. This singlehanded Ub Iwerks animation (700 pages of straight ahead animation per day) was created in 2 weeks time with Walt and Roy and their wives working all night to do the ink and paint and Ub working all day and night to save the studio after Mintz ripped off Oswald the not so lucky for Walt or Mintz Rabbit.

This is a great DVD with a lot of very early Mickey Mouse cartoons. A Mickey you are not use to seeing. The disk is not as flashy as the Disney Treasures disks but it is filled with hard to find early Mickey Black and White cartoons. Pick up the disk and see how it really all started with the mouse.  ¶ 10:36 AM   

  Animation Archive: Work Is Progressing We enter our second week of operation with a formidable stack of over 100 DVD-ROM backups! Jason Jones and Paul Abramson stopped by to help out, and the three of us kept all four computers burning, backing up copies of the films donated by John Kricfalusi. We are maintaining two backups of each film, one to be stored at the archive, and another to be stored off site. We took a break from burning to view Popeye Presents Eugene The Jeep on the high definition 30 inch cinema display. Everyone agreed that the video and sound quality was amazing.

Thursday, the technician is stopping in to install the network and activate our internet connection. That will allow us to bring all of our software up to date and make it a lot easier to pass files between computers. Stop by and see how we're doing!

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive Project  ¶ 11:37 PM   

  The Belgium Connection Maybe a Little Explained:

I love a mystery and it lookss like we still have one with the large readership in Belgium. Benjamin De Schrijver writes in to say that he may be some of the cause for multiple page hits but he would have to be opening his blog bookmarks page 25 or 35 times a day to be the sole reason for the high Belgium page hit percentage.

As far as I know, the animation community in Belgium isn't much bigger than anywhere else. There are - I think - 3 schools that teach animation, and I've heard of only one Belgians-only animation forum. I also don't know about too many animation studios here.

I think the biggest part of the Belgian community is more into independent, alternative animation, thanks to Raoul Servais, who was the founder of the most prominent animation school in Belgium. And on the CGSociety forums, I have the feeling that the community these days is more about rigging and vfx than about character animation.

One thing that might boost the postcount a bit is something else, though. I've got quite a list of blogs I visit daily, and I've all put them in a bookmarks folder in my Firefox browser. Because there are so many, reading all the new posts mostly takes more time than I want it to, if I visit only 1 time a day. So I've gotten in the habit of opening that bookmarks folder every time I start up or shut down my computer, so I usually don't spend over 5 to 10 minutes each time I read the blogs.

But of course this has as a result that I open a lot of blogs that haven't gotten any updates yet, which could lead up to a bigger Belgian visitors number than actually is the case. I don't know how many readers your site has, though, so I don't know if that could be responsible for as many as 6% of the total. Maybe I should start using RSS feeds more often?

Anyways, that's only one possibility. If that's the reason, sorry for the confusion, and please send an e-mail my way, so I can change my habit to RSS. If not, maybe I'm looking for the Belgian community in the wrong places, and you could hook me up with some e-mail addresses from the other mailing Belgians?

So sorry, or thanks ;-)

--
Benjamin De Schrijver

P.S. Benjamin, don`t change your blog viewing habits. I will take the extra page hits. I don`t mind the inflated numbers as long as I am not the one inflating them. So tell me more about Raoul Servais. He sounds like a fascinating and important animator that I would like to know more about.  ¶ 6:24 AM   

 

Calling Readers in Belgium:

I spent the weekend animating. Did a new opening title piece for my animation, so I am feeling pretty good this morning. I have an appointment later today and my Monday night history of animation class at Cal State Fullerton. Good group, just read and graded their first assignment. This group is on the ball. We are into talkies and just a little after the Mintz take over of Oswald. The early 30s, great time, lots of fun stuff coming out of New York studios.

On other fronts I keep an eye on where my readership come from. Tracking software with pie charts and bar graphs. And I have notices something strange of late. It seems that I have a large number of readers in Belgium. Anywhere from 3% too as high as 6% of my total readership on any given day are from Belgium. That is what my tracking software claims and I believe it.

That leads me to the conclusion that there is a very strong animation community in Belgium that I know very little aboutt. I asked Tom Knott, the guy on the Board most into world animation and he said that he believed that there was a strong animation community there but could not tell me much more about it in the time we had to talk.

I thought I would go straight to the source so if you are part of the Belgium community of animators that read these pages I would like to hear from you and about you and your animation community. And I think that my readers would also like to know about you. larry@agni-animation.com P.S. make sure to put something in the subject line of the email that will let me know that this is a real email not a spam email. I don`t want to delete the good stuff.   ¶ 7:21 AM