General Membership Meeting This Sunday, April 7
This Sunday April 7th!!!…
ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum is proud to announce the second annual General Membership meeting! It is our chance to meet as a group, invite others to join and have an engaging discussion on ways to improve our animation education!
This year we will be meeting on Sunday April 7, 1:00-5:00PM at USC Room SCB104 (The Animation Building of the School of Cinema).
The topic of this years meeting is “Short Films…Long Process” Charles Grieb (CSUF) and myself (Aubry Mintz, CSULB) will be hosting a panel with the Annie Award nominated student filmmakers and their educators discussing helpful ways to motivate students to finish their films. What better way than to hear it straight from film makers!
We will then open up the discussion to the group as a whole to continue to find solutions to challenges we are facing in helping students to finish their films.
Lastly we will close the day with a film screening of the student annie award finalists!
We would be honored for you to join. Please RSVP (with your name and institution you teach at) to me (aubry.mintz@csulb.edu) if you are able to attend so we can plan for the number of attendees. This event is open to faculty and students. We will be taking RSVPs for people attending in person at USC AND online with Google Hangout. The AEF is expanding through our email group in wonderful ways and this is a great chance for us all to meet, and be heard, in person. We hope to see you there!
Read MoreStudent Annie Award Nominations Annouced
The Annie Award nominations have been announced, a list that now includes a category for best student film! We congratulate the nominees, as well as every student who submitted their work.
The nominees are:
- Can We Be Happy Now – Tahnee Gehm
- Defective Detective – Avner Geller & Steve Lewis
- Head Over Heels – Timothy Reckart
- I Am Tom Moody – Ainslie Henderson
- Ladies Knight – Joseph Rothenberg
- Origin – Jessica Poon
- The Ballad of Poisonberry Pete – Karen Sullivan
- Tule Lake – Michelle Ikemoto
Good luck February 2!
Read MoreA Brief Overview the History Animation Instruction in America
Tom Sito, animator and author of “Drawing the Line.”
The Art of Animation is one century old, yet the art of animation instruction is barely half that age. Over the decades the need for such instruction has ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of the commercial animation industry. It has come from the passing down of simple tradesman’s tricks to the modern era’s Master’s Degree university programs. They now include serious exploration of cinema aesthetics, drama, natural science, draughtsmanship, and computer sciences. Many young animators do their most creative work in college. Famous TV shows like JOHNNY BRAVO, POWERPUFF GIRLS, SAMURAI JACK and Shayne Acker’s film 9, began as college films. George Lucas first film in school was an animated cut-outs film.
From the invention of the artform by James Stuart Blackton in 1900, up until the late 1930s, animation training was mostly done on the job. Many of the artists attracted to the new medium had originally wanted to be something else. Joe Grant had wanted to be a newspaper caricaturist like Miguel Couvarubbias, Art Babbitt was a medical student, Maurice Noble had a job doing window displays for Bullocks Department Store on Wilshire Blvd. Iwao Takamoto was interned in a Japanese Camp and had been picking strawberries in the Imperial Valley when a friend suggested he try to get work in an animation studio. They fell into this line of work when nothing else seemed to be going their way. Some animators were made to feel ashamed by their parents, that all the money spent on fine art training was being wasted on something as vulgar as the silly flicker business. Even at the high period of Walt Disney Cartoons in the 1930s, some artists didn’t want to be photographed in front of the Hyperion Studio, for fear their parents would find out about their new careers.
Read MoreNew Website
We’re currently updating our website with new information and graphics. Be sure to check back for more updates!
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