Day 4

Ronnie Del Carmen

Peter Sohn

Henry Selick

Wow, last night was Henry Selick discussing his career and creating 'Coraline'. A very animated and funny guy. He has been doing stop motion a very long time. I throughly enjoyed listening to him and was very inspired by his passion for this artform.

This morning I finally took in some animated short films. I bumped into Clive, the Australian composer and we had coffee and then took in the screening. Some very good animation, some experimental. The overall tone of the films were very personal and at times depressing. I would have liked to laugh more. It seems everyone wants to use this as some kind of cathartic therapy or something. Again, very interesting styles, but too personal and dark for my liking. I hope to catch one more screening at 9pm, but with a 6am wake up call, that might not happen.

I visited the Arts court where Disney, Studio B, Nelvana and such were looking at portfolios. Some other animation schools also had booths there, so I took some information and chatted them up.

Eric Goldberg from Disney (he created the Genie from Aladdin and is working on Princess and the Frog) sat with me on the bus to the Museum. Very lovable looking old guy, just taking the bus and enjoying the festival like the rest of us. A few fan girls were bugging him and wanted to show their Genie watch. He really laughed at that.

This afternoon was Peter Sohn from Pixar, the director of 'Partly Cloudy'. Amazing, amazing presentation. He had us laughing and marveling at this work so much. He pretty much storyboarded his whole presentation for us (see above picture as an example) and went through the entire process of making the film from the 'seed' of an idea, the pitch process, story, character and technical development right down to the rendering challenges. Very interesting and he showed tons of drawings and shared a huge amount of development work. I wish the students could have seen this one. Afterwards he signed posters and I got one made out to the students at school.

Tonight is Ronnie Del Carmen, the story supervisor on 'Up'. That again will be a packed house and I will need to get there early.

Ronnie was great. He talked all about the story process of 'Up'. He shared tons of artwork, storyboards, anecdotes and photos about their research trip to South America. We also got a special advanced screening of the new short that will appear on the 'Up' DVD in November. It's called 'Dug's Secret Mission' (I believe). Very funny, but what else would you expect.

I feel very privelaged to have heard these artists from Pixar talk about their processes. Hugely insightful and inspiring. They have it all figured out.

And that my friends will wrap up my festival itinerary. It has been amazing! Great weather, great people, tons of info and animation geekery alike.