Category Archives: events

animation, events, travel

Upcoming talk: Canterbury Anifest

Later this fall, I’ll be speaking at an animation festival in England. Canterbury Anifest is the weekend of October 5-6, and my talk will be Saturday morning at 9am. If you’re in the UK and yearning for nerdy discussion and pretty pictures, stop by!

My talk will be a variation of the “Animator as Designer” talk I gave at Animasyros last year. If you’ve already seen that talk, you should probably just sleep late and have a long breakfast. You look so tired, so skinny! But do come after lunch to see the other presenters from Aardman, Double Negative, and Pixar. Or watch a great selection of animated shorts. Or do one of the hands-on animation workshops. Really, it’s hard to go wrong. The whole event should be a lot of fun.

You can read more details about the event and the other speakers over at the Canterbury Anifest blog.

events, fun

Ready for the solar eclipse

Ready for the solar eclipse by otherthings

Getting ready for the solar eclipse… I bought some 0.2mm silver mylar, which is practically opaque, but lets a tiny bit of sunlight through (like, about 1/160,000th by my seat-of-the-pants estimate). One layer of it makes the sun seem about as bright as the moon. Two layers, and you can’t even see the sun at all.

THIS MAY NOT ACTUALLY BE SAFE AT ALL. I don’t honestly know, because I have no way of knowing how much UV light gets through this stuff. But I did use mylar to look at the last solar eclipse several years ago, and I haven’t gone blind yet, so there’s anecdotal evidence at least.

Here’s a good article explaining when and where you can see the eclipse. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, it should start on Sunday afternoon (May 20th) around 5:30pm, and reach maximum occlusion (about 90%) by 6:30pm.

animation, events, travel

Getting ready for Animasyros

1 Comment


Two Saturdays from now, on September 17th, I’ll be giving a talk at Animasyros 4.0, an animation festival on the island of Syros, Greece. The festival will also be screening How to Train Your Dragon, as well as our short film How to Make a Baby. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hi!

Many thanks to my friend Gesine Krätzner for connecting us with the festival organizers!

animation, events, timelapse

Our Baby’s fall festival circuit

The “How to Make a Baby” festival tour continues, starting this coming Saturday with the first annual Stop Motion Film Festival in Los Angeles. This is the first festival I’ve heard of that’s dedicated entirely to stop motion animation. It’s in a tiny venue (55 seats!) in Echo Park, so if you’re in LA and love the medium, be sure to get there early! Here’s the whole schedule for the next few months:

As always, you can see the rest of the schedule on the festivals page.

animation, events, self-reference

July/August festival update

We received our first official film festival rejection letter this morning via email. It was kind and gracious and encouraging, and beautifully written. I was so touched by the letter, in fact, that I wrote back with a quick note thanking them for the courtesy of letting us know.* I wasn’t expecting a response, it just felt like the right thing to do. Minutes later, I got an answer back from the festival director. They had sent me the wrong letter by mistake. Our film was accepted after all!

That festival was the Nevada City Film Festival, where How to Make a Baby will play in late August. Over the next two months it’ll also screen in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and New York City. It looks like the festival organizers have put together some amazing programs, so if you live near any of those cities, I highly recommend checking them out in person. You can click the images above for the dates and details, and as always, see our festivals page for the whole list of events.

*Many festivals don’t bother to inform filmmakers that their films have been rejected: you have to wait ’til they release the list of accepted films, and then search for your film in the list, a rather heartbreaking process if you were hoping to get in and didn’t!

animation, events

More festivals for our “Baby”!

Two more festivals will be screening How to Make a Baby next Saturday night (May 22nd) in two different cities. The Santa Fe Reporter’s 3 Minute Film Festival (at the Lensic Performing Arts Centre, 211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe, New Mexico), and a reprise screening of the Santa Barbara Minute Film Festival (at Samy’s Camera, 614 Chapala Street in Santa Barbara, California). Apparently last week’s SBMFF was so popular that they sold out the entire theater, so they’ve scheduled a second screening for everyone who was turned away at the door the first time.

The film has also brought home some accolades: it earned an Honorable Mention from the Disposable Film Fest, and was voted in the Top Five by the jury at the SBMFF. We’ve submitted it to a bunch of other festivals, so stay tuned for updates. If you want to keep track of the all film’s screenings and awards, you can find the whole list on the
project’s festival page.

animation, events, timelapse

Upcoming festivals

The DFF was such an overwhelmingly fun experience, it got us completely hooked on the film festival buzz. So over the past month I’ve been submitting “How to Make a Baby” to various festivals, and we’re starting to hear back from some of them. One of them, the Santa Barbara Minute Film Festival, is right around the corner! It’s happening on Saturday, May 1st at 8pm at the Faulkner Gallery (40 East Anapamu Street) in Santa Barbara, California. I won’t be able to make it to the event in person, unfortunately, but if you happen to be in the area, stop by the screening and let me know how it goes!