TAAFI - The Toronto Animated Arts Festival International

 After a one year hiatus, the Toronto Animated Arts Festival International (TAAFI) will resume on April 22 and run through April 24.  The Friday and Monday will feature workshops with industry veterans such as Eric Goldberg, Samantha Youssef, Michel Gagné and others.  The weekend is dedicated to screenings from around the world, including the world premieres of the features Spark and Nova Seed.  Other guests include Marv Newland, Audu Paden, Michael Rianda, Stevie Vallance, Willie Ito, Jerry Eisenberg and Tony Benedict.

Early Bird discount passes are available until March 22.  The website, with more complete details, is here.

100 Years of Norman McLaren

2014 is the 100th anniversary of Norman McLaren's birth.  McLaren was the pioneering experimental animator at the National Film Board of Canada.  One of the many events to mark the occasion was a documentary on his work created by Amir Avni for TAAFI, the Toronto Animated Arts Festival International, which occurred last June.

TAAFI has now put the documentary online and in addition to several McLaren films, it includes interviews with National Film Board alumni who knew McLaren: Kaj Pindal, Gerald Potterton and Bob Verrall.

TAAFI 2014 Part 3

The final day of TAAFI was devoted to industry panels.  It started with DreamWorks supervising animator Rex Grignon recapping his career.

L to R: Shari Cohen, Mark Jones, George Elliot, Laura Clooney, Juan Lopez, Michelle Melanson, Brian Simpson

This was followed by The State of the Industry panel.  While I understand that TAAFI has to keep good relations with its sponsors and the industry, this panel could better be called The Conventional Wisdom panel.  Rather than discuss the real state of the industry, it deals with what everyone thinks the world looks like at this particular point.  Nobody talks about the challenges that Canadian animation is facing or challenges the direction that the industry is going.

George Elliot made the point that in the past, the industry was more about service work and didn't pay much attention to building brands.  Now, there is less service work and studios are working harder to build brands.  While this is accurate (and not to dump on George, who is one of the more successful independent studio owners), it ignores the myopia of Canadian studios for the last 25 years.  While American studios were building worldwide franchises around shows like Dora the Explorer, Spongebob Squarepants, and The Powerpuff Girls, Canadian studios focused on working the tax credits and Canadian content rules to get shows on the air.  Once the show it 52 or 65 episodes, it was retired.  Instead of continuing to build a franchise to the point where it could support merchandising, studios walked away from shows.

As viewers are abandoning broadcast and cable TV, Canadian content rules are becoming less and less useful.  Now the Canadian animation industry is heavily dependent on the existence of tax credits to fund production.   There is no guarantee that those tax credits will survive or won't be superseded by larger tax credits in other countries.  As usual, the Canadian industry is always using a crutch to stay in business.  Rather than using the crutch as a way to get strong enough to survive without government regulation or largesse, the industry is addicted to the government propping it up in one way or another.  So long as the short term is covered, Canadian producers are satisfied.  Are there any studios strong enough to weather the withdrawal of government support?

Would TAAFI be able to stage a real discussion or debate about the state of the industry?

Vera Brosgal

Vera Brosgal presented a panel called The BoxTrolls: A Case Study.  The talk was actually more about Coraline and Paranorman, but was still a very enjoyable look behind the scenes at Laika.  Brosgal showed some of her storyboards as well as images of the various departments at Laika.

Ayah Norris of Indiegogo gave an excellent talk about crowdfunding and the best way to orchestrate a crowdfunded campaign.  She revealed that Indiegogo takes 7% as their cut for projects that fulfill their goals and talked about how it is best to know you can quickly get to 30% of your goal before launching the campaign.  The best perks are those that can be delivered digitally, as they are the most cost efficient, and she stressed that the cost of the perks should be calculated before the goal is set.

She mentioned that any dispute, say for non-delivery, was between the contributor and the project.  Indiegogo takes no responsibility for projects that don't deliver.  This is the Achilles' heel of crowdfunding.  While the amounts donated are generally low, they are a 100% risk.  I've donated to several crowdfunded campaigns that have not delivered their promised perks or did not get completed.

That was my TAAFI for this year.  There were many panels and screenings that I did not attend, so others may have very different opinions.

I think TAAFI is still trying to figure out who its audience is.  There are events for fans, students, and professionals.  The Animarket is a case in point.  It was free, which was an excellent move, but I suspect that artists looking to sell their work were disappointed relative to their experiences at Anime North or Fan Expo.  The studios there to recruit and the hardware/software vendors were probably pleased with the response they got.  I'm sure that the TAAFI management will be evaluating the Animarket results and adjusting accordingly.

Here are some suggestions for future TAAFIs.  While the venue was good, being located on Lake Ontario at Corus and George Brown College, the food choices were severely limited.  I hope that if TAAFI continues in this location that they do something about this.  The industry panels should be moved to a weekend day so that people would not have to lose a day of work to attend them.  There should be a separate pass for just the industry panels and also a separate pass for just the screenings.

While TAAFI is still suffering some growing pains, it is an excellent festival and one of the few events that unite the Toronto industry.  I look forward to future editions and I'm confident that it will continue to improve.

TAAFI 2014 College Animation Challenge

TAAFI 2014 Part 2

Sunday at TAAFI began for me with a panel called Compelling Character Design featuring Dave Cooper, Jessica Borutski and Stephen Silver and hosted by the Guys with Pencils, Andrew Murray and Adam Hines.

L to R: Andrew Murray, Adam Hines, Dave Cooper, Jessica Borutski, Stephen Silver

Dave Cooper talked about drawing from photos and then doing multiple passes on the drawings, each time pushing the caricature and the shapes farther, as a way of warming up. Silver also agreed that figure drawing was fundamental.

The following panel was called Creating Success and was hosted by Mike Valiquette of Canadian Animation Resources and featured Rob Davies, Dave Cooper, Mike Geiger, Michael Rex and Natasha Allegri.

L to R: Mike Valiquette, Rob Davies, Dave Cooper, Mike Geiger, Michael Rex, Natasha Allegri

Each of these people had sold a show and Valiquette questioned them about the paths they followed. Davies is a partner in Atomic Cartoons and one of the creators of Atomic Betty. Cooper started out as a cartoonist and fine art painter before pitching shows and only after Pig Boat Banana Cricket was rejected by Nickelodeon and gathered an audience online did Nickelodeon reverse itself and pick the show up. Mike Geiger had been creating online animation for years. Michael Rex was a children's book illustrator who created a series of graphic novels starring a barbarian in third grade called Fangbone. Natasha Allegri had been doing online comics since high school and was invited to work on Adventure Time as a result. From there, she created the online series Bee and Puppycat. In every case except for Allegri, the shows had been in development for a period of years before getting the green light. A question I should have asked, but didn't, was whether anyone on the panel retained part ownership of the copyright of their projects and whether they had any share of ancillary rights such as merchandising.

L to R: Steve Wolfhard, Vera Brosgal, Michael Rex, Jason Thompson

Make Comics! featured Steve Wolfhard (Cat Rackham), Vera Brosgal (Anya's Ghost) and Michael Rex (Fangbone) and was moderated by Jason Thompson (The Art of Dad).  All three of the panelists work in animation: Wolfhard on Adventure Time, Brosgal at Laika and Rex on the forthcoming Fangbone series.  For Wolfhard, comics were a way to create personal work away from a day job.  Brosgal talked about how her graphic novel was a way to deal with her experiences as an immigrant and Rex created the graphic novel as part of his day job creating children's books but it got optioned for a series.

My final event of the day was a screening of Student Shorts.  Seven countries were represented, which speaks well for the quality of animation education around the world.  Overboard used a sailing analogy to talk about the production of animated films.  It was directed by Paul Zeke at the Vancouver Film School.  Harald, directed by Moritz Schneider, is a cgi film about a wrestler with a mother/manager from hell. Floating in My Mind is a beautiful film by Hélène Leroux, but I don't know if the baloon metaphor is properly worked out.  Chili Con Carne by Philippe Rolland is funny and ends with a very sick joke.  The Sugar Bugs is an epic by John Kim about bacteria.  There were two films by Sheridan grads: Backwards Cat Goes to the Vet by Tanya Kozak and Bringing up Bigfoot by Edward Coughlin.


EXTRAIT : Philippe Rolland "Chili con carne" from Ecole Emile Cohl on Vimeo.

TAAFI 2014 Part 1

The third edition of the Toronto Animated Arts Festival International has now finished.  As always, there was more than a single person could attend, so what follows is only a partial review of what occurred.

This year, the opening night film was a French feature, Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, directed by Stéphane Berla and Mathias Malzieu.  Unfortunately, it could not live up to last year's opening night feature, The Day of the Crows.  While the film had interesting art direction, it was heavily influenced by Tim Burton, reminding me of Edward Scissorhands and the ending echoed Corpse Bride.  The script was extremely talky and the drama was not as developed as it should have been.  Still, I'm always grateful for the opportunity to see an animated feature that isn't available in North America.

Prior to the feature, two shorts were screened.  Gertie the Dinosaur, 100 Years Later, was not, as many of us suspected, a screening of McCay's original film.  It was a wholly original piece taking off on McCay's film and was well received by the audience.  This year's College Animation Challenge, It Happened in a Pub, included contributions from seven Ontario animation programs.  Max the Mutt's contribution was generally acknowledged to be the best.

Dan Povenmire (left) and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh

On Saturday morning, the creators of Phineas and Ferb, Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, critiqued It Happened in a Pub and then gave their keynote speech, going over their careers and how they launched the show.

The next thing I attended was a screening of shorts for kids.   Lightning Larry by Daniel Solomon and Hyun Jun Song, had  being late for school turning into a disaster movie.  Runaway by Susan Huen Sin Yung and Esther Parobek was about an aging refrigerator convinced he was to be replaced by a newer appliance.  A Girl Named Elastika used pushpins and rubber bands to form its characters, a very novel approach to animating.  Warren Brown had three of his Big Block Singsong shorts screened, and while simple were great fun. The Fog of Courage, a cgi Courage the Cowardly Dog short by John Dilworth was incredibly creepy and sent at least one child out of the screening in tears.  The final film, The Dam Keeper by Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutusmi, was a beautifully art directed film bullying and social isolation.



"Courage the Cowardly Dog" (Excerpt) from Acme Filmworks on Vimeo.
A GIRL NAMED ELASTIKA from Guillaume Blanchet I Filmmaker on Vimeo.

I then went to a second screening entitled Straight Up Toons.  Monkey Rag, by Joanna Davidovich is an energetic homage to musical cartoons and was lots of fun.  Yellow Sticky Notes, directed by Jeff Chiba Stearns, was a jam animation about a day in the lives of all the animators.  Crime: The Animated Series, directed by Alix Lambert and Sam Chou, used documentary soundtracks and a range of design approaches to illustrate various perspectives on criminal activity.  Mr. Hublot, which won an Oscar for bets animated short, was an amusing story about a man and his robot dog.






I really looked forward to seeing Stephen Silver at the festival.  Besides admiring his art, I admire his fearlessness.  He is very entrepreneurial and has no hesitation to move forward on any idea he has for marketing his artwork and earning a living with it.  His talk was entitled "How Not to Get Screwed" and was about behaving in a professional manner and watching out for people who have no hesitation to take advantage of artists.

Stephen Silver

My final event for Saturday was Bill Plympton's latest feature Cheatin'.  I have very mixed feelings about Plympton.  On the one hand, he's certainly a good artist and I admire the way he's created a unique career for himself.  On the other hand, I find that his features are all lacking in the areas of story and structure.  Cheatin' is about a husband who is given a photo implying that his wife has cheated on him.  The problem is that the evidence showing that she is innocent is in the same photo, but the husband never looks closely enough to notice.  Furthermore, the husband never confronts his wife about her supposed infidelity.  The audience spends the entire film knowing that the wife is innocent and wondering how long it's going to take for the husband to figure it out.  The story could have been told in 20 minutes but made for a very dull feature.  I noted three people who left while the film was in progress.

Plympton doesn't need advice from me, but I wish that he would work with a writer.  He's complained that it's difficult to get distributors to take on his films because they don't conform to the family audience, but in this case, I think the film is its own worst enemy.  Everyone knows that sex sells, yet his film built entirely around illicit sex is far from compelling.  There's nothing wrong with Plympton's ideas, but they need more structure, less padding (there are endless shots of characters traveling) and better dramatic development.
Cheatin' Trailer from Bill Plympton on Vimeo.


To be continued.

TAAFI Roundup Day 3

In addition to Kevin Schreck's excellent documentary on Dick Williams, I also watched another shorts program.  I see that I mistakenly included comments on those shorts in my day 2 roundup, so I've nothing else to report about them here.

Mark Caballero

Mark Caballero, a stop motion animator who worked with Ray Harryhausen towards the end of Harryhausen's life, celebrated Harryhausen's work with some rare clips and behind the scenes photos.  Caballero's company, Screen Novelties, collaborated with Harryhausen to complete The Tortoise and the Hare, one of the fairy tales that Harryhausen did early in his career but abandoned.  Caballero revealed that Harryhausen actually did several new shots in the film, so it was probably the last animation he ever did.

TAAFI had originally intended to have Harryhausen as a guest and planned to give him the Life Achievement Award, but Harryhausen's death intervened.  TAAFI still wanted to do something to commemorate his career, so they worked with Harryhausen's foundation to have Caballero make his presentation and Harryhausen was given the award posthumously.

Top: Matt Mozgiel.  Bottom: Max Piersig.  Photos by Graydon Laing.

The Big Pitch was an opportunity for two creators to pitch a TV series idea to a panel of development executives, with the winner decided by an audience vote.  Matt Mozgiel and Max Piersig pitched their ideas.  Both deserve a lot of credit for guts.  Having pitched shows myself, I know the pressure that a creator is under when in a room with just a few people, but to do it in front of development people and a full auditorium takes real nerve.  Both acquitted themselves well, with the audience selecting Piersig the winner.

With all due respect to the participants, the whole idea of pitching an idea is absurd as the ability to pitch and the ability to create are wholly separate skills.  A great creator may be bad at pitching and someone good at pitching may not have the best ideas.  If a novelist is looking for a publisher, he or she submits a finished manuscript or an outline and sample chapter.  What's being judged is the actual work.  It's easy to imagine great writers unwilling or unable to pitch.  Someone like J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) would never have put up with it.  Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?) had a bad stammer.  What chance would he have had?

Pitching exists in TV due to the laziness of development people.  Rather than read a script, a bible or a storyboard, they want to be spoon fed a series concept and characters in just five minutes.  How absurd is it that a creator, who has probably laboured for an extended period of time to create a show concept, has only 5 minutes to make an impression?  And how many good shows have never seen the light of day because the creator wasn't good at pitching?

The last event of the festival was the awards.  If you want to know who won, you can find out here.

TAAFI was densely programmed with a wide variety of screenings and talks.  I'd be surprised if an attendee couldn't find something of interest in every time slot.  The festival also benefits from the venue.  The TIFF Bell Lightbox is compact making it easy to move from one screening to another.  The location is also good for a variety of food choices and is well served by mass transit.

With so much animation production for TV, games and effects done in Toronto, it's great that the city finally has a festival to celebrate it.  Ben McEvoy and Barnabas Wornoff have pulled together the entire animation community to make the festival work.  The second year was better than the first and it's heartening to know that the next festival is already being planned for June of 2014.  I will definitely be attending and look forward to whoever next year's speakers will be and hope that Ben and Barney find a feature as good as The Day of the Crows for us to watch.

For lots more photos of the events, visit TAAFI's Facebook page.

Persistence of Vision

Richard Williams

I will write an entry about TAAFI's third day, but Kevin Schreck's documentary Persistance of Vision, which screened at TAAFI, deserves an entry of its own.  The film is a chronicle of the making and unmaking of the Richard Williams' feature The Cobbler and the Thief.  Williams began the film as an adaptation of stories featuring the mullah Nasruddin written by Idries Shah.  A falling out with the Shah family led to the reworking of the story to eliminate the Nasruddin character and a cobbler became the new focus of the film.

Williams financed the film out of profits made from his studio's commercial work.  After the success of Williams' contribution to the animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Warner Bros. agreed to finance his feature.  When Williams failed to deliver the film on time, Warner Bros. decided it was better to drop the project and collect the completion insurance, which put the ownership of the film in the hands of The Completion Bond Company.  At that point, the film had been in production for 24 years.

Stuck with a film they didn't want, the bond company took it away from Williams and had it completed in the cheapest, fastest way possible.  They hoped to salvage something financially by bowdlerizing the film to make it look like other animated features of the time.  The film, released as Arabian Knight, was a failure and Williams withdrew from active production to lecture, write The Animator's Survival Kit, and to work on personal projects.

That's a very bare outline of events, but the man at the center of it, Richard Williams, is a huge contradiction: he elevated the art of animation but was the author of his own misfortune.  Schreck's film explores both of these aspects of Williams' career by interviewing many people who worked on the film and using footage of Williams himself from interviews he gave over the years.

Left to right: Ken Harris, Grim Natwick, Art Babbitt, Richard Purdom, Richard Williams

Williams understood that the men who created character animation were getting on in years and that their art would die with them.  At his own expense, he brought animators Art Babbitt, Ken Harris, and Grim Natwick to his studio to train his staff.  These veterans of Disney and Warner Bros. gave their knowledge freely as well as contributing to the studio's output.  Williams himself was a perfectionist who demanded the best possible work from his staff.  While he was often a difficult boss, those who worked for him acknowledge the opportunity he gave them to grow as artists.

Left to right: Ben McEvoy, Kevin Schreck, Tara Donovan, Greg Duffell.  Donovan and Duffell both drew inbetweens on the Williams feature 17 years apart.

After the screening, Kevin Schreck made the comment that Williams had the sensibility of a painter working in film rather than the sensibility of a film maker.  That crystallized my thinking on Williams.  While he brought over veteran animators and idolized Milt Kahl, it's interesting that over the course of the production, he never brought in veteran story men like Bill Peet, Mike Maltese or Bill Scott.  He never consulted with directors like Wilfred Jackson, Dave Hand or John Hubley.  At no time did he hire a famous screenwriter or novelist.  He was interested in creating better animation, but he was uninterested in what the animation was there to serve.

Williams treated content as an excuse to create elaborate visuals, but he didn't much care what the content was and may not have been able to tell the difference between good and bad content.  In this way, he was perfectly suited to the commercials his studio turned out.  He was lucky that during that period, British ad agencies were writing literate and witty ads.  The combination of their content and his astounding artwork made his commercials the best in the world.

But when the content was mediocre, as it was in his feature Raggedy Ann and Andy or in The Cobbler and the Thief, the result was an elaborateness that wasn't justified. Character designs were overly complicated and had a multiplicity of colours.  Layouts used tricky perspectives.  The inevitable result was that artists could only work at a snail's pace, driving up the budget and jeopardizing delivery.  The detail overwhelmed the flimsy stories and the films collapsed under their own weight.

Someone in the documentary revealed that during the period when Warner Bros. was financing the film, Williams was still creating storyboards.  That was twenty years into the project.  It was obvious that Williams considered story an inconvenience; it had to be done so there would be something to draw.  In the panel discussion after the film, Greg Duffell recalled that there were mornings where Williams had to create sequences off the cuff in order to supply Ken Harris with work.  There was never a structured story, just sequences that tickled Williams' fancy. The visuals were what Williams cared about.

Schreck's film encompasses the heroic Williams and the self-destructive Williams.  Williams is animation's Erich Von Stroheim, making an impossibly long version of Greed.  Or maybe Williams is Captain Ahab, inspiring his crew to pursue the white whale but leading them all to destruction.  Williams set out to make a masterpiece, to show the world animation as it had never been done before.  Those parts of his film that survive are unlike anything else that's been done.  But being different and being worthwhile are not the same.  Williams chose to work in a medium where the audience expects a story that evokes emotions, but Williams saw story as a necessary evil instead of the heart of the project.

This documentary is a major work of animation history.  Schreck has been traveling with it to festivals all around the continent.  I don't know if the film will be picked up for distribution as clearing the rights to various clips would be expensive and time consuming.  For now, festivals may be the only way to see the film, so you'll have to seek it out.

Williams' career has undoubtedly been a benefit to the entire animation industry, but his success with audiences was greater when others created the content that was the basis for his work.

TAAFI Roundup Day 2

Dr. Stuart Sumida

The absolute highlight of TAAFI on Saturday was a talk by Dr. Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist by trade who consults with the animation business.  Dr. Sumida has consulted for Disney, DreamWorks and Arc Productions in Toronto, and it was Arc who suggested him as a TAAFI speaker.  His talk was on comparative anatomy, pointing out the difference between herbivores and carnivores, between animals and humans and then between men and women.  Those differences in structure had repercussions for how various creatures move.

 I think everybody in the audience learned something about anatomy from his talk.  I know that I did.  After his talk, I approached him to suggest that he lecture at Sheridan the next time he was in Toronto, but the associate dean of the animation program beat me to him.  I hope that Sheridan students have the benefit of his knowledge.

Not having heard of him prior to TAAFI, I did not register for his Sunday master class.  I will not make that mistake again should he return to Toronto.  If he appears at a festival near you, I urge you to attend.  You will not be disappointed.

The balance of my day was spent watching three shorts programs.  Shorts programs are always a mixed bag.  There's no question that I have a bias for narrative.  My general comment, not only about the shorts at TAAFI, is that many films are poorly paced and directed.  I often find myself wanting the films to move faster or be clearer as to what they are trying to communicate. The work embedded below is what I found online and that I felt had merit.  However, few of the films are serious and still entertaining.  That may be asking too much, but it's a direction that I'd like to see animation pursue.

I enjoyed the anarchy of Got Me a Beard and I thought The Right Place was well crafted, though I wish the craft was applied to something other than a scatological joke.  Fester Makes Friends is the latest in a series of Fester cartoons.  They are dopey and politically incorrect, but they remind me of cartoons of the 1930s that throw decorum to the wind.

There was a 21 minute film called Priests whose animation and design were rather spare, but had a great script that dealt with various religious contradictions as well as the relationship between two priests.

Jazz That Nobody Asked For was another anarchic piece that I enjoyed.  The Bravest Warriors is a web series by Pen Ward, the creator of Adventure Time.  I was never able to get my head around Adventure Time and admit that it's probably a generational thing, but I found The Bravest Warriors to be clever.

The last shorts program I saw that day was student shorts.  Four of them were from Sheridan, so I can't be objective about them.   Happily Ever After was from Israel and had potential but he ending was a disappointment.  Double Occupancy from Germany was very solid for a student film, but there were missed acting opportunities.  The two characters could have been developed further.  Probably the stand-out was I am Tom Moody.  What's embedded below is only a portion of the entire film, which is a sensitive look at a character at war with himself.

Jazz that nobody asked for from Benny Box on Vimeo

TAAFI Roundup Day 1

Anyone who has attended an animation festival knows that the cascade of talks and films tend to blur together.  In addition, TAAFI had three sessions running simultaneously each day.  It's possible for someone to have attended and experienced a completely different festival, so don't take this as a definitive review of TAAFI, merely my own personal impressions.

David Silverman

David Silverman, a director on The Simpsons, gave the keynote address on the series.  Someone asked about table reads and punching up the script and Silverman revealed that the script was punched up at least four times, the final time after footage was already in colour.  He mentioned that people suggested more efficient ways of working, but his attitude was that the show was the most successful animated series in history, so why mess with a good thing?

This was followed by a state of the industry panel.  Ben McEvoy, one of TAAFI's founders moderated and asked if the broadcasting was dying, with so many people cutting their cable subscriptions.  Predictably, the broadcasters on the panel said no.  Whether they believe this or were trying to project confidence, I don't know.

Later, there was a panel "From Napkin Sketch to Green Light," about pitching shows and getting them to air.  Someone on the panel said it could take five years to go from pitch to a show, and I thought to myself that if broadcasting wasn't dying now (and I think it is), who knows where it would be in five years?  Pitching shows to conventional broadcasters and cable channels now is a questionable proposition, as their financial model is deteriorating rapidly.

I have an axe to grind here, but it was clear from this panel that ideas should not be fully developed, as broadcasters like to shape shows to their needs, and a broadcast executive emphasized that even if he liked a pitch, he still had to sell it to those higher up in his company.  The combination of these two things is the reason that I personally discourage people from pitching shows.  Any creator worth his or her salt is going to want to explore their idea and nail things down.  This is precisely what broadcasters don't want.  There are legitimate reasons, such as needing a show to be suitable to a particular demographic, but there is also the vanity of business people who think that their ideas are as good as anybody's.  If this was true, they wouldn't need to take pitches and would create their shows in-house.  Furthermore, after contorting an idea to please a development executive, the executive doesn't have the authority to put the show into production but has to convince the bosses, who are likely to contort the show even more.  While this ugly process proceeds, the creator is being paid peanuts in development money while the broadcast people are on salary.

The game is stacked heavily against creators, which is why I encourage people to get their work to an audience in a more direct fashion: as prose or as comics distributed on the internet.  Besides establishing ownership of the property (something you would have to give up to a production company or broadcaster), it allows a creator to thoroughly explore the idea and develop it without interference.  Finally, should the property attract an audience, that gives the creator increased leverage in dealing with broadcaster interest.

The business we're in is very simple, really.  It's all about attracting an audience, the larger the better.  That audience gets monetized though advertising, subscriptions, pay-per-view, merchandise, etc. and that's what finances the whole shebang.  If you've built an audience, that makes you and your property valuable.  People who want access to your audience will come to you.  Pitching will be unnecessary and instead they'll be making you offers.

There was a panel on funding yourself which I had to miss as it ran concurrently with a panel I moderated on portfolios and self-promotion.  I really wanted to see it.

My panel had Lance Lefort of Arc, Darin Bristow of Nelvana, Patti Mikula of XMG Studio and Peter Nalli of Rune Entertainment talking about the best way to organize your material when applying for work.  These days studios prefer links to any physical media.  Reels should be short with the best material up front.  Applicants should know about the companies before applying so that they know they're showing suitable material.  Resumes should be no longer than 2 pages and cover letters a single page.  All stressed that attitude was as important as skills, as they were looking for people who would fit into existing teams and be pleasant to work with.

The day ended with three talks.  Mark Jones and Sean Craig of Seneca College talked about how the school had worked on professional productions, particularly those made by Chris Landreth.

Jason Della Rocca gave a fabulous talk relating Darwinian evolution to the changing nature of the media.  As I have an interest in evolutionary psychology and business, it was right up my alley.   He talked about how people assume that the present environment extends infinitely into the future without disruption and how inevitable disruption catches people off guard.  He talked about the importance of variation in an uncertain environment as the only way to discover what would work in new conditions.  Failure was a necessity in order to gain knowledge but the failure had to be small enough as to not destroy an enterprise.  Della Rocca mentioned that Angry Birds was the fiftieth project of the creators and that nobody remembered the previous forty nine.  He talked about how the highest quality inevitably came from those who put out the greatest quantity, precisely because that quantity (including failures) gave them more information about what worked in a given environment.  The talk could be boiled down to "fail fast and cheap."  Right now, Hollywood is betting everything on tentpoles that cost $100 million plus (meaning "slow and expensive") and even Lucas and Spielberg are warning that movies are vulnerable to a financial collapse as a result.

Greg Duffel explaining spacing charts

The last speaker of the day was veteran animator Greg Duffell, who talked about timing.  In the past, directors would time entire films down to the frame as a way of guaranteeing synchronization with music that was being written while the animation was being done.  Duffell talked about how this had fallen by the wayside and that what animation directors do today bears very little resemblance to what they previously did.  Duffell gave a longer version of this talk to the Toronto Animated Image Society several years ago and I wish that TAAFI had allowed more time for this important talk.

Coming up will be reflections on days two and three of the festival.

TAAFI Shorts Selection

The Toronto Animated Arts Festival International has released its selection of shorts to be screened in July.  The list is here.

Taafi Report

July6-8 was the first TAAFI festival.  TAAFI stands for Toronto Animation and Arts Festival International.  I suspect that the acronym was chosen before the full title was worked out, but that's okay.  TAAFI is catchy.

Ben McAvoy and Barnabas Wornoff are the two guys who made it all happen.  They spent the better part of a year pulling everything together and I have to say it was a successful festival, especially for a first-time event.  The TIFF Bell Lightbox, located in downtown Toronto and easily accessible, was a good venue, keeping all the events under a single roof.  The fest was a good mix of screenings, workshops and presentations and there was more happening than any individual could take in.

Some of the events included a screening of Rock and Rule with a reunion of some of the crew, the North American premiere of Ronal the Barbarian, a northern European 3D cgi feature that parodied sword and sorcery movies, workshops by Charlie Bonifacio on posing, Peter Emslie on caricature and John Kricfalusi on story development.  There were panel discussions on games, the state of the Ontario industry, independent animators and a retrospective of Kaj Pindal's career.

There were four programs of shorts and a separate program of student films all programmed by Mike Weiss.

I know from talking to Ben that the festival was a financial success and that there are plans to do it again next year.  While there are organizations like The Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS) and the Computer Animation Studios of Ontario (CASO), Toronto has been a fragmented animation commmunity.  Here's hoping that TAAFI continues to be successful and serves as a hub and rallying point for the Toronto animation community.

I didn't have my camera with me over the weekend, so the following pictures are lifted from other sites or individuals.  Below are shots from Grayden Laing's blog.

Facing the camera: Adam Hines and Andrew Murray of Guys with Pencils.  Facing away from the camera, Nick Cross, Rex Hackelberger and Marlo Meekins.  You can hear a podcast interviewing Cross and Meekins here.

John K. leads his workshop.

From the Rock and Rule panel.  L to R: Robin Budd, Scott Caple, Willie Ashworth, Charlie Bonifacio.

The photo below is by Sanaz Asli.

That's me on the left moderating a question and answer session with Kaj Pindal.