Back Again

I'm back from Ottawa, still trying to digest my experience of the festival. You can find a list of the winners here, though I have to say that I found the people I spent time with far more satisfying than the films this year. There are several things I want to say about the festival, but I'll need some time to gather my thoughts before putting them down.

I'll take this opportunity to say how nice it was to see old friends like Jerry Beck, Amid Amidi, Mike Sporn, Tom Knott, Mark Langer, Emru and Tamu Townsend, and Bill Perkins. I also got the opportunity to meet people for the first time that I've known through the internet, such as Steve and Mary Stanchfield, Larry Tremblay, Ward Jenkins and David Nethery.

Steve Stanchfield is an animation renaissance man as an animation teacher, a producer-director-animator and a film collector/historian/DVD producer. It was great to meet him and I love all the DVDs he's put out.

I finally got to meet Mike Fukushima of the NFB, after hearing about him for years. I got to talk again very briefly with Evan Spiridellis of Jibjab, whose presentation on independent creators was well attended and enthusiastically received.

Of course there were lots of Toronto friends who came up for the festival as well, some of whom I'm more likely to see in Ottawa than in Toronto.