Sunday, September 10, 2006

So the opening night of Atlanta Underground Film Festival was incredible! I had such a blast :)

It started off a little rocky: projector wasn't set up, we didn't have a long enough audio cable to position the projector where it needed to be for the image to fit on the screen, so poor Eric had to run home and get his long cable, so we started about 30 minutes late, haha. This stuff happens all the time! People were pretty patient. I made announcements about how soon it would start.

After the films was the animators demos/lectures portion. I was in charge of this, and it seemed to have gone great!! A lot of people left but it was actually nice to have a smaller, more intimate crowd for that. Joe Peery talked about how awesome international animation is and then it was my turn, followed by all the indie animators (yay!), followed by Brian of Harvey Birdman and then Mack and Neal of Frisky Dingo.

Basically my demo was "Flash in Five Minutes!" and I passed out a one page guide that I went by. I pulled up this example to demonstrate sound, and then I showed the folks how to do that. I was super nervous but people seemed to enjoy it, whch is wonderful- I got a couple laughs and Joe later told me it was a good intro to Flash (not necessarily to animation itself).

But yeah it was an amazing experience. I really appreciated Isaac from work showing up (he doesn't know Atlanta at all, he works on the west coast!), what a guy! Another friend from work, John, tried to show up but couldn't find the place, which I totally understand and I appreciated his attempt so much.

Geez, I was just blown away by some of the demos. John Cason showed some *beautiful* rotoscope in Mirage (he showed different layers of this one shot, which included rain and shadows and characters... check his stuff at http://www.lilliebross.com/) and Brian of course showed unbelieveable Harvey Birdman animation (remember Wally the alligator??). And Mack was able to show a whole episode of Frisky Dingo- he and Neal are always hilarious. I could talk about each person in depth, actually- I made a new friend, Tak, who did some amazing stop motion... and Robert answered questions about Roboctopus, always delightful, and Marshall showed us how he does his cutout animation (wow).

Anyway, I hope to do something like it again sometime :)

5 comments:

Marc Deckter said...

Hi Brett - thanks for your comment! Sounds like the Atlanta Underground Festival went real well - are any of those films online?

Kevin Langley said...

Seems like everything went well and was informative, I'm always interested in how people work, I would've enjoyed this if I lived closer.

Brett W. Thompson said...

Hi Marc!! Thanks for dropping by! :) I love your blog :D It's quite an honor to have two of my favorite bloggers (you and Kevin) comment here! :)

I'll have to dig around more, but off the top of my head there are two of the films online:

Juxtaposer

and mine:

Chickenheads

but there could be others. I particularly enjoyed "Never Live Above a Psychic" but I couldn't find it online.

Thanks for asking :) I'll ask around and if I come across any more I'll let you know :)

Brett W. Thompson said...

Hi Kevin!! :) Ee, thanks for reading! And I don't think this post would've happened without your prodding :)

It was fascinating to see different people's approaches, certainly :)

It is a long way from NY to here! I'm flattered that you'd've come if you could have, though :)

Speaking of NY and animation, I love the films on the "Avoid Eye Contact" DVDs...

Marc Deckter said...

Thanks for the info, links and compliments Brett! I'll be sure to check those films out soon.