Citizen Jane and animation

First off, I’d like to say how fun and amazing Citizen Jane was this year. I was a liaison and at first I thought that it wouldn’t be much good because the first two filmmakers I met were very independent and liked to keep to themselves. However, the last filmmaker I met was Beth Mickle. She was an awesome person to talk to and get to know. She’s been the production designer for several features. We’re both very creative and I love building my own things as well for my productions so we talked about cool and inventive ways to make things and “cheat” as we called it. We ended up talking about the Lord of the Rings production design and how she would’ve loved to help with that. It turns out that she had some friends that worked on the design of those films and she has a brother who is a director.

Making this contact at the film festival was the high light of my weekend. Beth gave me her email address and told me to email her if I ever had a question or if I’m ever in New York to join her for drinks some time. It’s just really exciting for me to get to know film people and be able to connect with them.

Okay, now onto talk about animation. When I read to book I found that European animation was more experimental and not all of it was for kids like the American animation. Something I found that probably influenced this was the fact that America only had two main studios doing animation; Disney and Warner Brothers. In Europe, there were more independent studios that would make animation and they had more freedom to do what they wanted.

One of the most memorable things I read was something about Japanese animation. There had been a small animation with a cartoon drawing that had been set aflame and this person on the paper was trying to stay away from the flame so he could live for as long as possible. Someone had commented that this was an allusion about the atomic bomb that hit Japan after WWII. These sort of things showed me that the animation of different countries aren’t afraid to talk about deeper issues and politics with their animation, thus explaining why the animation in Japan is for adults as well as kids.

Animation - Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although several other forms of presenting animation also exist.