Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Tonight, ASIFA-East is presenting an evening with John R. Dilworth. This means that John will be there with a number of surprise guests from his past and present, including Howard Beckerman, who taught him; me, who hired him; and Courage the Cowardly Dog, who was drawn by him. Given John’s affinity for the unexpected, it’s doubtful that it’ll be the typical Q&A.

Some of his shorts will be shown as well as several of his films. I could tell you which ones they are, but that would spoil the surprise.

The festivities begin at 7pm at the School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd St, 3rd floor amphitheatre. The admission price is free and worth every bit of it.

Of course, if you insist on buying some things, ASIFA calanders will be sold as will John Dilworth goodies.

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- Once again, let me promote The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated feature that I just love. There was a good interview with director, Wes Anderson, on Charlie Rose 11/30/09. There’s no direct link from here, but you can see this clip by going to Charlie Rose ‘s website, then typing in Wes Anderson on the search box. You can see the whole interview (about 30 mins) there._______________
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- Now for something different. Just for the opportunity of showing off some beautiful blue-pencilled ruffs by Frank Thomas, loaned to me by John Canemaker, I’m going to post them here. They’re from Sleeping Beauty, of course.
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This last one is from Ichabod and Mr. Toad –
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Ichabod and Katrina.
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- The most peculiar news story of the week was the headline at the top of Sunday’s NYTimes. It talked about a Taiwanese company that was creating their own videos of the news using cgi animation. The Times reports that the “. . . Taiwanese newspaper, Apple Daily, has dozens of programmers, designers, animators, even actors on its staff . . . responsible for scripting the videos.” We were shown a poorly created video of Tiger Woods (they admit that it didn’t really look like him, but they were happy over the color of his skin and his hair.) Maybe Robert Zemeckis could help out.

The question is how long it’ll take for ALL newcasts to include animated stories because they’re too lazy to do the actual reporting. Get rid of newspapers and make up your own videos. Apparently, MSNBC’s Keith Olberman made some sly comments about it. When he needs to make up the stories, he uses his “finger puppet theater.” In Taiwan they use cgi.

The world’s gone berserk, but now there’s a whole new line of work for animators of the future.

Here’s the YouTube presentation of that newscast.

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