| Laguna Hills teacher in love with film | | Posted Tuesday, January 09, 2007 1:07:19 PM by Blog57 Team | | Before taking a job teaching video technology at Laguna Hills High last spring, John Hall had worked as a photographer or camera assistant for dozens of feature films, music videos and short films. Hall has worked under such cinematographers as Andrzej Sekula ("Pulp Fiction") and Chris Duddy ("Titanic"). Q:How'd you get into filmmaking? A:Just before going to high school, I was on a team that won the Little League World Series. Everyone knew who we were, and the (high school) coaches wanted us to play for them. So they said, 'The animation will be an easy A for you to get through. We put a lot of athletes there so it's one less class to worry about.' I fell in love with that whole animation thing. And I don't draw. I got into stop motion animation.... | |
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| | | Starz creates film company | | Posted Tuesday, November 14, 2006 11:11:50 AM by Blog57 Team | | Starz LLC has formed a motion picture studio that will make eight to 12 feature-length films a year, the company said Monday. Overture Films will operate as a subsidiary of Englewood-based Starz, which in turn is owned by Liberty Media Corp. The company trademarked the Overture Films name and logo in October. CEO Chris McGurk and COO Danny Rosett will run Overture Films. Both were executives at Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios Inc. before its sale to Sony Corp. last year. McGurk was vice chairman and COO at MGM from 1999 to 2005. Rosett's roles at MGM, where he worked from 1994 to 2005, included president of United Artists, the studio's specialty film division. Overture expects to produce about 60 percent of its releases, with the rest acquired. Releases will begin in the middle of 2007.... | |
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| | | Disney's Profit Soars on Success of `Pirates' Film (Update5) | | Posted Friday, November 10, 2006 7:01:43 AM by Blog57 Team | | Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Walt Disney Co., the second-largest U.S. media company, said fourth-quarter profit doubled on the box-office success of ``Pirates of the Caribbean'' and ``Cars.'' Net income rose to $782 million, or 36 cents a share, from $379 million, or 19 cents, a year ago, Burbank, California-based Disney said today in a statement. Sales climbed 14 percent to $8.78 billion, exceeding analysts' estimates. The film unit posted profit of $214 million, buoyed by the success of ``Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest,'' which earned more than $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Chief Executive Officer Robert Iger, a former ABC executive, also boasts three of the five top-rated television shows and Monday Night Football on ESPN. ``They beat estimates basically because of the studio,'' said Sanford C.... | |
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| | | Review of "Flushed Away": Film is flush with great animation but swirls off track alot | | Posted Sunday, November 05, 2006 6:56:19 PM by Blog57 Team | | For anyone who's ever pondered what it would be like to get flushed down a toilet and what life would be like at the other end, here's a family film with the answers. Down there, it turns out, is just like up here - complete with World Cup soccer games, cops, mobsters, raving fanatics and tidal waves that threaten to wipe everyone off the face of the sewer pipe. Just another world where a lower-class girl hopes to be swept off her feet by an upper-class boy. Just another wasted chance for creativity that arrives in theaters mired in the stink of the ordinary. In a nutshell, Flushed Away tells the story of Roddy (Hugh Jackman) who lives a life of English luxury as the pet of a wealthy little girl. He has a luxurious cage, a whole house to run around in but has absolutely no friends or attention.... | |
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| | | Flush the Awful Animation | | Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 1:13:45 PM by Blog57 Team | | You'll be forgiven if you think Flushed Away sounds like something you've already seen. Its story line -- pampered city animal finds himself in the wilderness, learns true meaning of friendship -- has been ludicrously recycled of late in movies like Madagascar, The Wild and Open Season. But this new cartoon from the U.K.'s Aardman Animations -- the company behind Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit -- has one substantial difference from those other movies: It doesn't suck. Better yet, it beats the competition at its own game, making us forgive even the use of fart jokes (which the Brits do better than anyone -- Chaucer and Shakespeare invented them, after all). There's no Hollywood hit so unique that it can't spawn awful knockoffs. Pulp Fiction begat Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead; Chicago begat Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera; and Brokeback Mountain begat Jackass Number Two.... | |
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| | | DreamWorks Animation Reports Profit | | Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 7:07:00 PM by Blog57 Team | | Continued strong DVD sales of its animated feature "Madagascar" helped swing DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. to a profit in the third quarter, the company said Tuesday. Profits were also boosted by sales to pay television markets of its fall 2005 feature, "Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit." For the three months ended Sept. 30, the Glendale-based company reported net income of $10.5 million, or 10 cents per share, compared to a loss of $0.7 million, or 1 cent per share, in the same period last year. Revenue fell to $55.6 million from $87.1 million in the same period last year. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected a loss of 2 cents per share on revenue of $38.8 million. The company's latest release, "Over the Hedge," is performing well in DVD sales after being released Oct.... | |
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| | | Are You the Next Animation Wizard? | | Posted Tuesday, October 24, 2006 6:55:05 AM by Blog57 Team | | COMMITTED to nurturing more home-grown creative talent, Cartoon Network has announced a unique Pan-Asian initiative called Snaptoons (Short New Asia Pacific Cartoons). Through this initiative, Cartoon Network is looking to invest in funding, backing and developing an original and groundbreaking idea that lends itself well to animation, is targeted at kids and has a universal or regional appeal. According to Orion Ross, vice president, creative and original content, creative services, Turner Entertainment Networks Asia Inc, Snaptoons is an ongoing initiative designed to discover and nurture creative brilliance that exists in Asia and to showcase the enormous potential that abounds in the region. .... | |
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| | | 'The Ant Bully' - insightful and mellow morality fable | | Posted Friday, October 20, 2006 2:54:50 AM by Blog57 Team | | While the two Hindi biggies for Diwali slug it out, here is an animation film that absolutely sweeps your heart away. Carrying on the strange and stirring phenomenon of animation films that put forward an entertaining social message with pungent panache, "The Ant Bully" recreates the ambivalent relationship between the human and animal kingdom through a rapport that grows between a little lonely boy Lucas and a colony of ants. The film gives us great flashes of insight into human insensitivity and how grossly it affects living creatures, which are too small and vulnerable to protest.The ant's colony is imagined with the organised grace of an army camp. Every detail is cleverly and cannily worked out to the point where we cease to marvel at the details, just sit back and enjoy the morality fable where size and proportion are things taken for granted.... | |
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| | | Norwich International Animation Festival | | Posted Monday, October 16, 2006 2:54:28 AM by Blog57 Team | | Norwich International Animation Festival returns for 2006 from Wednesday, October 18, to Saturday October 21 with a programme which includes plenty of cutting-edge animation but also live events. This year's festival, with the theme of Re-vision, takes place in venues across Norwich, and is expected to be bigger and better than ever. With guests and delegates expected from across the world, the city will be playing host to a key event in the international animation calendar that last year screened more than 170 films over four days, and recorded more than 7000 admissions. This year's festival is planned to be the boldest yet, with a trailblazing programme which ventures further still from traditional film festival territory to embrace live art, generative work and artists' film, eroding yet further the myth that animation is about cartoons alone.... | |
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| | | Is there an animation overload in Hollywood? | | Posted Thursday, October 12, 2006 12:54:15 PM by Blog57 Team | | Other than "Cars," the summer hit from Pixar Animation Studios, he would rather watch the re-released older animated classic "The Little Mermaid" with his 4-year-old daughter, Alicea. "They had a good message," Hernandez said of "Cars" and "The Little Mermaid" after attending a recent afternoon matinee of "The Little Mermaid." Of other, newer films, he said, "I don't pay too much attention." With more than a dozen computer-animated movies being readied for release by next summer, Hollywood is facing viewer fatigue worthy of Sleeping Beauty. Analysts and industry executives have long warned of a coming glut of computer-animated movies. That time has come. Now, with so many movies for audiences to choose from, some are failing to meet expectations or flopping outright.... | |
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