by mtonta20 | Feb 15, 2015 | ARTIST LAW
The 3 Basic Types of Agreement for Artist Freelancers by Lee Morin, Esq. Articles related to Copyright for the Freelance Artist series may be found here: Part 1: Copyright Basics (The 101) Part 2: 3 Types of Employment Agreements Part 3: Copyright Infringement and Defenses Part 4: A Case Study of Momocon THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENTS: The Case of Jack Kirby and Marvel Comics Whether you transfer ownership of or merely grant permission to use the exclusive rights to your work depends on the contract agreements in place. Heated debates have arisen where it concerns agreements between freelance artists and publishers that allowed publishers to exploit characters in the comic book industry. Motion picture adaptations of literary superheroes are an example of derivative works, which provide the film industry with some of the highest earning films of late, grossing more than 15 billion dollars for Marvel, now Disney, since 2000 [11] . Because copyright law provides that freelancers can terminate transfers of ownership in the exclusive rights to their work [12] , heirs of freelance artist Jack Kirby sued Marvel to reclaim rights to characters Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Spider Man, Thor, and X-Men [13] . Marvel argued that Kirby produced work as made for hire not subject to termination; thus, Marvel was author and owner; neither Kirby nor his heirs had any claim. The heirs insisted that Kirby had not irrevocably transferred his rights to Marvel, rather that the transfer was subject to termination after 56 years [14] . After petitioning the Supreme Court for certiorari, parties settled their dispute on confidential terms [15] . Whether freelance...
by mtonta20 | Feb 11, 2015 | ARTIST LAW, PEOPLE
So today we have an awesome guest blogger Lee Morin, an Entertainment Lawyer here to shed some light about things that artists might not know but probably should, especially if they are freelancing or considering doing so. One of these things that people might be familiar with but not in details have to do with the issue of copyright in art and adaptations. While something we are all probably familiar with at a basic level, here’s some useful information that might get artists more familiar with a bit more than just the definition and a bit of how copyright is important especially to artists. * This guest blog post was written by Lee Morin, Esq. OF COPYRIGHT, CONTRACTS, AND FAN ART If you are reading this blog, words like “manga,” “cosplay,” or “doujinshi,” may seem ordinary. To the uninitiated, these words are foreign; but, if you have heard of Pokémon, or Dragon Ball Z, then you know “manga”[1]. My first encounter with manga was the film adaptation of Akira, and later with Ghost in the Shell, whose soundtrack is as haunting as its subject matter. Following in the footsteps of the crossover tradition was the epic film adaptation, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, from the successful media franchise Final Fantasy, which, “centers on a series of fantasy and science fantasy role-playing video games, but includes motion pictures, anime, printed media, and other merchandise [2].” The film adaptation of Final Fantasy was the first photorealistic computer animated feature film, and most expensive to produce at $137 million with a staff of 200 at 960 workstations rendering 141,964 frames over a span of...
by mtonta20 | Feb 1, 2015 | COMPETITIONS
Every year there is the Superbowl, Oscars Award, and plenty of different prestigious Award Shows on the road. For Animation, one of the most esteemed of these award ceremony is the Annie Awards held by ASIFA-Hollywood recognizing achievements in the animation field- both in animated shorts/ animation TV production/ and features. Personally, I was rooting for The Lego Movie, Song of the Sea, Damkeeper, Feast, Over the Garden Wall, and ARCHER. Who did you cheer for? The results are in this year and the winners of each categories are: CURRENT Results from the 42nd Annie Awards Best Animated Feature How to Train Your Dragon 2 – DreamWorks Animation SKG JURIED AWARDS June Foray Award Charles Solomon Ub Iwerks Award Dreamworks Animation’s Apollo Software Winsor McCay Award Didier Brunner, Don Lusk and Lee Mendelson Special Achievement Awards Walt Disney Family Museum Production Categories Best Student Film “My Big Brother” by Jason Rayner (Savannah College of Art & Design-SCAD) Outstanding Achievement, Storyboarding in an Animated TV/Broadcast Production Joaquim Dos Santos – Legend of Korra – Nickelodeon Outstanding Achievement, Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production Truong “Tron” Son Mai – How to Train Your Dragon 2
– DreamWorks Animation SKG Outstanding Achievement, Editorial in an Animated TV/Broadcast Production Illya Owens – Disney Mickey Mouse
– Disney Television Animation Outstanding Achievement, Editorial in an Animated Feature ProductionJohn K. Carr – How to Train Your Dragon 2 – DreamWorks Animation SKG Best Animated Video Game Valiant Hearts: The Great War – Ubisoft Montpellier Outstanding Achievement, Character Design in an Animated TV/Broadcast Production Benjamin Balistreri – Wander Over Yonder
- Disney Television Animation Outstanding Achievement, Character...
by mtonta20 | Jan 26, 2015 | PEOPLE, STOPMOTION
While a lot of animation is done sitting down either in a dedicated studio space or at home, there are also times, especially for stop motion animators, that you might have to step out into the physical world to capture raw footage or animate on location. Such was the case with animation and Animation Chair and seasoned film festival veteran Matthew Maloney and motion media specialist and professor Christina Maloney of Savannah of College and Art and Design-Atlanta. (Their other beautifully crafted stop motion animation “The Anchorite” premiered at Cannes in 2009.) While in theory, this may seem as simple as grabbing a camera and running outside to start shooting, the physical world deals with weather conditions, unexpected passerby reactions, and uncontrollable variables. This past winter break, they were in Hong Kong with their puppets shooting live in the mountains, on the beach, the metro of Kowloon, and on the streets in the bustling crowd of passerby for their new animation Loon. With this, they came up with some tips for those that might be interested not just in stop motion but perhaps even live action sequences that requires shooting on the streets. 1. Secure Your Equipment Not just stop motion pieces or props are probe to damage or being stolen but expensive equipment used for the shoot such as cameras, laptop, tripod are susceptible during a mobile shoot. While shooting on the street, the Maloneys created a laptop cage by repurposing an old shoe rack he bought for around $3 and locked it to the ground and then locked the tripod to it. Now it’s safer from being stolen or being bumped into during...
by mtonta20 | Jan 22, 2015 | FILM FESTIVALS, PEOPLE
As it so happens one lazy afternoon as I was browsing my inbox, I was surprised to see an email from Daisy Jacobs and Chris Wilder telling me they’ve read my blog. For those of you who are not familiar with their work, you probably wouldn’t rationalize with my excitement of running around the living room in my pajamas doing this… As an avid stop motion fan, the first time I saw the well deserved Oscar-nominated animated short “The Bigger Picture”, I was captured by the unique technique of blending live size 2.5D and 3D elements. Currently, Daisy and Chris are now in the process of campaigning for their next upcoming larger-than-life animation. As it is, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and commend the efforts of independent artists. As an artist, I know fully well the efforts that goes into creating your own original pieces. It is a labor of passion and one that is a time investment often with cost involved. While there is still the idea that if art is passion, it should be free but the reality is artists also have to eat, pay rent, and function in the world as any other field of occupation. So to artists that are doing their own thing to carry out their creative vision is always a refreshing site to see and has my support and admiration. Their Next Project Now not much has been revealed about the upcoming animation Daisy and Chris has planned for yet but here are some sneak previews of images and animated gif that is sure to thrill and delight. Just looking at the lovely...
by mtonta20 | Nov 22, 2014 | PEOPLE
After seeing the Disney Pixar short, LAVA, there was no doubt in my mind that the environment that was showcased was gorgeous and the graphics was looking really defined. While many things were very interesting about the short, what drew me in particular was the technology behind the graphics. As luck would have it, my friend Brandon who is a Graphics Software Engineer worked on the short and kindly help me shed some light about his role in LAVA and the difference between coding for a feature and a short in his experience. PIXAR LAVA Trailer Clip Link 1. What was your role in the short? I wrote some shiny new code that allows for “deformable vector displacement,” to help create ridges on the volcanoes in the short. Displacement is a common Computer Graphics technique to add geometric complexity by “displacing” the geometry using a texture. This texture, usually a height map (black for low, white for high), allows the shading TD to control some of the more fine-grained look of the asset, and allows for details that normally require many polygons. Vector displacement is a specific flavor of displacement that allows for surface deformations in more directions than “out” and “in.” The “vector” part of “vector displacement” means that you can really displace the surface by a 3D vector. This is less common than a scalar displacement, as it requires more math, is slower, has artifacts if not handled correctly, and has weird edge cases. Deformable vector displacement means that the vector displacement authored on the asset moves with the geometry. For Lava, the ridges on the volcano...
by mtonta20 | Nov 20, 2014 | Freebies, PEOPLE
With this being the last week of finals, we posted up a beautiful poem of a prayer to keep all the animators. Today’s feature is a bit different from the rest but a close friend of mine and a crazy brilliant and ridiculously fast and versatile animator, Andrew Goh wrote a prayer for animators that are still facing their final countdown before deadlines. Andrew Goh ©2015 with minor graphic tweaks from Shir Wen Sun The Animator’s Prayer by Andrew Goh Our artist, who roughs in extremes, Hallowed be thy keys, Thy breakdowns come, Thy in-betweens done, On Pegs, as it is in Autodesk Maya ©2015 Give us this day our dailies And Forgive us our rotoscopes, as we forgive those who mo-cap, And lead us not into procrastination but deliver us from crunch-time, That’s a...
by mtonta20 | Oct 29, 2014 | PEOPLE
With the amount of competition today in the animation and film field, one of the great ways to break into established feature film companies or TV production studios is through internships. But even the competition for internships are extremely high, so how do you stand out from everyone that has applied? How do the few that do succeed get to where they are now? Here are a few words of wisdom from some of my animator friends that have interned and/or are newly hired addition to animation studios such as Blue Sky Studio, LAIKA HOUSE, MPC, and Adult Swim. Lastly, I’ve also included my own experience at Floyd County Productions working as an illustration/production intern with the illustration department of Archer. Studio: Blue Sky Studio JEN HURLER Location: Greenwich, Connecticut Affiliations: School of Visual Arts (SVA) Position: Production Assistant (Full Time) Portfolio: www. jenhurler.com THE STUDIO Blue Sky Studio is best know for their 3D animation franchise features Ice Age and RIO. Other well-known animations produced include Epic, ROBOTS, and coming soon to the big screen is PEANUTS:The Movie, a remake of the classic Snoopy franchise comic in CG 3D. THE HOW Just to clarify–this isn’t an internship, but rather a full-time job that I was offered. In this position, I aid the fur department in the day-to-day grind. I schedule and help run everything from inter-departmental rounds, to art critiques with the film directors. There’s a lot to learn regarding the BSS pipeline and different software used, but it’s a learning curve I enjoy. The HOW I actually got this job thanks in large to SIGGRAPH and...
by mtonta20 | Oct 19, 2014 | FILM FESTIVALS
WINNER OF THE FEAST POSTER ANNOUNCEMENT: Congratulations to Win Leerasanthanah for winning this official feast collectible lithograph poster. We will be contacting you soon. Results are generated through the http://www.miniwebtool.com/random-name-picker * For a chance to win a collectible commemorative lithograph copy of The Feast Animated Short poster, scroll to the end of this article. There are times I really love my school for all the extracurricular activities they bring that I feel help to broaden my scope as an animator. Every year, we are encouraged to go to the Animation’s Show of Show featuring a handful of amazing animated shorts selected from over thousands around the world curated by Ron Diamond and hosted at the new SCAD-Atlanta SCAD SHOW theatre. A quick brief for those that don’t know what the Animation Show of Show is, it’s a pretty big deal if you are in the animation field. Ron Diamond,founder and executive producer of Acme filmworks , has traveled across different states since 1998 to screen his top selected animation shorts (a lot of which has ended up as Oscar nominees or winners) at schools and major animation studios including PIXAR, Dreamworks, and more. The Show of Show is free and runs every year so catch it at your nearest location and book yourself a seat by going to their website and checking out the details. This year I found the particular selections to be a bit different from the past two years and there are three animated shorts from big name studios that the audiences were looking forward to including Disney’s Feast (Set to be out with Big Hero 6 Feature Animation), Pixar’s...
by mtonta20 | Sep 19, 2014 | FILM FESTIVALS
Animation Festivals Submissions Tips/ Tricks This article is a part 2 continuation from the article Submitting to Animation Festival pt1: Avoiding Rookie Mistakes. In the last article, we wrote about rookie mistakes to avoid when submitting to an animation festival, this article is focused more on other aspects you might not be aware of that may bog down or help your submission too that goes into a bit more details. Today’s guest post are tips to understanding Animation Film Festival submissions adapted from an interview with our very own talented animator Allyssa Lewis at Floyd County Productions working on Emmy Nominated Best Animated Series and Critics Choice Award Winner 2014 Archer and current Vice President of ASIFA-Atlanta. *Different Festivals may have different ways of judging and criterias. IF YOUR FILM HAS DIALOGUES…YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO HARDCODE YOUR SUBTITLES While most short animation may avoid the second level of animation complexity by avoiding talking characters or lip syncing altogether, there may be a time you will have to venture into the zone of having text to help out your story or dialogues. In this case, subtitles are very important to how far your animation may go. The two basic languages you should at least have for your animation is at least english and french subtitles. These subtitles should also be at a professional level, otherwise you should not embed them straight onto the animation. Instead, choose to have a transcript or have it closed captioned instead of hard-coded into the animation. This way, if a festival likes your film or wants to send it off to other films, they have the choice to use/not use it....
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