I had a great time at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. I'll write a little bit about what films I liked and the festival in general.
I saw all of the competion screenings and they were mostly good. There were four films that I thought were particularly outstanding: "Ryan" by Chris Landreth, "A Room Nearby" by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, "A Musical Shop" by Sonya Kravtsova, and "Concert For A Carrot Pie" by Janno Poldma & Heiki Ernits.
"Ryan" won the grand prize and it deserved it. There are some films that feel special right off the bat, and they are important and timeless. This is one of those kind of films. The film is about Ryan Larkin, who made the classic films "Walking" and "Street Musique". The designs are very unique because the characters have weird wire-like things sticking out of them like an external nervous system. The animation on them is also unique because the characters are constantly changing. The face of Ryan wriggles and jiggles and feels loose. It didn't feel like a typical CG film. Instead, it had a hand-made quality. There was a scene that I really liked where a CG Ryan is shown dancing along side one of his "Street Musique" characters.
Ryan Larkin himself was at the competition screening and the awards ceremony. He seemed very happy to be there.
I'm a big fan of Paul Fierlinger's films. This was the second time I've seen his "A Room Nearby" and I enjoyed it again. It looked great on the big screen. He uses a program called Mirage to animate in with a digital tablet. His animation is very inventive.
"A Musical Shop" was probably the best looking film at the festival. It looked like the technique was similar to what Norstein does with cut outs. The animation was very smooth and entertaining.
"Concert For A Carrot Pie" was my favorite film. This one is hard to describe! It's just very strange in a great way, and very memorable. I loved the designs.
There were a very large amount of puppet films in competition. I don't really like puppet films because they seem to have a built-in dark quality about them. There was a clay film that was great though. But clay is much more interesting than stark, designy puppets.
There was a lack of drawn animation with characters, or just experimental animation with a hand made feeling. A lot of the films had a very gimmicky, rigid feel.
Films that were longer than about about 7 or 8 minutes were hard to sit through. At a festival you're seeing so much animation, and sitting for so long, that bad 10 minute films are hard to tolerate. The films I mentioned above were long, but they were exceptionally good.
The festival itself was great. The venues are nice, especially the 2000+ seat National Arts Centre theater. Right outside of the theater they had an area where different colleges and companies had booths set up. You could buy things like books and dvds, and get information about computer software.
Some of the theaters were a bit of a walk away from each other, but not too bad. I did generally stick to the Bytowne Cinema, Arts Court building and NAC, since they were close together.
I attended some workshops with Chris Landreth and Chris Hinton. Chris Hinton talked about how he uses Toon Boom Studio to either quickly get an idea of what he wants to do, or use those TBS drawings and bring them into other programs like Phototshop and Painter and work on top of those. That's a great way to work.
There was a screening of Fred Crippen's films. I love most of his stuff, although he occassionaly goes way outside of what I like with some raunchy stuff and smiley face characters.
One of the feature films in competition called "Winter Days" was interesting because it had interviews with the animators at the end and it showed their studios and computers.
There were a lot of panel discussions about things like starting your own business, animation criticism, scoring for animation. Steve Dovas did a good job of moderating a lot of the panels. The criticism panel was fun to listen to.
I thought the awards ceremony should be more formal.
It's definitely worth going to this festival if you can. There's so much to do, and you can meet a lot of people. It's very intense. I felt like I learned a semester's worth of stuff in five days.
Hello, Arna,
I too was at the Ottawa Fest last weekend. I was less than impressed with many of your choices (with all due respect), all except Ryan. That was a good film, but a bit weird. I did not really see the point of making an animated film about on old, drunk, strung-out animator from the NFB, but that is just my opinion.
Regardless, I personally enjoyed the Aussie entries (Ward 13, and Harvey Krumpet), as well as the TV's fun house entry (Saddam and Osama). And GOD BLESS AARDMAN ANIMATION for their "Creature Comforts - Dogs or Cats"! Brillant work, and my hat is off to each of these films, for taking a HUGE RISK, and making some conventional animation... COMMERCIAL, if you will.
One thing that really pisses me off year after year at these festivals is the experimental scratching on film stuff, or this year, painting on film (innovation at its best), moving sand, and whatever other strange, unconventional ideas these shmucks can come up with. All of these films seem to have the same damned musician doing the score too!!! Awful, "new age" music that gets on your nerves after the first 12 minutes of listening to it synched with terrible "animation" (and I use that term VERY loosely). It was like 25 minutes of listening to someone drag their fingernails down a blackboard. In music, a BEAT helps.
75% of the entries featured flashing colours, no story to speak of, and no freaking characters! What are these people who make these films on, anyways 9and where can I get some?)? Arna, did you see the student film from Korea, that is supposed to be about the oppression of the Korean women during world-war-two by the Japanese army? What a waste of time! And it just kept going and going! However, as annoying as it was, it just summed up my festival this year... It just kept going and going, horrid film after horrid film. There was one competition screening on the Saturday (N.A.C., Saturday at 11, I believe) that did not have even ONE good film in it (in my opinion).
Anyways... I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I just wish I could see some STORIES, and CHARACTERS and such, in the animated films at the festival. I will tell you what... This whole thing has actually inspired me to make my own short film, for the next festival. And there will be a message about the current films in the festivals... It will not make me popular with the shmucks at the NFB, but c'est la vie! Hey... Maybe I can get some money out of them to make it!? GOD KNOWS I WILL TRY TO!
After seeing all these "wonderful" films, what really took the cake for me is seeing that the NFB had something to do with many of them (funding/production). There is my tax dollar going to the greater good... The million-Dollar minute, if you will.... When I am unemployed, I cannoyt even get my unemployment insurance (or EMPLOYMENT INSURANCE, as it is now called), but some crack-head can get a quarter million bucks to make a film about a red dot travelling around a screen.
Lastly, you did not mention Pinocchio 3000, the film done by CineGroupe (incidentally, thje first Canadian 3D feature film)... Did you not like it? I know the story was not the strongest story ever (it was written by the French co-producer... enough said), but neither was the "concert for carrot pie". The animation looked pretty good though, if you could get past the fact that the guy operating the projector at the N.A.C. had no idea what focus was. Just curious as to what you thought.
Sorry if I sound a bit miffed in this post about this festival, but I just fought sleep too many times while screening the films, and it just pissed me off to no end as to what kind of crap was accepted for this. All opinions expressed are solely my own opinions.... I do not mean to offend anyone else who actually LIKES to see scratching on film or flashing colour films.
Cheers
Wade
"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon