Category: Short Films

Today's tour stops are PDI/Dreamworks, an ASIFA San Francisco dinner and then on to Skywalker Ranch.

Every year Pixar host the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short. It's always an exciting chance for the filmmakers to interact with the artists at the studio. Follow their day in pictures.

I am sitting in the filmmakers lounge at Sundance headquarters watching the historic inauguration of Barack Obama.  I am amongst a crowd of filmmakers, and there is a clear sense of hope and relief that this day has arrived.

What is it about Italians?  Give any of them a microphone and invite them to speak and they immediately turn into the best public speakers known to man.  Joking, calling out to the audience, laughing, and then delivering interesting insight and banter.  This is I Castelli Animati.

My first Pictoplasma was an eye-opening affair set in the avant-garde city of Berlin.Combining a day-long “character walk” of installations set in fascinating locations, with screenings and lectures featuring the artist/creators themselves, it was a revelation of what a festival could be.

Johannes Wolters dives into fmx/08, which this year offered an even greater number of stimulating discussions on the state of artistic and technological visual content.

At 20th Century Fox, I Met the Walrus producer Jerry Levitan talks about interviewing John Lennon when he was 14 years old.

I banned them from talking about it as I was getting so nervous and then I checked the Oscar website in the afternoon and there we were! And then the phones all started ringing and Rosto gave me some flowers and champagne and whisked me off to dinner!

Someone called me when I had friends over for dinner. It was someone who speaks English. I needed time to switch my brain in the English mode, but I understood: “…academy… motion picture…. Congratulations!!!” So I answered, “Yes ?! Thank you!” But I didn’t really understand what it was all about.

The studio was crammed with interesting bits of artistry that clearly pulled in influences from a broad base of culture — art, theatre and film. Amidst the puppets, props, collage assemblages, posters and paraphernalia, I remember one sign that they had up on the wall, that said something like, “an impossible task, a tight budget and a crazy deadline are the mothers of invention”. No doubt, a little spirit catcher for stray producers.