keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Chris Walsh has put up part 2 of his interview with stop motion animator Payton Curtis. Part 1 is here .

The Museum of the Moving Image has posted a 76 minute audio interview with Henry Selick that was recorded on November 18 and 19 of last year. You can also download an mp3 of the interview at the link.

Chris Walsh is one of my fellow instructors at Sheridan College. While he lectures on story and animation history, his main area of expertise is teaching stop motion. Over at his blog, Walsh-O-Matic , he has the first part of an interview with stopmo animator Payton Curtis. Curtis recently worked on Coraline and The Fantastic Mr. Fox and talks about the process of animating on a stop motion feature.

The National Film Board of Canada periodically runs a program called Hothouse, where they offer emerging animators the paid opportunity to create short films at the NFB. The program is only open to Canadian citizens or landed immigrants and the call has just gone out for the sixth edition, for which all films will be made in stereoscopic 3D. The deadline for submissions is February 19 and the program will run from April 5 to June 25 in Montreal. Anyone interested can find out more details here .

As a follow up to my earlier post , here's James Cameron's take on what he's doing.

Cordell Barker talks about The Cat Came Back . (link via Jim Caswell .)

Updated at the bottom. (There are no spoilers below.) I saw Avatar and quite enjoyed it. Many people have pointed out similarities to Pocahontas , Ferngully and Dances with Wolves . There are also elements of Tarzan and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern . I'm sure that some enterprising person will set up a website showing all those references and many more. James Cameron's strong suit isn't originality; what he's best at is taking existing elements, weaving them into a solidly structured screenplay and then kicking it up a notch with his directing ability. Avatar doesn't break new ground from the standpoint of content, but it does deliver that content in a very satisfying manner. It's basically a fish out of water story combined with a romantic vision of simpler societies. Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Tarzan , John Carter and Carson of Venus stories) specialized in stories like this. In Burroughs' case, there was an underlying rac...

You may have read articles crowing about the box office record set this year. For the first time, movies have grossed more than $10 billion at the North American box office (which includes the U.S. and Canada). However, a closer look at the numbers shows that while the box office gross set a record this year, attendance is not the reason. It has to do with the increase in ticket prices. (Click to enlarge.) A quick look at the chart above (lifted from Deadline Hollywood Daily ), shows that ticket sales, while up for this year, fall in the average range. For the 11 years on the chart, 6 of them have higher ticket sales than 2009. Furthermore, except for the years 2002-2004, movie attendance has basically remained stable at fewer than 1.5 billion admissions a year during a decade when the population of the U.S. and Canada grew by approximately 33 million (See here and here ). Note that ticket prices have gone up 47% since 1999 while paid admissions have actually fallen from that yea...

As there are only 359 days until Christmas, this seems like the appropriate time for this mosaic. The information on the animator draft, courtesy of Mark Kausler, can be found here and here . Click any of the images below to enlarge.