The “Toon In!” team has been working on the AniMazing Spotlight! “festival and feedback” project lately, so we thought we’d bring you up to date on the latest over there.  You can get more details by visiting us at www.animazspot.com.  

We find it interesting that the three winning shorts of the first two quarters are very different, at first glance, anyway; “Alice’s Attic” by Robyn Yannoukos, the first one to your right, the Q1 winner, announced last month, is a complex visual statement, “Jabbawaki” by Sean B. Conly, the second one down, one of the new Q2 winners is a graphically stunning legend, and finally “RED & blue” by Tyler Ayres, the last one down there, the other Q2 winner, is a more traditional light-hearted romp with animated characters.  

Robyn Yannoukos’ “Alice’s Attic” (image to the right) is the First Winner of AniMazing Spotlight’s first Quarterly competition.  Other shorts will still be chosen from panelists notes; for Specialty Awards and Honorable Mentions, but those will be finalized just prior to the year-end festival, and then screened during the Evening Program.  To find our more visit the new AniMazing Spotlight! site at …

www.animazspot.com

After months of tweaking and getting the “festival & feedback” program underway, the new site is now ready for visitors, and will leave it’s temporary home here, and Toon In! … to the World of Animation will return to the business of getting more animation interviews up on the site.  

So, to find out about the first AniMazing winner, and more, here are some of the things you’ll find on the new site …

• Complete lists of first entries in the 1st & 2nd Quarters
• Requirements for submitting animated shorts
• An Application to enter a short animation
• How to sign up for the Festival Crew
• More about the International Panel
• How to become a Sponsor
• What people are saying
• and, more …

The site is not finished, maybe 90%.

All the important information is in the site now.  Primarily, some pesky artifacts need to be dealt with, and, more information and functionality will be added.  Comments will be gratefully accepted using active Contact Us buttons on the site, which reminds me, we have to get back to fixing them here.

Our “festival & feedback” animated shorts program, AniMazing Spotlight! recently completed the First Quarter, receiving about two dozen entries from; California, Arizona, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Canada, Australia, England, Sweden, The Netherlands, Romania, Israel, Guana, South Africa, Brazil, and China. The image is from Australian Tamarind Taylor’s animated short entry, “Encore”.  No winners have been selected yet, we just chose this image, because it looked nice on the site.

Only 8 of the entries qualified; John Joyce, Nicole Rund, Seana Kozar, Jeroen Zijistra, Robyn Yannoukos, Abbey Paccia, Ryan Smith and Tamarind Taylor.  The others weren’t able to get all their materials in before our January 28th Quarterly deadline.  But, hopefully, they will be able to complete them for our Second Quarterly deadline, on March 30th.  We’re recommending that entries be sent in early, as we’ve discovered that there’s a rush just prior to the deadline date.  That gives our panelists more work, and less time, than they have during the relaxed early part of the quarter.  

We put the eight shorts on a DVD, and sent them off to our panel of international animation experts, for voting, and comments.  So, very shortly, we will have two Quarterly Winners, and each entry will receive comments on their short, and a Certificate of Appreciation, which will include one of the quotes from a panelists.  Since there are so few entries, we may only present one winner, and award three for the Second Quarter.  If you’d like to stay informed about our progress, or want more information, let us what interests you, at bosumedia@yahoo.com, and we’ll answer you questions, put you on our periodic Periodical list and/or send you a pdf of the regs and application.

The eight Quarterly winners will vie for the top three yearly awards, which will include prize money.  The awards will be presented at a day-long festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, on November 8th, 2009.  AniMazing Spotlight is the only International Animation Festival being held in Hollywood. It will not only include the screening of the award winning shorts, but there will also be special programs, tours, discounts for filmmakers who entered shorts, and participation by some of the biggest names in the Hollywood and Burbank animation industry.  More details on the specific programs in the coming weeks.

So, for the Second Quarter we began spreading the word for more short animated film entries, interviewing for potential staffers, ideally with a passion for animation, as well as lining up Sponsors for the year-end Festival.  If you, or a short filmmaker you know, would like more information, google “AniMazing Spotlight”, and either go to “withoutabox” or here to “tooninanimation” for qualifications, an application, and a list of our international panel.  The advantage of Withoutabox, is filmmakers can access other festivals besides ours, and get a discount if they join.  The advantage of Toon In is it’s a direct connection to us, and we have a lot more detailed and up-to-date information.  Most filmmakers seem to do both.  And, don’t hesitate to let other animated shorts filmmakers know about us, or potential staffers, or festival sponsors, or anyone else you think would like more information.

Initial sponsors for AniMazing Spotlight are:

          UPA Legacy Project

          American Cinématheque

          Toon In to the World of Animation

Festival Work Force Folk. so far:

         Tee Bosustow

         Robert Bunes

         Alexander Camarillo

Coming Soon: 

Winner(s) of First Quarter, Details of Egyptian Theatre Festival, 

Next Staff, Sponsors, Panelists, 2nd Quarter Filmmakers, etc.

Click Withoutabox if you want to submit an animated short to AniMazing Spotlight through the acclaimed international festival site, Withoutabox.  You can still submit your entry directly to us, but there are two great reasons for going through Withoutabox, first of all, you can fill our one entry form that will allow you to enter many other festivals as well as ours, without having to fill out an application for each one, and secondly you can get a fee discount through Withoutabox.   

The same rules and regulations still apply.  They are all listed in Withoutabox, or you can refer to our October 1st post.  There are a few changes since then, most importantly we have extended the First Quarter deadline to …

• Monday, January 26th, 2009

… to accommodate this new relationship with Withoutabox.

Also, we have expanded our Panel of Animation Experts … and remember, every single entry, whether the film wins a prize or not, gets a critique from at least three panel members, possibly more.  Every participant can find out what some of these experts think about their labor of love, and we are one of the few festivals that except works-in-progress, which can benefit, perhaps even more, from critiques by some of these experts, now expanded from our original 9 to 20 …

• Nancy Beiman, Animation Prof, Sheridan College, Oakville, Ontario, Canada
• Tee Bosustow, Host of Toon in … Animation, Woodland Hills, California, USA
• Carolina López Caballero, Animator/Documentarian, Barcelona, Spain 
• Sharon Colman, Oscar Nominee/ Storyboard Artist, Loch Lomond, Scotland
• Gene Deitch, Legendary Animation Director, Prague, Czech Republic
• Paul Dopff, Animator/Children’s Workshop, Verneuil-sur-Indre, France
• Amal El Kalifa, African Animation Festival Programer, Meknéz, Morocco
• Sayoko Kinoshita, Hiroshima International Festival Director, Tokyo, Japan
• Marcos Magalhães, Filmmaker, Professor, Festival Dir., Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Bill Matthews, Disney Features, Head of Training, Glendale, California, USA
• Dan McLauglin, Professor of Animation, UCLA, Westwood, California, USA
• Tsvika Oren, Animation Director/Journalist/Professor, Tel Aviv, Israel
• Monique Renault, Acclaimed Woman’s Animator, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Chris Robinson, International Animation Festival Director, Ottawa, Canada
• Raffaella Scrimitore, Animation Festival Curator, University of Milano, Italy
• Marie Stroud, Programming Assessor for SBS-Television, London, England
• Hrvoje Turkovic, Animation Scholar/Film Theory Professor, Zagreb, Croatia
• Malcolm Turner, London Animation Festival Co-Director, Melbourne, Australia
• Paul Wells, Historian/Screenwriter/Educator, Loughborough, England
• Sharon Wu, Animation Festival Curator, Los Angeles/Taipei

If you decide to submit directly to us, we now except only money orders, international money orders, or payment through Pay Pal, which is now working again.  But, if you’d rather pay by Credit Card, that’s a third good reason to go to Withoutabox.  If you’d like to contact us, our Contact buttons are still a little flaky, so you may want to email us at bosumedia@yahoo.com, with “AniMazing” in the Subject line.  Or, you can write to us at …

• Artist in Me, 
• 6311 Van Nuys Blvd., #406, 
• Van Nuys, California, USA 91401.

Also, we are going to start staffing up soon, beginning with part-time jobs.  If you’re interested in submitting an application, send it to bosumedia@yahoo.com, with “AniMazing” in the Subject line, or snail-mail it to the address above.

Finally, we’d like to encourage you to visit our site regularly for updates to the AniMazing panel, announcements of Quarterly winners, and Speciality Awards, and, of course, more interviews for Toon In to the World of Animation, at last.  WE now have over 160 interviews, with only 46 up on the site, so we have a bit of work ahead of us.  Although, once AniMazing Spotlight gets rolling we will dedicate a separate site for that, and get back to the original mission of this animation interview site … so, stay tooned, it’s animazing.