How to use this Page

Hanna-Barbera legends Willie Ito, Jerry Eisenberg, and Tony Benedict will also be guests in Toronto this spring.

The post TAAFI: Eric Goldberg, Michel Gagné, Michael Rianda Confirmed As Guests appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Learn how 'The Iron Giant,' 'Shaun the Sheep Movie' and other animated standouts came to be at Spark's annual conference.

"The Iron Giant: Signature Edition," director Brad Bird's remastered masterpiece of war, peace, and paranoia, returns to theaters this Wednesday and Sunday, with new scenes courtesy of Duncan Studio.

In the summer of 2013, composer Gheorghe Costinescu commissioned artist Michel Gagné to create an animated abstract visualization based on his 1973 work, "Dots, Lines, and Patches for recorded electronic sounds". This film is the result.

Michel Gagné’s

Originally published as a serialized story in volumes 2 through 7 of the comic anthology Flight, it was then repackaged as a trade paperback by Image Comics in 2010. The 4-minute short was funded by raising over $57,000 on Kickstarter last year and is to be the first installment of a classically drawn independent animated feature film that Gagné is planning. “I would like to believe that there are still some people out there who want to see good old 2D classical animation being done,” Gagné told Cartoon Brew. “I know that my big donors love this type of animation and want to see it continue. We can’t rely on the big studios to keep the art of 2D full-animation going, so it’s up to us.”

His 1995 film Prelude to Eden was created using the now defunct 2D animation software Animo, which had remained his “go-to” production software up until 2012 when he began looking for an update. He gave Toon Boom a try and was pleased with the results. “I quickly realized that I’d just upgraded my old Model T Ford for a car of the year.” So, with Toon Boom in hand, along with Photoshop, After Affects and Premiere, Gagné set out to see just how much progress could be made adapting The Saga of Rex for the screen. “I wanted to test my limits and see what I could do single-handedly in a set period of time. What you see here is about six and a half months of work.”

The short, which is subtitled The Animated Film Project Pt. 1 – Abduction is animated in pantomime, which is Gagné’s intention for the entire film. “I’ve toyed with the idea of adding narration to the film, but then again, I realized it would take away some of the mystery,” he said. “In a way, I’m not sure I want people to fully understand what is going on. I want them to ask questions and create their own meaning.”

Transparency in the crowdfunding community is highly valued, and animators tend to be most successful when they are upfront about the length of the animation they plan to produce with the monies raised. The unintended result of this openness is that the opaque world of animation budgets has begun to fade away.

When Cartoon Brew published a crowdfunding report last month, we cataloged the per-minute costs of various high-profile animation projects on Kickstarter. The costs ranged from $3,333 to 13,750 per minute of completed animation.

Now, we look at two more recent Kickstarter projects that have recently achieved their goals: Michel Gagné’s short The Saga of Rex and Masaaki Yuasa’s short Kick-Heart. At first glance, the two projects could not be more different: Gagné is a former feature film animator who works largely by himself from a home studio, while Yuasa is producing his short using a full crew and traditional production pipeline at Tokyo-based Production I.G..

However, both films share one thing in common: they have budgeted their animation at $15,000 per minute. Gagné set his goal at $15,000 to produce one-minute of film, with each additional minute produced at a $15K increment. Yuasa asked for $150,000 to produce a 10-minute short. This is not a particularly high per-minute rate for the type of animation that they’re producing, but it is higher than the average per-minute rate of many other Kickstarter animation campaigns.

The takeaway: not only are more projects being crowdfunded nowadays, but the per-minute rate for A-list animators is growing alongside it. Even with the aid of digitial technology, animation like the kind that Gagné and Yuasa produce remains a laborious, hand-crafted process. It’s encouraging that the backers of their campaigns recognize this since a decent per-minute production rate will be essential for crowdfunding to make a serious impact in the world of animation production.

Anything by Michel Gagné, even 30 seconds of new animation, is worth a post on Cartoon Brew. Here is a promo for his 2010 graphic novel The Saga Of Rex, his first time using Toon Boom, “done single-handedly in 3 weeks while learning the software”. Beautiful job!

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Michel Gagne

Animation professionals are pushing the limits of the field every day on the big and the small screen, but veteran animator and storyboard artist Ryan Woodward is breaking new ground right in your hands: on phones and tablet devices. Debuting last Friday, Woodward’s Bottom of the Ninth is an iOS app that is both a graphic novel and animated short film, with each comic panel acting as a frame for a short piece of the animated work. Using the skills accumulated from his seventeen years in animation, he’s broken out on his own with a small team of animators, programmers, musicians and voice-over talent to push the boundaries of what people think of as animation. Woodward has created what he calls “the first animated graphic novel,” and not just simple sliding graphics as in many animated comics, but a graphic novel featuring full character animation.

The story of Bottom of the Ninth is set 200 years in the future and revolves around a young girl named Candy gifted with phenomenal talent on the baseball field. Her father, a retired pro baller named Gordy, is training her to harness her raw talent into the skills needed to become a pro in their futuristic version of baseball, dubbed “New Baseball,” that comes complete with artificial gravity and vertical infields. With Candy’s talent she might be a shoe-in, but as anyone who’s parented a teenager or been one themself (don’t deny it), work is the last thing on her mind.

Ryan Woodward jumped into the animation field in 1995 fresh out of Brigham Young University, cutting his teeth in the trenches on Space Jam and the film’s polar opposite, The Iron Giant . As a young artist, Woodward apprenticed under a number of notable animators including Michel Gagné. In recent years, Woodward has transferred his talent to the CG realm and worked on this year’s The Avengers and Snow White and the Huntsman. After hours, he has continued to work on personal projects like the award-winning short film Thought of You ,and now, Bottom of the Ninth.

The first chapter of Bottom of the Ninth is available now for $3.99 from the iTunes App Store, with plans to release future chapters as In-App purchases.

Chris Arrant: Ryan, you’ve had an extensive career working in theatrical animation and live-action films, but I was surprised to learn that you’d trained under animator Michel Gagné at Warner Bros., an industry veteran who has similarly pursued his own creative path. How do you balance a busy career working on major feature films while creating ambitious independent projects like Bottom of the Ninth?

Ryan Woodward: Not easy. But guys like Michel and also Acturas Actas taught me to have passion for this art form and they taught me the value of pursuing my own dreams along with supporting great feature productions. In the end it comes down to wanting to feel human. I want to feel like I’m arriving to my potential. The studio system is great and I learned a ton there, but the need for specialists in that industry limit you to how much you want to grow in other areas, and I’ve always wanted to grow and be a much more well-rounded production artist. And when you do your own production, you have to animate, wri

I ran into animator Michel Gagné at the Annie Awards last week (where he picked up an Annie for Best Video Game, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet) and asked him about his next project. Turns out Gagne had been toiling on a labor of love (literally) that has just gone on sale this week. Says Gagné:

“I have a new book that just came out. I’ve always had a very particular vision of how books reprinting old comics should be restored and presented, so a few years ago, I decided to put my own historical collection together covering a subject that had never really been documented before. I worked on the project for many years and last year it was picked up by Fantagraphics. The book was released last week.“

That book, Young Romance: the Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics, is not the usual thing we endorse here at Cartoon Brew – but as a life-long Jack Kirby fan and oddball comic book buff, this project is right up my alley. Gagne writes more about why he wanted to do this project, and how he did the restorations on his website. I’ve ordered my copy and highly recommend it, sight unseen. Thanks, Michel!

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Michel Gagne

Everything Michel Gagné does is worth seeing and owning. His latest project is a video game (which we teased back in 2009): Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

“After 5 years of work including the most intense year and a half of my career, ITSP is finally wrapped up and ready for release. Being a fan of classical animation, I think you should really enjoy looking at the game (and playing, if you’re a player). Five years ago, game veteran Joe Olson and I set out the goal of bringing feature quality 2D classical animation to video games. Working with the amazingly dedicated crew at both, Fuelcell Games and Gagne International, I believe we pulled it off!”

Various videos following the evolution of the game, and a bunch of new screen shots, can be found on Gagné’s blog. Here’s the new trailer:

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: Michel Gagne

Anything Michel Gagné does is worth a post on Cartoon Brew, but a whole new film by him is cause for celebration. His new short, Sensology, visualizes in abstract form an improvised musical session by two leaders of the avant-guarde jazz movement, Paul Plimley (piano) and Barry Guy (bass). The music was recorded on November 9th, 1995, at the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada. A 9-second teaser of Sensology, posted online in the Fall of 2006, resulted in Pixar contacting Michel to do the abstract taste visualization for the film Ratatouille. Gagné tells us:

“The film was started in August 2006 and completed in July 2010. Many months of experimentation with various animation techniques lead to a grant from Art Partners in Creative Development and the creation of the live show Fixed Fragmented Fluid which will also make its way as a film at a later date.

“I’ve been refining the animation over a four year period and finally wrapped it up three weeks ago. The completed 6-minute film premiered in Los Angeles last week, to qualify for an Academy Award, at the Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7 in West Hills, CA.”

And now, here’s the finished film: