AWN Oscar Travelogue

Oscar Showcase 08 Disney Photo Gallery

oscartour — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:25:15 +0000

On Feb. 20th, the day belonged to Disney on the Oscar Showcase tour. Here is the photographic evidence.

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Oscar Showcase 08 Academy Screening Photo Gallery

oscartour — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 05:08:45 +0000

On the evening of Feb. 19th, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences hosted a screening of the animated and live-action shorts. Check out the pictures from the star-studded event.

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Nominees Treated Like Superstars At Academy Screening

oscartour — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:38:35 +0000

After the Q&A at 20th Century Fox, tour host Ron Diamond had to quickly move the nominees toward the road so that we could make the reception before the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences screening. With the event filled with press from all over the globe, the nominees were given the star treatment. On the way to the screening, I asked I Met the Walrus producer Jerry Levitan what went through his mind when he heard that his film was nominated. He said that is was surreal and knew that his life would be different from now on. With dozens of photographers clamoring to get his picture, I guess he was right. Walrus director Josh Raskin said his food was pulled away from him three times, as he was spirited away to another interview. During the reception, Madame Tutli-Putli producer Marcy Page was able to thank John Lasseter for his endorsement in getting her into the Academy. The Disney animation head said it was warranted and thanked her and fellow NFB exec David Verrall for continuing to fund short animation.

This year’s event sold out in 20 minutes. After the screening to the very receptive crowd, the night’s MC, L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson, asked the filmmakers some of the typical questions like how they made their films and what their influences where. Josh said John Lennon of course for his film animates to the voice of The Beatles star. Madame Tutli-Putli directors Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski credited Charlie Chaplin, while Peter and the Wolf director Suzie Templeton cited Bambi. Suzie’s producer Hugh Welchman, who brought the Peter puppet from the film to the event, said Night of the Hunter for its original use of magical realism. Even Pigeons Go to Heaven producer Simon Vanesse was influenced by 2001, which his director Samuel Tourneux, laughed and asked how Stanley Kubrick’s space epic influenced their CG film about a priest trying to sell an old man a machine that will take him to heaven. And Maciek added a nice new description of using stop-motion animation on his film. He called it a silver bullet. When hunting werewolves a silver bullet is good, but you don’t shot them all the time. Stop-motion is good for a surrealistic tale like Madame, but for just capturing the movement of women there are better ways of doing so.

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Exclusive Oscar Day Pics!

oscartour — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:46:42 +0000

Ron Diamond (center) poses with the animated short Oscar winner Torill Kove and the live-action short winner Ari Sandel. © AWN Inc.

Here they are — pics from the exciting Oscar day. Lots of winners, excitement and fun!

Torill and her husband Kevin pose for a pic in the hotel lobby. © AWN Inc.

The Danish Poet team in the limo on the way to the big event. © AWN Inc.

Marcy does her Helen Mirren Queen-wave for the wanting crowds outside. © AWN Inc.

The Danish Poet team on the red carpet -- Kevin (l to r), Torill, Lise, Marcy and Kajsa Naess of Mikrofilm. © AWN Inc.

The Danish Poet team celebrates right after the win. © AWN Inc.

Little Matchgirl producer Don Hahn and his wife at the Governor's Ball. © AWN Inc.

Don poses with Ron and Ron's sister Debbie Sarto. © AWN Inc.

No Time for Nuts' Mike Thurmeier (l to r), Ron, Chris Renaud and Debbie. © AWN Inc.

Canadian Television interviews Torill outside the Vanity Fair party. © AWN Inc.

At the Vanity Fair party, John Lasseter chats with Clive Owen while John's wife Nancy talks with Jerry Seinfeld. © AWN Inc.

Ron poses with the newest star to animation Jerry Seinfeld, who created and produced the upcoming Bee Movie. © AWN Inc.

Oscar winners Helen Mirren and Torill Kove. © AWN Inc.

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Bill Kroyer’s Thoughts on Visiting the Oscar Tour

oscartour — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 01:48:10 +0000

Bill Kroyer poses for a pic with Little Matchgirl's Don Hahn and Roger Allers at Sony. © AWN Inc.

Ron Diamond has created as new Oscar tradition: his yearly tour of the major West coast animation studios by the nominees for Best Animated Short Film. In a few short years this has become such an established event that all of the nominated films are represented by their respective directors, producers or both. At studios, which include ILM, Pixar, PDI, DreamWorks. and Sony, all five of the nominated films are screened for crowds of enthusiastic employees. The nominees have a chance to meet their professional counterparts and see their facilities.

Taking part in this tour is not a trivial thing, and I’m not talking about the singular difficulty of just achieving the status of Academy Award Nominee. There is the much more mundane obstacle of coming up with the money to take several weeks of unpaid leave and pay for travel costs.

Animation (thank God) remains the last bastion of the individual artist. It is still possible to make a film with little money and a few dedicated friends and supporters and have that film stand toe-to-toe with the productions made by the major studios.

While the nominees from Pixar, Disney and Blue Sky enjoy the painless financial support of their parent companies, many of the folks who worked on Maestro (Geza M. Toth, Hungary) and The Danish Poet (Torill Kove, co-produced in Canada and Norway) had a more personal travel experience. They flew coach and paid their own way to bask in the Oscar limelight. I can picture a live-action director throwing a hissy fit over such a predicament, but animation people? They just do it. Don’t you love ‘em?

Ron Diamond invited me to spend a day with the tour, in part to compare the pre-show buzz of the animation nominees in 2007 to the experience I had in 1989 when I was nominated for my short film Technlogical Threat.

That year, I shared the spotlight with John Lassiter (Tin Toy) and Cordell Barker (The Cat Came Back). But there wasn’t much of a pre-show spotlight to share. I recall the three of us getting together with our wives for dinner – and we split the check.

Bill Kroyer has a chance to have lunch with Kajsa Naess of Mikrofilm and Marcy Page of the NFB. © AWN Inc.

The animation industry has exploded since then, and with that explosion has come new and well-deserved attention to the artform’s honorees. At each stop on the Ron Diamond tour, the entire program of films is screened in 35mm, the nominees answer questions from the audience, tour the facility and have a catered lunch. These visits are squeezed between the various press and interview events.

The day I tagged along, the nominees visited Sony Imageworks, and, in an excursion that speaks volumes for the new esteem animation enjoys, CAA, the Creative Artists Agency.

CAA has just moved into their sleek new multi-million dollar headquarters in Century City, and we were informed that our program of five films was to be only the second screening to be held in the spanking new state-of-the-art theater. The rust showed a little when the projectionist managed to reveal the tail leader on Lifted, but otherwise the room lived up to its look.

In the Q&A that followed, you might have guessed that no questions were asked about the making of the films. The agents wanted to know about the marketing of the films. Who watches shorts? How do they make money? What’s happening to the industry in general?

Happily, the Academy’s new program of theatrical releasing the nominees, the advent of short films on iTunes, and the general health of the animation business made the answer a positive one.

At Sony, the Q&A was notable for the lack of questions. Ron said that it was not unusual to have very few questions from studio audiences. Why, you may ask? Maybe people don’t want to give the impression that they don’t know more than the guy sitting next to them.

I remember years ago at the Academy’s “Bake-off” (the night when the Visual Effects branch views potential FX nominees) when Richard Taylor had the same experience when he presented Tron. That picture featured the first-ever use of high-end computer graphics in a motion picture, and it was a certainty that not one member of the audience had ever used the technology. I can attest to that because we literally invented it as we made the picture.

Yet, in the Q&A, only one question: what kind of camera did you use?

Why no others? Richard always suspected that no one wanted to reveal they were behind the curve. There is another side to this, of course. Many of the animation crew in today’s audience actually do know how these films are made because they use the technology every day.

Then there are the human elements…

The Little Matchgirl is unusual for a Disney film – it has a tragic ending. Director Roger Allers fought for this, and it took literally years for him to achieve it. He accomplished it in a simple way – he outlasted the opposition. Management at the studio changed, but Roger’s vision will now be on film forever.

Maestro has the distinction of having the shortest credit list of any film. Director Geza M. Toth of Budapest, Hungary, had to teach himself how to use the software that he used to create the film.

Gary Rydstrom, director of Lifted, is famous for being the premiere sound designer on most of Pixar’s features. He could not attend the Sony screening because he was, we were told, behind schedule on a Pixar film with a release date of 2013.

Bill Kroyer (right) gets a chance to chat with No Time for Nuts director Chris Renaud at Sony. © AWN Inc.

Chris Renaud got a chance to direct No Time For Nuts because he won a competition at Blue Sky to come up with a new Scrat concept. Chris, a former comic book artist, boarded the whole film himself.

Torill Kove, director of The Danish Poet, made the film as a co-production between Canada and Norway by virtue of her own personal friendships. Although currently residing in Montreal and working at the National Film Board of Canada, she went to art school in the tiny coastal village of Volda, Norway, where she met the future founders of Mikrofilm, a tiny studio in Oslo that split the work with Canada.

Spending even a day with these nominees reminds me and reassures me of one of the enduring joys of animation. The artists really love their work, and that love translates into a common bond that trumps any barrier of age, distance or nationality.

In my mind, that’s the real benefit of the Ron Diamond tour. The industry is healthy, the industry makes money, the industry creates product. But what makes it special to those in it is that the industry makes art. The creators of the five honored films represent that in a very personal way.

This pilgrimage to the studio doesn’t serve as just a publicity event or parade of kudos. It’s an exercise in connection, a chance for all of us to bask in the glow. Not the Oscar glow, but the glow of remembering that we belong to a community of artists that can create something special.

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Guess Whom the Nominees Ran Into at Disney & ICM?

oscartour — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:50:36 +0000

The Disney leg of the Oscar Tour poses for a pic in front of the studio. Courtesy of Disney.

Officially one week of the Oscar Tour is up and we’re nearing the home stretch. Today was less crazed than yesterday, but still wonderfully eventful nonetheless. The day was a home coming for Roger and Don. Every time we turned a corner someone was ecstatic to see them. After Tenny Chonin, head of artistic development at Disney Features, introduced the screening, Don took us on a special tour of the old animation building across the street from the new animation complex (you know, the building with the big hat on it). On the way, even, someone crossing the street lit up when he saw Don and pleaded him to come back to work soon. He has been like the Zen master of the group. His peaceful nature is just unforgettable. I had thought before that it must be a pleasure to work for him and after today I think many of the Disney employees confirmed my feeling.

Right as Don got into the swing of his tour guide mode, he goes “and there’s John Lasseter and Ed Cutmall coming our way.” And sure enough everyone turns around and there is John and Ed. I think John was just as surprised to run into a crowd of Oscar nominees as we were to run into him. Ron introduced everyone to John and Ed. Having seen all the shorts, John was complimentary to all the nominees. Marcy has known John for years and he gave her a big hug when he saw her. Marcy reminisced about when back in the day John was her tour guide around Pixar. John asked about Frédéric Back and Marcy was sad to report that he isn’t doing well. His wife suffered a stroke recently and he was skin cancer. After each of the filmmakers had a chance to chat with John, he and Ed had to leave. Now that was a seriously awesome star sighting.

Oscar Tour poses at the corner of Dopey Drive & Mickey Lane. Roger Allers (l to r), Geza Toth, Marcy Page, Tamas Liszkas, Torill Kove, Lise Fearnley, Don Hahn, Chris Renaud, Katherine Sarafian, VFXWorld editor Bill Desowitz, Ron Diamond & AWN co-founder Dan Sarto. © AWN Inc.

Don resumed the tour taking us into the old animation building. A tunnel runs underground connecting the animation building to the ink & paint building so that cels never had to be transported outside. Don also pointed out Walt Disney’s corner office. Throughout the building, there’s great artwork hung on the walls from the classic films. Don pointed to a beautiful Lion King background and commented that it was still hard for him to see projects he worked on at Disney up on the wall alongside classics like Snow White.

We made it back to the packed auditorium just as the final film was hitting the mid-point. Ron introduced the filmmakers and opened it up for questions. The audience asked similar questions about the inspiration for the shorts and distribution means. Marcy was very happy to share the fact that the Magnolia Pictures compilation film of the Oscar shorts that is playing in the U.S. finished 44th at the box office in its debut weekend. I went and looked up the stats — it’s playing on 38 screens and garnered a per screen average of $2,781, which is almost a $1,000 better than the 7th ranked film, Hannibal Rising, scored per screen.

The final question asked was what everyone is working on. Geza is working on a new 3D animated short, which will be completed later in the year. Chris is working on Horton Hears a Who. Torill isn’t finished with The Danish Poet; she’s working on a picture book based on the film. Marcy is producing shorts at the NFB with Chris Landreth, Chris Hinton and Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis. Lise Fearnley is working at the Norwegian Broadcast company as well as producing two additional shorts. Katherine Sarafian is producing Lifted director Gary Rydstrom’s next project. Roger is working on the book for a Broadway musical, titled Grasshopper. Don said he was working on changing the oil in his car this afternoon.

After the Q&A, we were again treated to a nice lunch. I joked with Lise that after the tour I’m really going to have to go back to the gym, because I’ve been fed so well. Ron encouraged everyone to sit by people they don’t know so that everyone could get more out of the experience. I’m glad he did, because I had a wonderful chance to chat with Lise. In Norway, The Danish Poet’s nomination is a big deal, because it’s only one of five or six nominations the country has ever received. And two of them have gone to Torill. However, Lise said that many of the Norwegian film fan sites were debating for months which Norwegian film would get an Oscar nod and when the Norwegian entry didn’t even make the Foreign Language category shortlist, they were writing off any Norwegian nods at all. It goes to show that all around the world shorts aren’t even on the radar. But it also shows how much an Oscar nomination sends them into orbit.

I asked Lise, “how big will it be in Norway, if Torill wins? Will they throw a parade and erect statues in her honor?” She laughed and said, “We hope so.” But she also made an interesting comment about he nature of fame and success in Norway. Norwegians, she said, seem to hate people who get too famous. Some very much rejected the idea of Liv Ullmann providing the voice over for the film. It’s surprising that in the States several people, including myself, couldn’t think of a better voice. Ullman’s tone and delivery matches Torill’s low-key, sardonic humor perfectly. As for distribution, she told me that in the main theater in Oslo, there is a free screening at 6 pm on weekends of short Norwegian productions. Additionally, studios in Norway still have the opportunity to distribute their films before feature films much like the U.S. in the 1940s. However, just like the States now, the theaters want shorter shorts around five minutes long so that they can fit in more screenings of the features in a day.

After we all finished eating, we were treated to a thorough tour of the new animation studio. Our tour guide Jay took us first into the new coffee lounge, which was proposed courtesy of John Lasseter as an area for the artists to gather, relax and communicate. Disney provides an extensive reference library for the artists to use for inspiration and a recording of the Oscar Showcase will be added to that collection. The building is set up to hold two full productions. Each production has its own pod. Currently, the studio is about to wrap on Meet the Robinsons and is gearing up to finish American Dog. The various pods are filled with artwork and style inspirations. American Dog has a very unique look unlike anything Disney has made in CG thus far. The style is inspired by the work of painter Edward Hopper. Some of the cinematic references that were posted include Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Thelma and Louise. The pods are also decorated in a similar style to that of the picture. The American Dog pod includes an authentic 1950s dinner and refrigerator.

Ever wonder what’s in the sorcerer’s apprentice’s hat, which tops the animation building at Disney? Well, originally it was Roy Disney’s office, however the curved, striped walls cause a feeling of vertigo. An interesting factoid about the room was that at the time it was built, Roy smoked and was going to be the only person allowed to smoke in the building. So a special air ventilation system was installed in the sorcerer hat bookshelf so that the smoke would be filtered outside. However, Roy quit smoking soon before moving into the office, which he only stayed in for two weeks anyway. Now the room is used as a conference room. And another secret factoid that Jay shared was that the middle star in the bookshelf actually pops out to provide access to the ventilation system, which was something no one knew about until someone investigated why the middle star was the only star on the bookshelf to have a dark border around it.

Next we ventured up to the third floor were development of future projects takes place. The first short we saw artwork from was the new 2D Goofy short, How To Install Your Home Theater, which will return Goofy to his popular “How To” shorts, which were popular in the ’40s and ’50s. The project is being co-directed by Kevin Deters and Stevie Wermers. Katherine commented that she has seen the Goofy short at Pixar and promises that it’s hilarious. The next film was a CG short titled, Golgo’s Guest, where a Russian frontier guard meets a space alien. Chris Williams is doing double directing duty, juggling both Golgo’s and American Dog. The stark design style of Golgo’s matches the Siberian setting nicely. The design of the main character is wonderful as well. There’s a lived in look to the character’s face that I liked. We also saw two sketches from the two other shorts in development — The Ballad of Nessie, an origin story of the Loch Ness monster, and Prep and Landing, which has two hapless elves wreck havoc on a house in preparation for Santa’s arrival. Jay told us that John Lasseter likes the Prep and Landing idea so much that he’s considering turning into an ABC Christmas special. Last, but not least, we were able to gaze upon the character and production designs for Glen Keane’s Rapunzel. Keeping true to the original fairy tale, the look of the film is like Victorian paintings coming to life. If the CG looks anything like what Tenny described to us, it’s going to be breathtaking.

With the tour coming to a close, the nominees were appreciative of being given the chance to see things that others do not get to see. We had to say good-bye to Katherine who was hopping into a cab to head back to Pixar while the rest of the group was headed to the agency ICM. No Time for Nuts producer Lori, who works around the corner from ICM at Fox, joined us for the second screening of the day. Robert Lazar greeted us and told us that the screening was the first in their new swank screening room. Attending the screening was ICM vice chairman Bob Broder, who had warm congratulations for all. The shorts went over pretty well. Afterward, the agents mingled with the nominees, chatting with the filmmakers of their favorite shorts. And the nominees were treated to a second surprise celebrity sighting of the day when Henry Winkler came into the lobby to talk to Bob Broder.

That closed another filled day on the Oscar Showcase tour. Tomorrow, I’ll be accompanying Ron to an NFB luncheon at the Canadian consulate, followed by a screening of the shorts at the William Morris agency. Check back soon for new updated pictures in this post as well as a new photo gallery with some great pictures from DreamWorks, the Academy screening and Disney as well as Mike’s beautiful baby girl.

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John Canemaker’s Thoughts on The Oscar Experience

oscartour — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 01:58:26 +0000

Canemaker & producer Peggy Stern

It’s exciting to able to share with the rest of the community the thoughts and experiences of the Oscar nominees. And it’s a great pleasure to share with you today the feelings of last year’s Oscar winner John Canemaker. The Moon and the Son director tells us why the Oscar Tour was such a special event in the whole Oscar extravaganza. Here is what he had to say:

The Oscar award ceremony is exciting; but the build-up to that evening — the tour of studios and screenings of your films as organized by Ron Diamond — is one of the best parts of the whole experience. Screening your films at Pixar, DreamWorks, Disney, Sony, Electronic Arts, Lucasfilm and other studios — and the huge AMPAS theatre — to standing room only crowds eager to see your work and ask you questions is thrilling!

Ron knows everyone in the industry and is well-liked and admired. Through his personal contacts, you are greeted at the studios by and dine and converse with and the likes of John Lasseter, Jeffrey Katzenberg and other top execs — a marvelous opportunity afforded to few.

One of the best parts of the whole experience was getting to really know our fellow nominees as we toured the studios, the several parties, lunches and dinners that Ron also planned. We all bonded and were (and are) very supportive of each other.

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