Busy week trying to recover from the Annies. Have not put much in these pages but have been busy. Touched base with a number of cool people at the Alex last Saturday. Called up or emailed some of them this week to continue half finished conversations started in the press of the crowd.

One such conversation was with Dan Lund, Director of Dream on Silly Dreamer. Really good news, Silly Dreamer is coming out on DVD next week with all kinds of cool extra features including lots of interviews and footage from the Alex screening.

As I have said before, Silly Dreamer is a documentary of major importance and should be seen by everyone in the field of animation. I know that I am going to be showing it to my students.

Speaking of Silly Dreamer, people in the industry press are still combining my award and the award for Dan Lund and Tony West. I had to send it a correction to Variety this week. Can`t blame them, there was an early ambiguous press release that started this whole mess off.

One of the disappointments at last week`s Annie Awards is that I did not get to meet Ian Mackinnon & Peter Saunders the winners of the Ub Iwerks Award for their outrageous clockwork stop motion armatures for Corpse Bride. The crowds at the Alex were too large and I never got to run into them. I have been emailing back and forth to Ian and hopefully I will be able to interview them for these pages at a later date.

Now that we are on the subject of Corpse Bride, I picked up the Wide Screen version of same this week. The extras are very nice with a whole section on the armature magic of Mackinnon & Saunders. The stuff they are doing with secondary action animation devices like the brides vial and dress is unbelievable. The animation in this movie is a major breakthrough. I loved the story too.



I finished sawing up my guest speakers for my Laguna College of Art & Design History of Animation class this week. This is one of the best classes I`ve had in a long time, very smart, very dedicated. I had students arranging animation report subjects in the second week of class for a report that is due in week ten. I`m very impressed with the whole LCAD program. More details on guests later.

Last Wednesday night was the post mortem on the 33rd Annie Awards. A very good job was done by everybody involved. Looks like we are starting to strain at the seams of the Alex Theater a little. Gretchen Dixon and Annette O`Neil did a wonderful job making the Annies happen. Many thanks to IDT for the Annie Screening reel editing. They did a beautiful job. All the volunteers where champion. Special thanks toEd Gonzalez and his video crew, great work very professional. Of course it is now time to start planning next years Annie Awards but first I have to get Comic Con up and flying. More on that later.  ¶ 7:45 AM