Classes have officially wrapped up now. We had our Life Drawing and Design for Film one-on-ones with Linda and Píxote (which ended in hugs for a lot of us), and presented our beatboard pitches in Story.
Before I get to our Story pitches, though, there’s a topic I’ve been neglecting! This blog’s been focused on the Animation Residency, but there’s two other residencies going on concurrently: Art and Film.
I intruded upon the Art Residency as they presented the results of their hard work:
They’ve been working just as hard as us here in Animation, having their own adventure, and I wish I had blogged about them earlier.
Back to Animation, though! As I mentioned, our final for Story class was to present a beat board pitch to Robert and the rest of us.
First, we got knighted by a genuine Disney pitch stick:
Robert wasn’t the only big-time animator around, though. There were some surprise guest animators! Like, say, Mark Dindal, director of Cats Don’t Dance, Emperor’s New Groove, and Chicken Little!
Or Gary Trousdale, Director of Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Atlantis: the Lost Empire. With a bonus appearance by Dan Jeup, who animated Sebastian on The Little Mermaid and worked on Toy Story 2.
We knew there’d be a wrap party afterwards, which had pizza, salad, and ice cream. What most of us (except those who attended last year) didn’t expect was when we were told to gather in the center...
Are Robert and Yaou singing?!
And now we get to sing, too?!
Yaou’s one of the TAs here, a previous Resident, and a current CalArts student. Afterwards she held an impromptu signing session where she drew cool caricatures of all of us.
It’s surreal, having so many animators in the same room. The TAs, guests, instructors...
Actually, if you’ll permit me a chance to be obnoxiously optimistic, I’d say that room was filled with forty-odd future legendary animators last night.
Unfortunately, as Robert and Yaou sang:
Next Time: One last hurrah!
