So day 4 was basically the day that greatly magnified my wiz-powers and understanding of the world's delicate and intricate thread of inconspicuous facts. Or as the program called it: Professional Development Day.
The first session 'Give me a Job' was hosted by recruiters of Cartoon Network, DHX and Walt Disney Studios. These companies where present as well at SIGGRAPH, and yet they limited themselves to blurt out whatever requirements they have for entry level positions (which is basically listed on their website). Nevertheless, here they were engaged in a discussion of what a good portfolio and entrepreneurship as a starting animator really means within their respective companies and their take on the industry as a seasoned working professional.
They talked a lot about web presence and how this is in most of the cases as important as a job interview. How it is particularly for this reason that a clean and appropriate web persona needs to be projected through your social network profiles, so yeah either cleaning or filtering your facebook appropriately so no drunk pics get between you and your chance of landing a job. But particularly they made a strong emphasis on regular blog activity and how the layout of the aforementioned can be crucial to its review. The importance of filtering content in these blogs is also very important, that posting pics of things that inspire you is great, contrary to posting subjective content that doesn't really shows relevance to your work and development as an artist.
All in all a great panel, I found it particularly funny that although they all agreed mainly on most of the ideas and points posed, they subtilely where always tearing each other's studio reputation apart.
Followed by this was the Surviving as a Filmmaker panel, with panelists like Nick Cross (Pig Farmer) Andy & Carolyn London (Eager to Please), among others. This was more of a pep talk for all starting animators to keep on creating, to embrace their concepts over the soul crushing economic and time constraints that may imply, but most importantly to find the joy and profit out of the necessary evil of freelancing and working in a commercial pipeline, as creatively stale as it may appear to be. Several pointers were given about copyright organization, web distribution vs festival application, crowd-sourcing and concept harvesting, which can be roughly resumed in: be organized and don't get over emotional/critical about your own work, since that is the audience's job.
The Pendleton Ward and Thurop van Orman Misadventures panel was simply fantastic, Thurop pitched an idea he has for what can possibly be a short stop-motion film or a series called Black Forest and Pen gave out some Adventure Time sneak-peek for season 4 which was quite good, I won't spoil stuff so nyah.
Later on I rushed to the feature screening Dead but not Buried which was ridiculously hilarious. Quite a minimalistic piece I'd say and making lots of dark humor comments about its form and narrative cliches, which was nice. However I felt there was a point where it became kind of tedious. (And it didn't deserve to win best feature film imo).
That's... basically my highlights for day 4 at the OIAF 2011. 'Kay, see ya!
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