Unfortunately the weather sucked today and I had to run to 3 blocks in the freezing rain to cinema studies, but a classmate did his presentation on Russian animation, which I don't know much about, so there was a nice little dialogue on animation in class today. It always surprises me how my whole class will know this super obscure cinema stuff but like... Has never heard of French Animation or Triplettes of Belleville. I've found, taking both cinema and sequential arts this quarter, that sequential artists really look up to animation for inspiration, and even though animation looks up to cinematography and film history, cinema people generally don't know anything about animation. I just find that terribly sad... It's all movies and storytelling, we should all be a little more interested in things outside our little worlds.
The head of story for Kung Fu Panda 2 came to my sequential arts class and talked about storyboarding for dreamworks the other day. He later gave a lecture that night about it, but it was so cool to randomly have him show up unannounced in class. I love it when that happens (last time, the CEOs from Jib Jab came to a class, an before that, a Disney animator randomly came in and critiqued some student work). It's cool stuff like that that makes me so grateful to be here.
