Welcome to our second annual Kidscreen Conversations episode. I headed to San Diego, not Miami this year for the first west coast Kidscreen. As always it was a great event, although the sun decided to skip it this year!  Our guests this year are Rob Doherty, a consultant with great insight into the industry and founder of Festivus, an animation org that parallels the Creators Society in some ways in the UK, Sueann Rochester, Managing Director of Wild Child Animation in Scotland, and Lucy Murphy, director of kids content at Sky in the UK. There's some really great thoughts and insight he ..read more

Welcome to the 4th season of the Creators Society Animation Podcast. We're thrilled to have made it this far! As you know, our business is changing all the time, rapidly. But that means that there is more to talk about than ever, so we're going to be talking to different people and discussing different topics of change and importance. Today we chat with Sean Charmatz and Peter McCown from DreamWorks about their new film Orion and the Dark, which is out on Netflix. This one is super interesting to me from a few perspectives. When I saw the trailer, I was intrigued - it was written by Charlie ..read more

Today we have a treat as I chat with Mike Lasker of Sony ImageWorks. I don't know about you but I was blown away by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - and actually when it finished, I sat there with so many questions - mainly around the theme of 'how the hell did they do that?!' I have long had a fascination with render styles that veered away from realism, playing with toon shaders and compositing techniques in my own work and trying to find new looks that were fresh or different. Of course Sony's recent films have been an explosion of fresh and different, starting with Spider-Man: Into t ..read more

In today's episode we have a conversation with Sandy Wax - a former Discovery, Disney and Sprout executive. Sandy is delightfully curious, and  that curiosity really paved the way for so many things - from her interest in research, to how that ties into content development and marketing and branding - and what led to her becoming CEO of Sprout for over over 10 years.  Branding is something we don't talk enough about, so I loved diving into this with Sandy - and she's had 3 different and major experiences with brand building in our industry that I think we all can learn from. I hope ..read more

For this episode, we're breaking down The Inventor with an 'Anatomy of an Indie Stop Motion Film'. We first had Jim Capobianco on the show almost two years ago! In that chat, he talked about the stop motion feature project he'd embarked upon. With the Inventor releasing in theatres on Friday, September 15th, we thought doing a deep dive and breaking down how it made it to screen would be a great idea. To do so we were joined by Jim, the film's writer and director (Jim was also Oscar-nominated as co-writer of Ratatouille), Co-Director Pierre-Luc Granjon, and Line Producer Kat Alioshin.  ..read more

If you're looking for some career inspiration, look no further than this episode with guest Bobby Chiu. Bobby's career is an example of tenacity, purpose, and a drive to not only be a great artist but to be great FOR artists. We start out early in his career journey and talk through all the obstacles he encountered before his big break, which was really a big gamble that turned into a big break. Our industry throws up continual obstacles, whether it's a no from a pitch, a no from a school, being part of layoffs caused by Wall Street's whims, or a myriad of other barriers, this episode will e ..read more

If you're look for some career inspiration, look no further than this episode with guest Bobby Chui. Bobby's career is an example of tenacity, purpose and a drive to not only be a great artist, but to be great FOR artists. We start out early in his career journey and talk through all the obstacles he encountered before his big break, which was really a big gamble that turned into a big break. Our industry throws up continual obstacles, whether it's a no from a pitch, a no from a school, being part of layoffs caused by Wall Street's whims, or a myriad of other barriers, this episode will enco ..read more

In this episode, I got to chat with Kirk DeMicco and Faryn Pearl, the director and co-director of DreamWorks Animation's latest film, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. As with most films, what we see onscreen is only part of the story. If you look at the math, Kirk's last directorial project was Vivo, released around 2 years ago, which means Ruby was a sprint from when he came aboard - pun intended.  This film is refreshing in that it's focussed on a young female protagonist, and the entire thread of the story focusses on 3 generations of women - well, kraken women.  The production des ..read more

In this episode, we chat with Gary H. Lee, a layout, pre-viz, and cinematography guru who has also directed a couple of amazing shorts. Gary has an amazing career story that we know you'll enjoy, from working on one of the biggest film franchises of all time at age 19 to working with Ang Lee on Life of Pi, he has an incredible amount of experience and insight. We discuss his career, his thoughts on where pre-viz is going with Unreal, and how he used pre-viz to get his ambitious short films into production. Check out the trailer for Gary's short Aden here. We'll let you know when it's live onl ..read more

In 2022 Animation Magazine celebrated 35 years, so I sat down with Jean Thoren, a serial encourager, to talk about her and the magazine and the journey.  Jean, and Animation Magazine have seen so much change in the industry of the past 35 years, and we chat about how it all got started, when Pixar was emerging and Disney was changing and the evolution of animation from being pigeon holed for kids to having a wider audience today.  Jean and Animation Magazine also run the Animation Summit in LA in November which we chat about. Enjoy! Please like, rate, and comment on your favorite ..read more