These gift ideas are fun! I'm surprised at how some of the older books, especially the Miyazaki chronicles, remain affordable. Incidentally, I wish it were also easy to somehow gift non-traditional/non-tangible things like submission fees or things like "crit" for animators; I was reminded of how SOTW does amazing critiques for a fee—it's not exorbitant at around $70 USD I think, but still adds up!
Speaking of crit, I was thinking that I'd give a lot to be a fly on the wall for film jury deliberations. It must be so difficult to choose one film over another when so many of these animated shorts are so different not only stylistically but in terms of what their artistic "priorities" are—for lack of a better way to put it. One film can feel like an apple and another an orange, to me. I think GIRAF didn't have more granular categories?
Lastly, I loved Mekakure—thanks for spotlighting it! I look forward to these gems every issue. There's something so anxiety/fear-inducing about it, in an impressively non-flashy way. I thought a lot about how what we can imagine is often so much darker and more terrifying than what we can physically see. (The style triggered a memory of the small bits of animation used in the excellent 2018 arthouse horror film Mandy with Nicolas Cage for some reason, even though they're probably not that alike.)
Very true about gifting crit and submission fees (a burden on indie animators that we were shocked to learn about some years back). We've seen a few artists on Patreon create backer tiers dedicated to critique, but not sure about animators. It seems like a bit of a missed opportunity for mentorship in the indie sphere, although we know that many animators barely have enough time to make their films as it is.
As for GIRAF, it was a really unique experience. The format was essentially one international winner, one Canadian winner and then a single runner-up in each category. After that, we had free rein to give films our own special mentions. A lot of the decision-making was based on the lists we'd made before deliberating. We all named our favorites, which can have a strong subjective element, and then we checked for where we overlapped the most. Any film that managed to speak to all of us individually, for our own reasons, tended to place higher.
Each juror had their own way of ranking films. Our personal list slotted them from A- to D-tier, alongside a mini-review that summarized our thoughts. It could be tough, but we tried to weigh each film on its own merits -- whether it succeeded at its goals, whether its goals were good ones, whether it approached them in a unique way, how fully it realized them and how confident and thorough the artistic/technical vision (filmmaking, animation, etc.) seemed to be. For us, films ranked lower when we saw them as merely technical exercises, or thoughtlessly cruel, or playing into stereotypes and cliches, or too shaky to be considered for a top award, and so on.
GIRAF was full of strong films, though, so our A- and B-tiers were packed -- and many of the Cs still had a lot to recommend. Our favorites ranged from upbeat and lighthearted (BoxBallet, Sanctuary) to some of the most unsettling animation we've seen this year (Horacio, The Bones). More than half of our A-list picks wound up getting prizes. The other three (Signs, Vadim on a Walk and the paint-on-canvas film Pilar) didn't speak to the other jurors as strongly as they did to us.
And glad you liked Mekakure! We were happy to see that it was publicly available for us to share. As more of these pieces come online for wider audiences, we'll try to highlight them as well.
Great article, this was a nice change of pace from the usual newsletter. Animation cells can also make great gift though they can be quite expensive an hard to find if you are looking for something specific. Also Mekakure was a really fun and striking short, thanks for making me more aware of it.
Thank you! It's great to hear that you liked the issue and Mekakure. And you're right about cels -- they're beautiful things to have, despite being expensive and tricky to work with. Definitely a good gift to seek out if the person buying them knows their way around auction sites, avoiding forgeries, et cetera. Awesome suggestion.
These gift ideas are fun! I'm surprised at how some of the older books, especially the Miyazaki chronicles, remain affordable. Incidentally, I wish it were also easy to somehow gift non-traditional/non-tangible things like submission fees or things like "crit" for animators; I was reminded of how SOTW does amazing critiques for a fee—it's not exorbitant at around $70 USD I think, but still adds up!
Speaking of crit, I was thinking that I'd give a lot to be a fly on the wall for film jury deliberations. It must be so difficult to choose one film over another when so many of these animated shorts are so different not only stylistically but in terms of what their artistic "priorities" are—for lack of a better way to put it. One film can feel like an apple and another an orange, to me. I think GIRAF didn't have more granular categories?
Lastly, I loved Mekakure—thanks for spotlighting it! I look forward to these gems every issue. There's something so anxiety/fear-inducing about it, in an impressively non-flashy way. I thought a lot about how what we can imagine is often so much darker and more terrifying than what we can physically see. (The style triggered a memory of the small bits of animation used in the excellent 2018 arthouse horror film Mandy with Nicolas Cage for some reason, even though they're probably not that alike.)
Very true about gifting crit and submission fees (a burden on indie animators that we were shocked to learn about some years back). We've seen a few artists on Patreon create backer tiers dedicated to critique, but not sure about animators. It seems like a bit of a missed opportunity for mentorship in the indie sphere, although we know that many animators barely have enough time to make their films as it is.
As for GIRAF, it was a really unique experience. The format was essentially one international winner, one Canadian winner and then a single runner-up in each category. After that, we had free rein to give films our own special mentions. A lot of the decision-making was based on the lists we'd made before deliberating. We all named our favorites, which can have a strong subjective element, and then we checked for where we overlapped the most. Any film that managed to speak to all of us individually, for our own reasons, tended to place higher.
Each juror had their own way of ranking films. Our personal list slotted them from A- to D-tier, alongside a mini-review that summarized our thoughts. It could be tough, but we tried to weigh each film on its own merits -- whether it succeeded at its goals, whether its goals were good ones, whether it approached them in a unique way, how fully it realized them and how confident and thorough the artistic/technical vision (filmmaking, animation, etc.) seemed to be. For us, films ranked lower when we saw them as merely technical exercises, or thoughtlessly cruel, or playing into stereotypes and cliches, or too shaky to be considered for a top award, and so on.
GIRAF was full of strong films, though, so our A- and B-tiers were packed -- and many of the Cs still had a lot to recommend. Our favorites ranged from upbeat and lighthearted (BoxBallet, Sanctuary) to some of the most unsettling animation we've seen this year (Horacio, The Bones). More than half of our A-list picks wound up getting prizes. The other three (Signs, Vadim on a Walk and the paint-on-canvas film Pilar) didn't speak to the other jurors as strongly as they did to us.
And glad you liked Mekakure! We were happy to see that it was publicly available for us to share. As more of these pieces come online for wider audiences, we'll try to highlight them as well.
Great article, this was a nice change of pace from the usual newsletter. Animation cells can also make great gift though they can be quite expensive an hard to find if you are looking for something specific. Also Mekakure was a really fun and striking short, thanks for making me more aware of it.
Thank you! It's great to hear that you liked the issue and Mekakure. And you're right about cels -- they're beautiful things to have, despite being expensive and tricky to work with. Definitely a good gift to seek out if the person buying them knows their way around auction sites, avoiding forgeries, et cetera. Awesome suggestion.