Description: The life and times of animation industry professionals.
Thursdays at CalArts were brutal. Getting to class early to pin our assignments on the long crit wall, we'd wait to be slaughtered by the old man. Upon his arrival, the room would go silent. He would casually stroll along the wall, surveying our assignments in his sport shirt and slacks (or Jordache jeans!), cigarette propped in a bent back wrist, like Tim Gunn and Humphrey Bogart's love child. Welcome to Bill Moore's design class. You could hear a pin drop as we held our breaths, each hoping the A
But 40 years on, Zombie lives, as does Bill's voice when I work on any creative endeavor. I hear him reciting his design mantras, "Repetition with variation....contour continuity....". And I hear his cold, judgmental prodding, "Is that the best you can do?" Of all my CalArts teachers - men who had worked with Walt Disney personally - I would have never bet the most influential would be a guy who never worked a day in animation, and in fact, held a general contempt for it. Bill's profou
May 8th marked the latest premature loss to our hunched and goofy community with the death of Allen Stovall at the age of 69. He was a veteran visual effects animator on features such as "Cats Don't Dance" and "Hercules". He always carried a gentle, mellow vibe, with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile on his face.