Monday, February 25, 2013

Animation & production at the 2013 Oscars!

Interesting stories all around with regards to the Oscars, including the controversy behind the scenes!

Disney's 'Paperman' won for best animated short! I would've preferred that 'Adam & Dog' won, but can't disagree that Paperman isn't very cool! An interesting story is that when Paperman was announced as the winner, the producer, seated in the balcony began throwing paper air planes into the crowd... which got her in trouble!

'Brave' also won best animated film to no one's surprise making even funnier Jack Black's previous statement  when presenting for the category several years ago that every year he takes the money he makes from making Dreamwork's movies and bets it all on Pixar. But this is also a historic occasion as Pixar's first female director, Brenda Chapman, who made 'Brave', is also the first woman to win in this category!

In the VFX category, 'Life of Pi' won. There is some very stellar work in that film particularly with regards to a complete CGI tiger and use of stereoscopic 3-D that is well deserved! Of note is that the VFX industry was protesting and raising awareness at the Oscars about how their artists are getting shafted of salaries and payments with a number of houses working on award winning films closing down due to bankruptcy. The Life of Pi VFX winners tried to shed light on this with their acceptance speech, but were cut short from doing so. You can get more insight into overseas outsourcing of VFX in a commentary here. All these things will be of interest to any students looking to enter into these fields in the future. Life of Pi also won for Best Cinematography, and Ang Lee got the Best Director award for it.

For Best Costume, the winner was Anna Karenina. Best Make-up went to 'Les Miserables' which also won for best Sound Mixing. There was a tie in the Sound Editing category for Zero Dark Thirty and 007: SKYFALL. Argo won for Best Film editing and best adapted screenplay. Lincoln won for production design. And Quentin Tarantino won for best original Screenplay!

All in all, Seth McFarlene did a great job in my opinion for hosting. Very funny without getting too crass! And Anne Hathaway looked very very nice with short hair, which makes it a shame that the Dark Knight Rises didn't opt to go with the Jim Lee Batman Hush Catwoman...

Awww man... this could've been puurrfect!

Any aspiring film-makers and animators can drop by our stores if they're looking for concept art and production books, costume books, instructional books and DVDs, and even books on film-making and screen writing! Someday you could be there in Hollywood winning an award! And if you do we would love it if you can take a few seconds to thank us at 'The Labyrinth Books' in Toronto on stage before the Jaws theme starts playing!