You say Toe-maw-toe and I say Toe-may-toe.  Should you cast kids for kids roles or go with adult voice over actors that can be easier and faster to work with but may not be able to give you that pure kid essence in voice quality?

Talking with an old friend who has a passion for hand drawn animation made me wonder what the future holds for this old mainstay that brought us such wonderful moments over the years.  Is anyone learning to become a 2-D animator anymore?  It seems that every working in 2-D only wants to learn the basis that they can apply when they move under the big CGI tent..... Doesn't anyone still love this lovely artform for what ii is, not where it can take them?

It's clearly a love/hate thing for a lot of us.  It has become so much a part of our lives that we have a hard time looking away.  Television, we can't do without it but couldn't we expect more for this member of our family that is always there. always tempting us to sit down and let it entertyain us?

Nothing important really.  If you don't read this you won't miss a great job opportunity or any special Zen like enlightenment.  You won't get any good tips on playing the ponies or how to make a perfect souffle or even where to pick up Boys/Girls....  If you have 5 minutes to waste give it a read, otherwise go in peace and know that you won't be any less informed or likely to regret missing my secret 'Five Steps to Growth and Success in the Business of Animation Filmaking." - (Just kidding).

Often hated but always needed, the poor budget can and should be the best friend of anyone trying to produce a film.  But rather it is more often the target of everyone's discontent and blamed for a multitude of sins and offenses. The film's budget normally stands in the dock accused of any and all the ills plaguing the production.  "If only we could have another month we could redo that sequence."  Or, "They say there's nothing left in the budget to rerecord the orangatang!  Who in the hell said betty white could still play the ingenue?"  But....whose faults are these?  If the budget was correctly made, everyone going into the production knew exactly what they had and what they had to do.  Why blame the budget for other's failings?

We've all had theose projects where we are just so very, very close to starting and we're getting everyhthing cleared away so we can be prepared when it starts but then there is a delay and we wait....

Why would it be important if Disney lost a suit filed against them to redress the common practice of creative accounting?   

The hope, the small flickering flame we can barely see at the end of the long and very dark tunnel we've all been crawling through, is that maybe a small crack will appear in the monolith of half a dozen media giants who control everything in our business. 

So far Disney has just lost round one, but being the 3 zillion pound monkey they are, the appeals have already been written and the best ambulance chasers money can buy are all lining up with briefcases at attention ready to do battle. 

We all have our own projects that we feel are better than some of the things that we see on broadcast television or cable.  Who hasn't wondeded what would happen if only they could get their film seen - After all it has to be better than a lot of the crap that seems to fill the airways.  Kent Butterworth worked for a number of years off and on to make his film Attila the Ham, in the end he finsihsed the film, found a distributor and kept the lion's share of ownership and rights.... Just like the good old days when broadcasters were broadcasters and producers were producers...  Here's how he did it.

Recently a friend and I started talking about his film "Attila the Ham" and how he got tired of trying to sell his ideas to the media giants who were always complimentary but always had their own 5 films in development and had no interest in producing anything they didn't have a heavy peice of or own outright...  He came to the conslusion that he should pmake his own films, and he did.