Looks like some casual meetings took place on April 1, 2007 on both sides of the country.

Here on the east coast, I was invited over to Takuro Masuda’s studio where he is filming his stop motion project for the Center for Puppetry Arts Experimental Puppetry Theater. His project involves Native American mythology and looks to be superb. Takuro is an Atlanta animator and one of his films titled “Room 101” is viewable on YouTube.

Brett Thompson, was also there. Brett was interviewed and had his Flash animations shown on a cable show last night. I missed that but hope to see a copy sometime. We all talked about stopmo walk cycles, video assist, set design and other stuff.

Out on the west coast Michael Granberry met up with Justin Rasch and Shel Wagner-Rasch from Stop Motion Mission where they chatted about stopmo and ate Indian food. You can’t go wrong with that combo.

My new web address www.objectsatrest.com is now official. I was able to acquire the “dot com” version of the domain name.

The former address www.objectsatrest.org should still work and redirect to the .com site but you may want to update any links or bookmarks that you may have.

The former owner of the domain now has a new web address located at Pyile.com.

Last night (and still playing today) is “The Animation Show” curated by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. I met up with Karl and also saw Brett at the event. Ward was there as well and I wouldn’t be surprised if he posts some info about the event in the near future on his blog or Flickr pages. Mike Judge himself was also present for a short Q&A after the show which was quite a bonus.

This is the third installment in the Animation Show series and I think it is the best to date. The previous two are now available on DVD for purchase or via Netflix. Memorable animations for me were Rabbit, Everything Will Be OK, Versus, and Collision. Rabbit, my personal favorite from the show, is available for viewing from Atom Films. Rabbit was created by Run Wrake. There is something about the sound and music design (not to mention the whole visual design) of Rabbit that I find alluring.

The projection and sound system at the Carter Center, where the event took place, was incredible. I don’t know if they used some kind of hi-def digital projection or something else but they should try to use that for the Atlanta Film Festival’s animation program. Karl confirmed that the projection was hi-def and they take it with them to the cities where it the show is screened which shows how much they care about quality…and it showed. The screen wasn’t huge but it was sharper and had more punch and contrast than what I’ve usually seen at the few film festivals I’ve attended.

I recently attended a meeting of animators in the Atlanta area in a get together called “The Atlanta Animation Workshop“. As I recall there were more than 20 people in attendance and various works in progress, student works, and other animations were being screened. Members and guests come from all schools of animation so CGI, 2-D, and stopmo are all present. There seemed to be a lot of interest from the participants in forming a more active community of animation talent in the area. I won’t be able to make the January meeting but plan to attend the one in February.

The workshop is hosted by Karl Sigler who is an animator in Atlanta. His site, Between the Frames, is a production blog with photos and info for his stop motion films.

Speaking of production blogs, Justin Rasch now has a blog called Stop MOTION Mission. I have links to these production blogs (and other animation sites) in my list on the side of this page. That list keeps growing too…I may have to think about how to better organize them in the future.