Goodbye Bill

Bill Melendez and I were not really friends. We knew each other. I talked to him a number of times. I guess you could call us good acquaintances. I know a lot about him because of the Evening With Bill Melendez DVD I produced.

Several years back I was talking to him at a Chuck Jones Gallery opening that he and Martha Sigall were headlining. Someone asked Bill about Martha`s career and he responded by saying that when he worked with her she was in Ink and Paint.

I then told him the story about how Martha was an animation camera-person during World War II but that the Cameraman`s Union pulled her ticket the day the war ended because she was not a man and therefore could not be a CameraMAN.

Bill was outraged. They can`t do that. That is not right. He was ready to pick up picket signs and go into battle to right a wrong he found intolerable 50 years after the wrong was done. He was fiery, a fighter.

The descendant of Mexican Generals, his father wanted him to return to Mexico and go to military school but his mother decided that he should develop his artistic skills. He was one of the Disney strikers. He never backed down on anything. He was an animation union president. He was both a great artist and a man who always fought for what he knew was right.

If they can say half as much about me when I am gone I will have lived a good life. Goodbye Bill you were a hell of a man.

Playing Games

Had my first History of Videogames class yesterday. Have a great class of 13 students. 1 to 13 are much better odds that 1 to 99 when it comes to one on one teaching. I really miss that in the big classes.

Here are some excerpts from their first assignment. I like to give assignments that force the student to analyze and think. Here I have the students judging a game on a number of scales: Realistic Environment to Cartoony Environment - Programmed Non Player Character Action to Artificial Indulgence NPC action. etc.



The final part of the assignment is a graph of player`s strength vs difficulty of play over the play the course of the game.


The idea is to have the student think about game play and what goes into an enjoyable gaming experience. The upside is that when these students start creating games I have a better change of enjoying the games they create. Enlightened Self-Interest is the name of the game.

School, School & Student Animaiton Festival

The above image is last Monday night`s Animation History class at Cal State Fullerton. I have an enrollment of 98 students with about 14 more who want to add the class.

Today I am over at Laguna College of Art & Design for a teacher`s meeting before the start of classes.

I have spent the last couple of days going through all the submissions for the Student Animation Festival coming up in October (18th).

Tommorow I am at Cal State Long Beach for an Animation Educators` Forum dealing with the Student Festival: http://www.agni-animation.com/aef/fest.html

Some the the student animations are killer and some of them will not play. Lots of phone calls on that front.

I am so far behind on my email. After I post this I am going to try to get through some of it before the teacher`s meeting starts.

Pre-Semester Run Around

Nightmare week getting everything ready for the new semester, just finished writing 2 syllabi and the class websites that go with them.




Have yet to get everything straightened away checking in at Cal State Fullerton after 4 hours of hell walking all over campus. This time they added a new twist to their stations of the cross walk all over campus check in procedure of the damned by not having my contract ready. So no one would let me do any of the things I needed to do at all the departments all over campus that I had to go to, to check in, without me first fighting through the miles of red tape. Don`t even get me started on the book order for my class at the book store. Enough of that.

Spent yesterday getting my videos and DVDs in shape. Will be doing the same today. I have gotten way behind in documenting new additions to the collection. Which means cataloging, labeling and scanning an image for my database. At some point I will need to fill in all the details for each item. But not today.




Next up, going to be very busy with the Student animation Festival. A whole lot to do on that front. The deadline for submitting the already entered finished films is the 29th of this month. Then judging and right on toward morning.

Update

Just finished posting my new class for Fullerton. Have also updated my website with samples from version 7 of my ebook, Animation on a ShoeString.



Off to the el Cap tonight for the Ollie event.

Back to the Past

Yesterday, between the phone calls for the Student Film Festival, I spent some time in a time warp. I just picked up an Atari 2600 for my upcoming History of Videogames class at Laguna College of Art & Design.

The 2600 is not the first home console with interchangeable game cartridges but it is one of the first big winners of the console wars. One of the first systems to become the standard to meet or beat.



I picked up a number of games for the 2600 including the infamous E. T. movie tie in game. Movie tie in games have always been questionable from the beginning. With a built in audience often little effort is expended in the search for quality gameplay. E. T. was such a dog that warehouses of the unsold game cartridges of this title ended lifes buried in the dessert under a large slab on concrete. I am not kidding on this. It happened but not soon enough.





The game I am having the most fun with is Spider Fighter. There is a real Centipede feel to the game in the movement of the enemies and the shooting. This of course is all just an accident of design.




I already have a lot of these (most of these) games in ports for other systems but the controllers are completely different on those systems, better. So the game play is different. There is something about the clunky 2600 joystick with the one button firing control that makes the game more real then playing a port on Game Cube.

Speaking of ports, there are a number of arcade ports in the games that I bought for the 2600. Donkey Kong looks like a gingerbread man and Packman eats dashes not dots. They both play much as their arcade parent did, they just look different because of the memory limitations of the console.




Since I picked up the 2600 unit for student training I bought games for their importance in gaming history not for their quality. That means I picked up Football.

I have never understood the mentality behind sports games and I have not liked a sports game since Pong. But somebody bought and played these games in the past so they have an importance in the history of games even if they played no part in my own personal gaming history.

Normally I buy games I like, but now I find myself buying bad games in much the same way I buy bad animation: for the teaching value. Maybe if I show enough in the way of what not-to-do to my student in the classroom it will make the marketplace a little safer place in the future. Nobody sets out to design a bad game, it just works out that way far too many times.

Student Animation Festival Schedule of events

Animation Educators` Forum / ASIFA-Hollywood Student Animation Festival
Woodbury University Campus
Oct. 18th 2008
7500 Glenoaks Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91510

All events are Free and open to the public

• Portfolio Review 10 AM to 4 PM (rooms in the new business complex)


• Saturday Morning Rear Cartoons 10 AM to Noon (Theater)


• Screening of student festival films 1 PM to 2 PM (Theater)


• State of the Animation Industry 2 to 3 (Theater)


• Breaking into Animation 3 to 4 (Theater)


• Screening of Student films 4 to 5 (Theater)


• Meet and Greet with food 5 to 6 (theater lobby)


• Awards Show and screening of winners 6 to 7:30 (Theater)

http://www.agni-animation.com/aef/fest.html