I finally met my new nephew over the weekend and he’s beautiful of course, you forget just how tiny they are at that age. I took loads of photos but only had time to convert this one to black and white and give it the Photoshop treatment.
In honour of International Women’s Day the image above is a link to English animator, Joanna Quinn’s short film “A Girl’s Night Out” from 1986 (might not be suitable for work). This was her student film and since then she’s gone on to animate many other short films and she’s also the creator of the Charmin toilet paper ads. I wanted to post one of her other films, “Body Beautiful” but unfortunately couldn’t find it on the internet. There are clips of it as well as of her other work on her studio’s webpage Beryl Productions.
In my experience of the animation world, women animators are in the minority. It’s getting better but in any of the studios I’ve worked at before now the women have been few and far between. There are plenty of women in production, marketing and HR positions but animation positions are almost always held by men. This gets even more apparent when it comes to animation directors. In fact, I’d never met a female animation director or supervisor until I started working here in Brown Bag where there are two…Bronagh O’Hanlon and Cat Little.
When I first went out in the 1990’s with my portfolio under my arm to try and find someone to hire me I did encounter some attitudes that I thought would have been consigned to the dim and distant past. In one of my very first interviews I was told by the person interviewing me that they didn’t like to hire girls because it was distracting to the almost exclusively male artists and programmers.
I persevered and eventually got to work as an animator (although it took another three years but that’s a story for another day) and over the last eight years I’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of women I get to work with.
I’m not sure why there are so few of us in this business, although reading the infamous letter about Disney’s old policy on not hiring women shows why it might have started out that way. There is the opinion that women are only interested in making artistic films about social or personal issues whereas men are more likely to go for entertaining films which are always going to find a wider audience. I don’t like those kind of generalisations though mainly because I don’t think it applies to me or many of the women I’ve worked with.
This year’s Oscar for Best Animated short was won by a woman, Torill Kove, something that’s happened maybe only six times in the history of the awards. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come.
If you’re not in too much of a hurry to make your train and you look west along the Liffey in the evening, the sunsets are spectacular. These were taken last Friday evening at the end of a miserable rainy day.
I’m only now crawling from my bed after last night’s festivities. Not because of a hangover…nope, not me…I’m a victim of too much cold medicine. I was feeling pretty bad but there was no way I was going to miss the party last night so I’m still quite groggy this morning. I’m guessing I’m probably not the only one though.
It was a great night, Damien and all the organisers did a fantastic job and well done to Bernie Goldbach for handing over his Best Contribution To The Irish Blogosphere to Damien. The full list of winners is up here. Gingerpixel didn’t get any awards this year but it was so much fun to be a nominee; it gives the night a little bit more of a buzz I think and I was in very good company. I was particularly happy to see Redmum and InfactAh heading up to the podium to collect their awards and sorry that Letter To America missed out again. Jett and Wayne’s podcast gets me through many long work days and I regularly embarrass myself by laughing out loud while listening to it.
The best part of course is getting to put names to faces and meet up again with the regulars. Roll on 2008!