Starting Wednesday, keep an eye out for 3D grad Percy Kiyabu. His short After Oz has been chosen to participate in the fourth annual Nicktoons Network Animation Festival.

Throughout August, Nicktoons will be airing individual selections nightly, leading up to a back-to-back marathon on Friday, August 31, when winners are announced five categories.

Mark Shirra’s A Great Big Robot from Outer Space At My Homework took home the Producer’s Choice award last year, and Percy’s tale of an unlucky-in-love Tin Woodsman is definitely a contender. Congratulations!

VFS Festivals & Awards - 2007 

Last week, Channel Frederator featured Classical Animation grad Choom Lam’s Bobble & Sqweek in its animation podcast, and now they’ve come back with a nice little Q&A with the creator. The big news? We haven’t heard the last of those pink and green blobs!

ReBoot, the groundbreaking ’90s CG series set inside a computer, is powering up for a second round, and Writing for Film, TV & Interactive Media has a big part to play in the project.

When ReBoot went off the air - seemingly for good - fans were left with a cliffhanger ending and a lot of questions. Megabyte, the show’s big villain, had just taken control of, well, everything, and things looked grim for our digital heroes.

But now Rainmaker Animation, formerly Mainframe Entertainment, is resurrecting the show - and involving fans in the process. Rainmaker is planning a trilogy of feature-length ReBoot movies, and has reached out to teams of local creatives to develop pitches for the relaunch. Those pitches have been posted on the site Zeros 2 Heroes, where fans can contribute their comments and vote on their favourites. One of the pitches will be developed as an online comic later this year.

Zeros 2 Heroes was founded by a Writing grad, Matt Toner, and the five pitch teams are chock-full of fellow alumni - including grads Jeffrey Campbell (”Arrival”), Angelo Eidse (”Regenerated”), and Julie Puckrin (”The Last Guardian) - along with instructors Kelsey Kirvan (”2.0″) and Jennica Harper (”The Last Guardian”).

Oh, and Paul Gertz, the Rainmaker exec guiding the project, has taught in both Film and EBM.

Zeros 2 Heroes has plot synopses and concept art for all the pitches - take a look and cast your votes!

It’s enough to make you dizzy. 20 VFS films from 3D, Classical Animation, and Digital Design will be screening Saturday, July 28 at Factory Nights 04. ‘Scorch’ - a marathon of art, fashion, music, body-painting and burlesque.

The event is being hosted at Snap Art Gallery, 190 West 3rd in Vancouver, from 7pm to 3am.

The films on tap: Spiritualized (Roy Margalit), Ketchup (Adam Yaniv), Zombies? (Jonathan Yaber), Doggie Style (Andrew Park), Romanza de la Luna (Adrian Dilamanta), Ainulindale (Young-Ju Christina Chu), Guernica (Marcelo Ortiz), The Heart Collector (Michael Fallik), To the Door (Jon Brown), Zonked (Marco Li), Malo Selo (Peter Thomas), Talisman (Peter Thomas), Iscah (Jessica Morfin), Locus (Nathan Miles Keane), An Impractical Timepiece (Gavin Wright), Faith (Lionel Maung), Bumbershoot (Wade Cross), Noche (Esteban Azuela), Devlin (Yuris Mangolds), and Birth (Mitsuaki Yajima).

To find out more about the show and tickets, drop by the Factory Nights site.

Last week, we told you about how Film Production grad (and Foundation instructor) Chad Costen’s The Coming was ramping up with a grassroots fundraising effort.

Well, while that’s underway, The Coming is starting principal photography next week in the tiny town of Russell, Manitoba. In all, the cast and crew includes 24 VFS grads and faculty from a whopping 7 programs.

And now it’s all coming together. “It’ll feel good to finally just get out there and shoot something,” Chad says. “We have the best cast and crew in the world, so no matter what happens we know that we’ll end up making a movie worth being proud of. You don’t need a fortune to make good films, you just need to be fortunate enough to know good people that will make films with you.”

We’ll leave you with the impressive list of VFS cast and crew. Producer Nicky Forsman, a grad of both Foundation and Entertainment Business Management, tells us, “I consider this list to be proof that going to film school was entirely worth it.”

We’ll be following the production as it happens, so stay tuned.

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We’re thrilled to pass along the news that VFS is one of Fido’s collaborators on Fido Spot, an outdoor digital projector system in Toronto’s Distillery District. The project will be a unique venue for promoting filmmakers and artists year-round.

Down the line, we’ll have more details on our involvement. For now, Fido Spot has its glitzy unveiling on August 1!

Carl Schnurr, game designer on scores of blockbuster titles and current Senior Director of Game Design at Activision, will be delivering a guest lecture to students on Tuesday, July 31.

The lecture, though hosted by Game Design, is open to all VFS students and alumni. Seating is limited and priority will be given to students in game-related programs.

Schnurr will be joined by Claudia Franco from Activision’s University Relations, to answer questions from students about the company and career opportunities.

Here’s the lowdown on the lecture:

Quantifying Design: Finding Hard Answers to Soft Problems
Designers are often faced with fuzzy, imprecise, and maddeningly ‘soft’ design problems. This talk presents a series of real-world, ‘soft’ design problems, an analytical approach to attacking those problems as developed by Activision’s Central Design Group, and the resulting solutions. Issues tackled include the feel of sandbox designs, the pacing of online shooters, and controls complexity in a variety of genres.

Tuesday July 31
4:30pm - 6:30pm
VFS Main Theatre, 420 Homer Street
RSVP not required

Exposure, a new CBC TV series that airs short films and videos by Canadian filmmakers, has included Life of the Party, a hilarious cautionary tale by Writing grad Ryan Wagner, on its slate. (It’s joined by a bunch of other VFS films, so stay tuned!) Will it make the jump from the web to the airwaves?

Exposure is a multi-platform venture in which filmmakers submit their films online, and a selection of them appears on TV. Videos also participate in the Yahoo! Canada Showdown, a people’s choice contest that pits three submissions against each other each week as they vie for prizes and a shot at a whopping $25,000 online development deal.

Voting on the Yahoo! Showdown starts July 26, while Exposure premieres on CBC on Sunday, July 29 at 11pm.

Hey, there’s a new kind of “mile high club”! Four VFS Film Production films have been selected for the newly-announced Air Canada enRoute Student Film Festival.

Over the next few months, these films will be screened on Air Canada flights to a whopping 2.6 million monthly passengers, featured in enRoute, the in-flight magazine, and shown on the festival’s website.

The VFS films screening on flights are: Who Wants to be an Amerikan? (July), Parallels and The Devil and Sarah Silverspoon (August), and Alibi Inc. (September).

Later, a star-studded jury including Donald Sutherland and Atom Egoyan will decide which films will go home with the festival’s top prizes (Who Wants to Win a 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid?) at an October screening and gala in Toronto.

You can read a blurb on the festival courtesy of Vancouver weekly newspaper The Georgia Straight.

Good luck to all the filmmakers! We’ll keep you posted on the festival’s results. (And if you’re flying this summer, be sure to keep one eye on those small screens…)

VFS Festivals & Awards - 2007

Friday, July 20th was Digital Design’s first-ever 30-Second Commercial Slam Day, a flat-out design sprint, in which students across terms were divided into teams and given an assignment first thing in the morning - and a deadline of 5pm the very same day.

It was an enormously fun challenge, so we tagged along as teams hurried to the finish line. Here’s our fly-on-the-wall account of the day as it happened:

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