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Gumby Fest 2015

I remember as a kid watching Gumby on TV and wondering how these toys could move and talk by themselves. I even had a toy Gumby and Pokey, but could not figure out how these characters came come to life.

This week, I learned that, after all these years, Gumby is alive and well at Gumby Fest in Glendora, CA.

Joe Clokey, son of Gumby's creator Art Clokey, helped organized this event which was held this weekend at Citrus College.

It was a really hot day, the kind that can melt clay into a liquid goo, but not even the heat could keep true stop motion fans away from this 3 day event. A family friendly atmosphere with many activity tents, food trucks and live music that filled the air. 

I went on Sunday, the last day to see several panel discussions beginning with Stop-Motion Puppet Makers.  Panelists Liz Allen, Nikki Rice Malki and Margaret Meyer all shared stories about how they began their careers, showed the puppets they made and briefly explained the process they used to make their puppet actors.

Margaret Meyer showed her puppets from "Coraline" and stressed the importance of taking pictures of your creations for your portfolio.

Liz Allen from Bix Pix talked about painting with pastel powder to give a softer look to her puppets. Below she shows how she embedded a magnet into the character's face to allow for easier use of replacement mouths.

Below are several puppets made by Nikki Malki of Stoopid Buddy for "Robot Chicken". The puppet builders at her studio are responsible for a puppet's creation from the beginning design to the final product.

During early episodes of "Robot Chicken", a variety of toys were purchased through Ebay and reassembled with stop motion armatures.

The next seminar, Stop-Motion University, featured a few colleges that offer Stop-Motion classes. Jim Ovelmen of California State University, Matthew Manning of Woodbury University and Musa Booker of USC talked about their early stop motion careers and showed samples of student work.

Other fest events included art workshops about drawing, background painting, creating a bendable armature, screenprinting and creating stop motion with digital media. There were various Gumby items for sale and the Gumby Museum, temporarily housed in the Citrus College library, will continue to be accessible to the public for another few weeks.

Dyane Duffy, a Citrus College' art instructor, introduced the final lecturer, lead puppet maker Julie Zobel, who discussed puppets from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. She showed the various types of puppets and gave a brief description about how they were put together. She talked about her career and gave us a lot of insight into working at Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

Before I left Citrus College, I ran into Joe Clokey, the man with the green hat, and thanked him for helping to put this three-day event together.

Can't wait until next year!

42nd Student Academy Awards

Last night, I went to the 42nd Student Academy Awards Alumni party held at the Academy Library. Academy members, past winners and this year's new winners gathered to meet one another. I usually get nervous at these kind of things, but everyone was so nice and I got a chance to meet some of the winners, even though I hadn't seen there films.

Man, I'm feeling elderly, because I just realized my film "Cat and Rat" won 1st place in animation at the 15th awards and now there up to 42! Time sure does fly when you're going senile. 

I'm going back to the Academy Library because they had many one of kind piece of animation history on display. I saw an original Windsor McCay drawing of Gertie the Dinosaur! I had thought the library was only for Academy members, but was happy to learn its open to the public. I will take you inside this amazing library of film and animation history in a future posting. Let me know what you'd like to see and I'll see if they've got it!

While I was there, I was handing out business cards with the "Meet the Patel's" image on them to see if I could drum up future animation work. I'm sometimes bad at this, but many people I met had either seen or had heard of the film.

I met a young live action director from AFI named Bennett, who made a film called "Stealth". A film about a transgender child, born a boy, but lives in stealth as a girl. A very real and touching subject shown from the child's perspective and handled very professionally. 

 

Bennett (above) gave me a copy of his DVD, instead of a business card at the time. He is a very likable and interesting person and I had wanted to talk to him more about his film. I was intending to go to the awards ceremony the next night, but unfortunately, all the tickets were all sold out.

Today I watched Bennett's film and thought he handled the story and subject matter quite well. When returning the DVD to its box, I realized that Bennett's last name is... Lasseter. 

Doing my very best Paul Harvey imitation, " And now you know the rest of the story, Good Day! "