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! "