Sundance Film Festival

Here‘s the backstory on Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot–that‘s the Animation Competition film mentioned in an earlier post…they did a workshop at the Film Center over the weekend.

It‘s been a good year for animators at San Jose State. They made a lot of their own luck, but as is often the case, help followed. Starting about a year ago, under the direction of lecturer David Chai, a bunch of them started down the path to Sundance, pooling their laptops, Adobe software and animation to make a short animated film called Neighborhood Roots. They entered the film in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards and as part of their finalist status received multiple copies of Adobe Video Collection. David Gladstone, then at DreamWorks kicked in more copies. With a hardware infrastructure based on HP workstations, the state university finds itself on a par with private colleges, turning out animators who are now working on more than 40 feature films and working at ILM and EA.

So back to Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot (their film at Sundance). Armed with (finally) matching copies of Adobe Video Collection and with 55 days of summer in front of them they went to work. Although SJSU faculty and recent alumni contributed to the project–especially the initial story–the bulk of the work was done by animators like Lauren Andrews. She‘s a character animator who is responsible for the “umbrella crumbling” and the “dragging crab leg” among other moments, and who lived on a steady diet of Vietnamese sandwiches, Costco pizza and the occasional splurge on a Taco Bell buffet, while the communal project took shape.

Finished in Sept. 2005, it made it into Anchorage and NY Independent Film Festivals, and then the call came for Sundance. “When we announced it to the group,” David says, “one guy had to slip out into the hallway to call his mom.”