Toon Travels

Spring means one thing for animation business pros — trips to conferences in such exotic locales as Cannes, Venice and Stuttgart. By Tom McLean.

Racking up those frequent- flier miles is almost a rite of passage each spring, as animation executives, distributors, and creatives flock to essential business events.

If you couldn’t make it — we missed you! — here’s an update on what generally went down at MIP TV, Cartoons on the Bay and FMX.

Anniversaries were definitely the theme for the 20th anniversary edition of FMX, held May 5-8 in Stuttgart, Germany.

Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri attracted a huge crowd for a walk down memory lane and 20 years of Weta Digital work from The Lord of the Rings through The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

ILM was able to double that with a 2x20 celebration for its 40th anniversary, which included a panel featuring three generations of visual effects experts: Lorne Peterson, John Knoll and Richard Bluff.

Back in 20th anniversary land, Pixar’s Ralph Eggleston, Bill Reeves and Eben Fiske Ostby reunited to look back on 20 years of Toy Story.

And FMX of course feted itself with a special event that kicked off the celebrations and featured reminiscences from speakers such as Ludwig von Reiche of NVIDIA and Eric Roth of the Visual Effects Society.

Spotlights on current work included case studies into the effects work on Avengers: Age of Ultron, a presentation from Double Negative’s Paul Franklin on the effects of Interstellar, and looks into the works of top effects companies in advertising and television series.

For animation, the most popular highlight was Jacques Bled and Kyle Balda’s presentation on the Despicable Me spin-off, Minions, two months before its theatrical release. Other animated features presented at the event were Big Hero 6, Song of the Sea and the Shaun the Sheep movie. [