In about an hour, I will embark upon a voyage of immense proportions. The Annecy animation festival is certainly going to be a quite a highlight for me this week. Plus, I am going there two days before the festival starts, to catch some alpine goodness.

But Annecy isn’t the only good thing coming my way so far. I am almost done with the storyboards for my fourth animation. And after I get back, I will do the animatic with music. The music will be done by these guys you see in this picture. They are very talented musicians I hope they hit the big time really soon. Also, I will be animating a music video for them after Annecy as well. Here in this photo, I am telling them about my ideas for their music video, and my animation.

First, I would like to congradulate Bill Plympton, Chris Conforti, Fran Krause, Jeff Medinkow, Nina Paley, Patrick Smith, PES, Signe Baumane, Tom Warburton, and those who’s names I don’t know, for winning in The 2005 ASIFA East Festival.

And a special hug for John Dilworth who won “best in show” this year. Here is a photo of him looking at the DVD of “Piper the Goat” that I gave him.

Also, here is a quote of Amidi’s from cartoonbrew.com in response to the Bobblehead caricature I drew of him:

The surest way to get a link on Cartoon Brew? Create a post on your blog titled “All Hail Amid Amidi” and draw a caricature of me surrounded by beaver clouds and other monstrous creations.

The surest way to scare the hell out of me? Create a post on your blog titled “All Hail Amid Amidi” and draw a caricature of me surrounded by beaver clouds and other monstrous creations.

So, guess what Lev Polyakov (a talented and quite young animator out of NY) did?

Thanks Amid, and I hope you have sweet dreams of sweet Beaverclouds in your sleep. See ya in Ottawa (or Annecy)

shorts@DEKK (curated by Victoria Clark) will be screening Piper the Goat this Sunday, April 24, 1 - 4 p.m.

Address: DEKK, 134 Reade Street (map)
(between Hudson and Greenwich Streets)
Subway: 1, 2, 3, 9, A, C to Chambers Street Stop

I am almost finished with the detailed script for my new animation. Everything is looking good so far. I will hope to finish this project in a year. It will be very tough, but I will try my best.

Great News has just come up. My website is now one of the links of Asifa-East , right next to Newgrounds.

On the day I found this link on Asifa East, the Seul Animation Festival sent me an invitation. Izhn’t zat veerd?

And last, but certainly not least, is this computer “painting” I did of Amid Amidi. It has somewhat of a psychodelic quality to it with the giant heads and all. And Beaverclouds, because I love Beaverclouds. If you want to know more about Amid Amidi, then go to his websites Cartoon Brew and Animation Blast

Today, Chris Hinton’s reply on my “Piper the Goat” page really lifted my spirits:

Hi Lev,

I love your enthusiasm and dedication to animation. Keep up the great work. We need to clone you. Perhaps we can do this in Ottawa this year.

All the best,
Chris.

All the movie previews are now added! So is the Photo Album, and lots more drawings are added too.

I’m working on the script for my next animation. I’m going to start reading the book on 3ds Max (hopefully tommorow). I realize that I am becoming quite a procrastinator after Piper the Goat was finished. It matters not. Tommorow I will begin a new day, where I’ll wake up early, do some light stretches, go shower, eat breakfast while watching a new film that I didn’t get a chance to finish, do French for an hour, finish a secret assigment which will ensure my freedom in the coming years, read Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”, eat dinnerlunch, put the ACTUAL dates on my photographs and works on this website, read the 3ds Max book, read the Aftereffects Book (hoping to find how to use it better for animation), eat dinnersupper, shower, do something else, and go to sleep.

Think I can do all that in a day when its 1 am right now as I’m writing this? Hell no. But that doesn’t mean I’m not up to the challange. This could be a fresh new start for me an the end of my foul procrastination. Mabye when I’m done with all of that stuff, I can draw procrastination in it’s celestial form?

At long last my glorious website is finally manufactured & shipped! This is looking to be a big improvement from my old overcompensating website designs, and I have a bunch of stuff to put inside, so I’ll get to it. I already put in a couple of sketches from the drawing classes, and two different versions of a poster for “The Laramie Project”. I have made a New Years resolution to make more than 1000 good sketches of the human body this year, and as an aspiring animator, I am up to any challange.

The movies section is done for now, but I am going to put in the preview movies soon.

Wordpress has a new feature called ‘pages’ that allows creating a special type of post that occupies a single page, specifically for more permanent content of the website. Sounds like what I need. Dr. Yura promised to write a plugin that will allow using stand-alone html files to be included in page content. That’ll be great as I will be able to edit those files with Dreamweaver.

Finally, I am off to a new web hosting Dreamhost and a new website look! Dr. Yura said I’d be better off building my website with some blogging software, and we decided to use Wordpress along with Coppermine Photo Gallery. But we need to do a lot of customization.