Festival
Since 2009, the SoDak Animation Festival has been showcasing and celebrating animation and animators. This year, we’ve added another whopping day to the line-up to make it a four-day festival out here on the prairie. We’re looking forward to more special guest artists and animators and more movies. If you’re an animator, send in your work and plan a visit. If you like animation, or want to know more about it, join us!
Catch a glimpse of last year’s festival here!
2012 Special Guests and Presenters
Thurs Oct 18 | Performing Arts Center (Time TBA)
This event is free and open to the public.
J.J. Sedelmaier
J.J. Sedelmaier is the President/Director of J. J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc and is responsible for many of the most talked about broadcast entertainment productions of the past two decades – the launch season of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head, SNL’s Saturday TV Funhouse series with Robert Smigel (“The Ambiguously Gay Duo”, “The X-Presidents”, etc.), Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s Harvey Birdman – Attorney at Law, the “Tek Jansen/Alpha Squad Seven” series for The Colbert Report, and over 500 TV commercials, animation and design pieces. His creative development and production studio which he runs with his wife Patrice, also lends its services to corporate branding for companies like The Chicago Tribune, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Bayer.
2012 Jurors
Shorts, Student, and Commissioned Works
David Chai
David Chai is an independent animation director and an instructor of animation at San Jose State University, CA. He has worked on a variety of projects ranging from educational software, animation for television and video, commercial advertising, to independent films. Commercials directed for Thunderbean Animation received the Gold Award for best animated television commercials at the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International 2005. To date, his independent films have screened in over one hundred and seventy film festivals internationally, including Sundance, Cinequest, Ann Arbor, and Annecy; been broadcast on Atom Films, MTV-2, G4TV, PBS, and ZeD in Canada; and nominated twice for “Best Short Subject” at the Annie Awards. Some of his films include 25 Ways to Die (2003), Stoopid Movie (2005), Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot (2005), Life on a Limb (2008), Ninjas vs. Guilt (2009), Enrique Wrecks the World (2010), and Why Do We Put Up With Them? (2011). David also was special guest artist and presented at the 2011 SoDak Animation Festival.
Emily Hubley
Emily Hubley has been making animated shorts for thirty years. Her hand-drawn films explore personal memory and the turbulence of emotional life. Her first feature film, The Toe Tactic had its theatrical premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in January 2009 and was released on DVD by Kino International in the Fall. In 2008, the film screened at numerous prestigious film festivals including SXSW, New Directors/New Films and the San Francisco and Rio de Janiero International Film Festivals.
Her company, Hubbub Inc., created short form series’ for the cable networks Nickelodeon and Lifetime and Ms. Hubley created the animated sequences for John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig And The Angry Inch.
A daughter of pioneer animators Faith and John Hubley, Emily worked on Faith Hubley’s films at The Hubley Studio, Inc. from 1977 to 2001. She lives in South Orange, NJ.
Bob H. Miller
Bob H. Miller has worked with the students of South Dakota for over thirty years through the Artists In Schools & Communities program. He is a highly respected and widely exhibited, diverse and prolific artist. His work brings together science and technology and their application in image making. The office copy machine, the instant Polaroid camera, photograms, holograms and the pinhole camera have all played a part in his development as an artist. Miller tries to incorporate the theories and tools of science into his residencies, using fundamental drawing and painting instruction, basic animation, collage and batik. He was recently included in the “American Perspectives” exhibit, which debuted at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His collages are touring regionally in a solo exhibit, “Sleeping Sickness,” a solo exhibit of his Polaroid images, Fiction/Non Fiction, and his alternative photograms were featured in Black & White magazine. As part of the SoDak Animation Festival since 2009, Bob has also taught animation workshops at Michelson Middle School.
Steven Wingate
Steven Wingate earned his MFA in Screenwriting from Florida State University, and his work has screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and elsewhere. He taught screenwriting for many years in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he also directed the International Film Series (ask him about his Stan Brakage stories!). His debut short story collection Wifeshopping was published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin, and in 2011 he joined South Dakota State University as an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing.