Fantastic Emmy Photograph

Yes, Animax Entertainment won the first ever broadband Emmy Award a few weeks back for our work for ESPN. Yes, Michael Bellavia, Animax's General Manager, and Tim Jones, the Head of Production, were at the award ceremony at Lincoln Center. And, yes, we have the proof in this glorious photo taken at the event. If you'd like an autographed copy please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to us.

I'll Show You Mine If...

Every other Tuesday night here at the studio is "You Show Me Yours, I’ll Show You Mine." It's an opportunity for the folks at Animax to share our own personal work or others’ work that we find inspiring. So far we’ve seen everything from praxinoscopes to puppets, from demo reels to poetry, from hand juggling to tasty snacks, from costumes to Silly Symphonies. Even though YSMYISYM is only open to folks here at Animax, let us know if you think there's something the team should see - we like to be inspired by lots of different things.

Peace for Kids

On June 3rd, folks from Animax Entertainment are going to be leading a bunch of workshops and activities focused on character design at the big Peace4Kids event: Celebrating the Arts. Kids aged 8 to 18 will be learning to draw cartoon characters - either their take on SpongeBob or Bart Simpson or creating their own like MegaIceCream Man.

Peace4Kids provides foster children and youth in need of a sense of belonging, with a safe, nurturing environment through which they learn cooperation and conflict resolution and also build self-esteem. Since 1998, Peace4Kids has touched the lives of over 600 foster and at-risk youth in the South Los Angeles neighborhoods of Watts, Compton, South Gate, and Willowbrook.

If you're a character designer and would like to volunteer your time or if you'd just like to help out, let us know.

Teen Content Creators

Just came across an interesting study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project about teens and the internet. More than half of online teens have created content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million. These Content Creators have created a blog; created or worked on a personal webpage; created or worked on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; shared original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remixed content found online into a new creation. That's huge. Forget MySpace. The ultimate killer app would be the device that generates a 25th hour in the day.

Economist New Media Survey

The Economist published a detailed and insightful survey of new media, covering the details of new technologies such as blogs, as well as the social and business implications of these technologies. The survey starts with the assertion that “The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media.” The presentation Animax gave at Kidscreen touched on a lot of these issues.

Animax Stays in Shape

Animax has been working on a ton of health related projects recently. In addition to the Radical Randy DVD and the recently completed Diabetes DVD, we just began production on another animated DVD for Health LAMP and Charles Drew University.
We are producing English and Spanish versions of an animated movie to help adult women understand breast cancer and the how to perform a self-exam. The video is targeted to the latina community so it's actually written in the style of a novella.

Camp Rad Gets Animated

Animax Entertainment recently finished producing a 20 minute animated DVD for The University of Texas Medical Branch to help kids who have asthma better understand the disease and how to manage it. The DVD featured Radical Randy, an interactive doll that is able to show kids his insides. Our Production Coordinator, Dena Light, went down to represent us at an uveiling ceremony in Galveston to meet the folks at UTMB and the project sponsors, The Fraternal Order of the Eagles. It feels good to do good.

Sopranos Family Cookbook

Animax's mobile division recently finished the design of a new mobile application for HBO Mobile. It's The New York Times best-selling Sopranos Family Cookbook and it's one of the first mobile apps of its kind! Adjust serving sizes, create meals and shopping lists, and save your favorites among 50 classic Italian recipes. The mobile app is available on Cingular's website right now.

Why eat regular ziti, when you can eat ziti the way Artie Bucco might prepare it for Tony Soprano?

Girl vs. Girl

One of the folks who helps Animax Entertainment produce the Emmy-winning animated series "Off-Mikes" for ESPN is Nassos Vakalis. He creates really dynamic storyboards. In his free time, he also creates really 'dynamic' t-shirt designs.

Mickey at the Pyramid

Disney just launched a teaser site for Healthy Kids: A Kids Guide to Healthy Eating. Mickey's Food Pyramid game is live now but a more robust website is coming soon. If you want more Mickey stuff, you can always explore his main site.

Kidscreen Lay of the Land

Michael Bellavia, GM of Animax Entertainment, spoke today at the first Kidscreen Brand Building in the Kids Digital Space even in Santa Monica. Lots of familiar faces in the audience like Fred Seibert from Channel Frederator, Michael Karsh from National Geographic and Larry Seidman of Dimensional Branding. Also got a chance to meet a bunch of new folks. If you'd like a copy of the presentation - a primer on the digital landscape and how it applies to kids - let us know.

Kid Power

Animax Entertainment is at the Kid Power conference in muggy Orlando at the Disney resort where even the carpet has Mickey's ears in it. The conference so far has had a lot of sessions talking about what's going on in the online and mobile space for kids. Michael Bellavia, Animax's General Manager, will be talking at Kidscreen next week in Los Angeles about some of these and other new developments in the digital space and how they impact marketing to kids.

Kid Power has just launched a blog as well that will cover the kid biz.

Furbusters!

Know someone with hairy ears? Think you're petting your cat but it's actually your husband? Who ya gonna call? Furbusters!

Animax Entertainment has had a long relationship with Fox Corp's Intermix. Furbusters is the first of a new series of shorts that we're producing for them as well as helping them out on storyboards for other animated shorts they produce in-house.

Front Page News

Animax Entertainment's Emmy win made the front page of today's Animation Magazine online edition.

Read the full article here.

McGruff a Webby Winner Too!

Wow, we didn't even realize that we were double Webby Honorees. While looking at the Webby Honoree page for the new Mickey Mouse site for Disney, we also just realized that the McGruff the Crime Dog website we worked on for the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council was also a Webby winner!

Animax Entertainment is getting so much bling that we're starting to look like Mr. T.

Mickey is Webby Honoree

The revamped Mickey Mouse site was just named as a Webby Awards Official Honoree in the 10th Annual Webby Awards. Gosh, golly, the awards keep coming!

Dave Monkeys Around

Dave Wolfe, one of the animators here at Animax Entertainment, the most bestest Emmy winning animation studio, just made available a new round of Flash plug-ins to help character animators automate tasks in Flash.

You can also check out the recent presentation Dave and Tim Jones gave at the LA Flash User group meeting - it was the biggest meeting LAFU had yet.

We Won an Emmy!!!!

We did it! Animax Entertainment won the Emmy Award for OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN CONTENT FOR NON-TRADITIONAL DELIVERY PLATFORM for the animated series Off-Mikes we produce for ESPN.com. It's the first time the Emmys have recognized content produced for broadband so it's great that our first Emmy was in a first ever category!

The ceremony was amazing -- just recovered from the afer-party. Got to meet Charles Barkley and Oksana Baiul. And David Blaine was in his fishtank nearby too.