We have two heavy weight, hollywood animators, speaking about flash animations.

Our first speaker, Silvia Pompei, will be presenting her documentary
entitled "Flash Goes To Hollywood".
Our second speaker, Jay Jackson, will be discussing what its like to
direct and animate in flash.

The event is free and there will be food and drinks.
more detail at http://www.valleyflas...

SPEAKER BIOS
1. Silvia Pompei followed her passion for animation from europe to
the USA. She attended art school in Bologna, trained at the
"apprenticeship" lab of veteran animator Secondo Bignardi, in Modena,
Italy, later graduating in Film and Video, from St. Martin's School of
Art, in London.

After beginning her career in character animation on the TV series
Masters of Animation for John Halas's Educational Film Center
(formerly Halas and Bachelor Studios) she happened to be in the right
place at the right time, when Disney and Amblin came to London.
Becoming an inbetweener on Who Framed Roger Rabbit ? she moved on to
assistant animation, to character animation on a number of major
theatrical features including: An American Tail II - Fievel Goes West,
We're Back, Cool World, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Swan Princess, The Rugrats
in Paris and The Wild Thornberrys, where she also did storyboards.

Her work includes several made for TV and CD-ROMs productions, ranging
from Rich Animation's Animated Hero Classics, to Disney Interactive's
games and storybooks ‐ such as 101 Dalmatians, Hercules, Mulan and
more. During the industry's 2D traditional animation's crisis, she
experimented briefly with 3D CGI, only to quickly discover the amazing
power of Flash character animation and the "renaissance" of 2D ‐
albeit digital, in early 2004, working for Disney Online, ACME
Filmworks, Titmouse-Cartoon Network and Animax. She was lucky enough
to feed her other passion, documentary filmmaking, by exploring the
different trends and transitions in character animation through the
eyes of her peers, going from traditional animation to 3D first, with
Pencils to Pixels (2004), and more recently with Flash Goes to
Hollywood (2006), shown at the Future Film Festival, the annual
international showcase of new technologies in animation. She has been
back with pencil in hand, as a character animator on The Simpsons
Movie, and is currently working on the TV series.

2. JAY JACKSON
Jay has worked as an animator on 25 films since he moved from Kansas
City to Los Angeles in 1979. Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, he became a
fan of animation after seeing Disney's Pinocchio. He studied painting
and photography at the Kansas City Art Institute and began to
experiment with animation. After reading in a magazine that the aging
Disney animators were looking for young artists, he moved to Los
Angeles and began training under Eric Larsen, one of Disney's "Nine
Old Men". His first film at Disney was The Fox and The Hound.

In his 15 years at Disney, his favorite assignments were animating
scenes of Sebastian the crab and the dance sequence "Under da Sea" in
The Little Mermaid, and supervising the Ape Family in Tarzan.

When Disney decided to halt production of hand-drawn animation, Jay
learned computer animation and moved to Sony Imageworks. He worked on
the airplane dogfight sequence in The Aviator and provided character
animation for Open Season and Monster House.

Recent projects include The Simpsons Movie, The Simpsons Ride at
Universal Studios, and The Secrets of the Furious Five for the Kung Fu
Panda DVD. He recently directed and animated the opening sequence for
a live-action film, American Primitive. He is currently a supervising
animator on a Disney educational film.

He also enjoys teaching at Animation Mentor and is a member of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.