Welcome to our second annual Kidscreen Conversations episode. We headed to San Diego, not Miami this year for the first West Coast Kidscreen. As always it was a great event, although the sun decided to skip it this year!

Our guests this year are Rob Doherty, a consultant with great insight into the industry and founder of Festivus, an animation org that parallels the Creators Society in some ways in the UK, Sueann Rochester, Managing Director of Wild Child Animation in Scotland, and Lucy Murphy, director of kids content at Sky in the UK.

Today we chat with Sean Charmatz and Peter McCown from DreamWorks about their new film Orion and the Dark, which is out on Netflix.

Today was a treat as we chatted with Mike Lasker, VFX Supervisor on “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”, working at Sony ImageWorks. I don’t know about you, but the movie blew me away, and when it finished I sat there with so many questions - many around the theme of ‘how the hell did they do that?!’

In today's episode, we have a conversation with Sandy Wax - a former Discovery, Disney, and Sprout executive. Sandy is delightfully curious, and that curiosity really paved the way for so many things - from her interest in research, to how that ties into content development and marketing and branding - and what led to her becoming CEO of Sprout for over over 10 years.

For this episode, we're breaking down The Inventor with an 'Anatomy of an Indie Stop Motion Film'. We first had Jim Capobianco on the show almost two years ago! In that chat, he talked about the stop motion feature project he'd embarked upon. With the Inventor releasing in theatres on Friday, September 15th, we thought doing a deep dive and breaking down how it made it to screen would be a great idea. To do so we were joined by Jim, the film's writer and director (Jim was also Oscar-nominated as co-writer of Ratatouille), Co-Director Pierre-Luc Granjon, and Line Producer Kat Alioshin.

If you're looking for some career inspiration, look no further than this episode with guest Bobby Chiu. Bobby's career is an example of tenacity, purpose, and a drive to not only be a great artist but to be great FOR artists.

In this episode, I got to chat with Kirk DeMicco and Faryn Pearl, the director and co-director of DreamWorks Animation's latest film, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken.

This film is refreshing in that it's focussed on a young female protagonist, and the entire thread of the story focusses on 3 generations of women - well, kraken women.

In this episode, we chat with Gary H. Lee, a layout, pre-viz, and cinematography guru who has also directed a couple of amazing shorts. Gary has an amazing career story that we know you'll enjoy, from working on one of the biggest film franchises of all time at age 19 to working with Ang Lee on Life of Pi, he has an incredible amount of experience and insight. We discuss his career, his thoughts on where pre-viz is going with Unreal, and how he used pre-viz to get his ambitious short films into production.

In 2022 Animation Magazine celebrated 35 years, so I sat down with Jean Thoren, a serial encourager, to talk about her's, and the magazine's journey. Jean and Animation Magazine have seen so much change in the industry over the past 35 years, and we chat about how it all got started when Pixar was emerging, Disney was changing, and the evolution of animation from being pigeonholed for kids to having the wider audience it has today.

Sometimes you see artwork that leaps off the screen - almost like visual click bait! Joseph Feinsilver's concept art did that to me when I spotted it on Instagram, so I wanted to chat with him about his story, his process and his work on Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.

This week's episode is a bit of a departure from our regular format, as we chat with 3 people from Kidscreen Summit in Miami and share some of my own thoughts on Kidscreen and making the most of it.

After starting as an intern on the original Toy Story, rising up to producer on UP, Inside Out, Toy Story 4, and helping to shape Soul, Jonas has 4 Oscars under his belt and is now Executive Vice President of Production at Pixar.

That would be a great story itself, but there are a lot more ingredients mixed in here, and really, this conversation was so enjoyable because Jonas is a super nice guy, gracious, humble and obviously absolutely loves what he does.

This episode is a chat with Julie Kane-Ritsch, Talent Manager and Head of Animation at The Gotham Group. It's a fascinating chat that shows that managers and agents have all kinds of paths into the industry, and Julie's journey is really cool.

When Hanna Barbera's shorts program produced 12 shorts, with 4 of them being Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, Dexters Lab, and the Powerpuff Girls, Julie was there.

In 2022 Sony Pictures Animation celebrated its 20th birthday, and Kristine Belson has been president for around 8 of those years, overseeing the industry-changing hit "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", and a growing number of film-maker led projects with varying styles and storytelling techniques.

Join us as we jump into a nearly hour-long chat with Puss In Boots: The Last Wish Director Joel Crawford and Co-Director Januel Mercado.

These guys were so fun to chat with and they were very generous with their time in a week where they probably did a hundred interviews. What's cool is that Joel and Januel are really close friends, and got to work side by side on a movie which is really a fun ride. And you can tell they have loved making this - it comes through in every frame.

If you've been taking in all the animated features this year, you no doubt have The Bad Guys as one of your favorites. For me, it's one of my favorite films of the year, animated or not.

And it certainly has its own flavor, a flavor which is really fresh, reminiscent of great heist films, and infused with a lot of today's guest, director Pierre Perifel.

LP Vermette and Virginie Lavallée are Canadian producers who have pivoted to focus on training producers in the industry. What is wonderfully refreshing is that aside from being super capable and experienced to teach other producers, they're taking the angle of wanting to turn out producers capable of balancing the well-being of their role and their team with everything a role in production entails.

Daniel Ross has worked as a voice actor for many years and does a vast array of voices, including many legacy characters, and new ones, big and small, in various shows. We chatted about his journey into voice acting, and the craft. Getting started into acting is a challenge, so you'll love Daniel's story of how he landed a role in a transformers video game to kick off his career.

Daniel is the third actor to voice Donald Duck for Disney, a role that recently earned him an Emmy nomination.

In 2017, when the industry caught sight of the first teaser trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, our collective jaws dropped. The rest is history of course as the movie went on to win just about every award imaginable. In this episode, we chat with Josh Beveridge, Head of Animation on Spider-Verse. We talk through his career, all of which has been at Sony Pictures Imageworks, and how the animation on Spider-Verse was a culmination of things that had been building for years, and how that first trailer drop allowed them to breathe a sigh of relief.

This week we were saddened to receive the news that long-time Pixar production designer Ralph Eggleston passed away after a long battle with cancer. I spoke with Ralph for one of our first episodes, so my instinct was to remember him by re-running that episode this week instead of what we had planned. I'm joined by long-time Pixar animator Shawn Krause, who has known Ralph, or Eggman as many knew him, since the early Pixar days.