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The International Festival of Erotic Animation (fiae.com.br)is our favourtie animation fest that we've never actually been to. We were closer than ever last year having booked an apartment on rio's Copacabana. We were going to go too, until the bosses got wind of it. The festival's backstory is apparently that Rio used to be full of sleazy cinemas playing films that have gone through erotic and come out the other side. The political wind shifted and they were deemed uncool. So there these cinema's rotted until the clever, and presumnably erotic, people behind IFEA kicked off the festival. We're already plotting to go to this year's Novemeber fest.

We got our 5000th site member yesterday. Congratulations to you duncanwilde, we're looking for a prize for you in the cupboard of mystery, there are definitely some robot kits back there somewhere.

While we're on the subject of kit we've been having a lot of fun with the Optoma pico pocket projector they sent out - www.optoma.co.uk

The July Issue of Imagine magazine is out: 3D, games, Annecy review, Plympton interview, all sorts of amazing stuff. We also interview the editor of some new books based on the teachings of Walt Stanchfield, who was a sort of genius hobo animator, he drew as he drove and was loved by everyone at Disney. The books, Drawn to Life volumes 1 and 2, are amazing treasure troves of animation wisdom. I've got some copies on my desk here, I will send them out to the first person to comment under this post with the name of the Winnie the Pooh character sketched in the article.

Blue Sky Studios, who did the Ice Age films are giving away some jumbo computers to a local university. Specifically the University of Connecticut will get racks worth $35,000. They probably have a better relationship between industry and education than we do over here. Uni's and colleges in the UK love nothing better than trumpeting their strong ties with industry, many of them might get a working animator to pop along for a guest lecture. What they don't do is sort students out with proper, useful work experience. Many studios are openly hostile toward fresh grads and warn that no work experience positions will be offered to them. That's the reason there are hordes of animation grads listlessly roaming around the place. Have you been to an open discussion between so-called industry and education? They get ugly. Skillset are supposed to be running the peace and reconciliation routine but it's not going to be easy. The only thing everyone agrees on is that the government needs to invest in the animation industry now if they don’t want to squander our ever decreasing head start and ultimately throw away an awful lot of money and jobs.

I was recently made aware of the work of Women in Animation. They would appear to be a fine US organisation established in 1994 to foster the dignity, concerns and advancement of women in animation. At uni I spent an inordinate amount of time studying feminist ideology, for which I have the utmost respect. I have also attended at least one UK Women in technology event. In my experience animation and digitalism in general are one sector in which the injustices of gender discrimination, which are all too real and repugnant, are largely absent. There are still not enough women in high level positions at the big post houses, there are only several female VFX supers, but, many of the most sought-after professional animators on the circuit are women and around half of the independent and student animators I meet are too. I raise this issue of equality only because I giggled at the FAQ's on WiA’s site, which I include below.

Q: Who belongs to Women In Animation?

Women — and men — who are working professionals in the art and business of the animation industry. Currently, 30% of our membership are men.

We've been seeing quite a bit of this type of animation where the viewer moves and the frames stay still. Trains are particularly good for this because they move at a predictable speed along a fixed route and they are a traditional battleground for the graff lot.

Glastonbury festival this weekend. We're heroically attending, not on some hedonistic, hippy tip but because of the copious animation going on. As well as all the blockbusters: Coraline and Bolt (in 3D) Waltz with Bashir and Watchmen showing in the cinema tent there's a lot of very cool interactive digital stuff happening. Animated Exeter will be showing a load of shorts on The Village Screen. Our friends from SDNA will be doing their interactive projection thing in Shangri-La. Plus there's bound to be all kinds of unannounced stuff happening.

This film "Pajama Gladiator" by Glenn Harmon of Brigham Young University just won the Student Oscar or The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 36th Annual Student Academy Awards, animation award.