The Society for Animation Studies Newsletter ISSN: 1930-191X
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Volume 30, Issue 2 Fall 2017 The Society for Animation Studies Newsletter ISSN: 1930-191X In this Issue: Letter from the Editors SAS Announcements 1 ● President’s Report Nichola Dobson Dear SAS members, 2 ● Membership Report Robert Musburger As 2017 draws to a close, it is time to reflect on a 3 ● Web Report Timo Linsenmier bumper year of animated events, symposia, 4 ● 2017 Emru Townsend Awards workshops and conferences that have made up an Tom Klein extremely rich animation calendar. No sooner had 5 ● Animation Studies 2.0 the dust settled on the SAS conference in Padova, Cristina Formenti Italy, plans were already afoot for Montreal 2018, hosted by Concordia University. This will, of course, Events and Announcements represent the 30 year anniversary of the Society for 6 ● Report: Ecstatic Truth II – Animation Studies – a wonderful achievement and Lessons of Darkness and Light worthy of hearty commemoration I think you’ll agree. Carla MacKinnon and Birgitta Hosea To keep things ticking over until Montreal, we have 7 ● Report: Queer/ing Animation our usual roster of regular updates on the society’s Claire Mead and Kodi Maier progress, including president’s report, membership 8 ● Report: The Persistence of Walt and web information, the results of the 2017 Emru Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Townsend Awards, and an insight into the growth of Dwarfs (1937) the SAS blog. As usual, we are very grateful to our Eve Benhamou contributors, on whom we can always count! 9 ● CFP: …Now, Then, Next: 30th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference The latter half of this latest newsletter reflects on Upcoming Event exactly the diversity and scope of work being done with the field of animation studies. We have reports on the Ecstatic Truth II and Queer/ing Animation conferences held at the Royal College of Art and Membership Information University of Hull respectively. The issue then ● SAS Board and Contacts closes with a summary of this year’s Anifest symposium, this year with a Snow White theme, as well as a CFP reminder for the SAS conference. Happy holidays one and all, and see you in Montreal for SAS 2018! Sincerely, Christopher Holliday and Lilly Husbands The articles in the SAS Newsletter are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Contributions are copyrighted by authors and remaining information is ©2006 Society for Animation Studies. Society for Animation Studies © 2014 SAS Newsletter, v30n2, p.1 President’s Report Nichola Dobson Hello SAS members. This year seems to have gone by particularly quickly and looking back over the messages and pictures, our summer conference in Padova, Italy seems like a distant memory! It was a fantastic conference and I was privileged to be part of such a well- organized event in such historic surroundings. Thanks again to Marco Bellano and his amazing team for bringing us together to meet and share our ideas and develop new plans for research in the future. I know of several research projects which have grown from initial conversations there. As always though, we also look forward to our next conference; moving west to the beautiful city of Montreal and our hosts Concordia University. The call for papers has gone out (see details in the newsletter) and the deadline is fast approaching (15th December) so get those proposals in. This past year is technically our 30th anniversary when founder, Harvey Deneroff thought it might be a good idea to get together with some people to talk about animation; next year is our 30th conference. There will be some celebrations in place so look out for that. The website redevelopment was our biggest project last year and the new site continues to be updated with new content, some sections faster than others. If any members would like to contribute please let us know. We have recently relaunched our regular news updates, managed by Maggie Guo. She is doing a great job posting items frequently so please keep checking back in to keep up to date on all things animated. We supported three more events this year with sponsorship; “Queering Animation”, and “Ecstatic Truth II”, which you can read about in the newsletter. We will be supporting new events next year so please keep an eye out for a call for funding support in early spring. We currently have a few offers to host the conference in 2019, but you may be aware that we try to rotate as widely around the globe as possible, so we are not yet decided. If you are interested in hosting in 2019 or beyond then please contact me for a proposal form. Ideally, we would like to have the venues fixed a few years ahead to help members plan, but we understand that sometimes things change so it is good to have options. Plenty to get on with before the year is out! Good luck with your conference proposals and keep in touch! Best wishes Nichola Dobson President, SAS Society for Animation Studies © 2014 SAS Newsletter, v29n2, p.2 Membership Report Robert Musburger PRELIMINARY SAS FALL 2017 FINANCIAL REPORT INCOME Wells Fargo Checking balance 6,566.70 Savings balance 25,546.10 Wells Fargo total 32,112.80 Pay Pal Pay Pal total 5,706.63 EXPENSES Total expenses, so far 20217 11,099.19 SAS FALL 2010 MEMBERSHIP REPORT Total 2017-18 paid members Total 2011 paid members (includes 2010 dues) Renewal Student New Total paid members 229 Web Report Timo Linsenmaier As every year, the AGM is both an opportunity to look back and evaluate how our websites have been doing as well as give an update on planned development work. Society for Animation Studies © 2014 SAS Newsletter, v29n2, p.3 So, first of all, here are the numbers you’ve all been waiting for! In the period from July 1, 2016 to July 1, 2017, statistics for unique website visitors are: www.animationstudies.org o 7,862 unique visitors o 33,219 page views (2.73 pages/session) o Bounce rate: 52.72% journal.animationstudies.org o 15,503 unique visitors o 49,278 page views (2.12 pages/session) o Bounce Rate: 67.87% blog.animationstudies.org o 23,082 unique visitors o 47,066 page views (1.56 pages/session) o Bounce Rate: 78.67% And the winner is… the blog – at least when it comes to raw numbers. However, when e.g. looking at the recently re-designed main website, there are some nuances: Even though less people come to visit overall, they stay longer, and navigate deeper into the site as on e.g. the blog. This is also very visible when comparing stats for the previous year with the ones from this year, see the figures below. Society for Animation Studies © 2014 SAS Newsletter, v29n2, p.4 In other words, the investment made into our web properties has clearly paid off, and given that apart from the conference, which not everybody can attend, the web is our main means of exchange, it is necessary to sustain this momentum. Another conclusion that can be drawn from the numbers is that content is king. The parts of the site that get updated more frequently with fresh content, i.e. the journal and the blog, are more attractive. The Board has therefore decided to look for a web editor, a content manager, who can update the main website with news and announcements on a regular basis, thus driving more interest and traffic to the site – making it a hub for information about animation studies! If you’re interested in helping in this role, please contact the president, Nichola Dobson! Finally, there are other technical projects to be realized in the coming months. The first concerns payments. We have come to realize that Paypal is not available any more in a variety of countries, e.g. Singapore or Turkey. On the other hand, bank transfers need manual input into the database and therefore take longer. We’re looking at finding new solutions to this. Other payment providers seem to have similar restrictions as Paypal if they’re US-based (e.g. Stripe), some are only available regionally (e.g. GoCardless, only in Europe), or are complex to set up (e.g. Ogone, a classical online financial transaction provider). The task at hand is therefore to find, in the coming months, a mix of several providers that cover all geographical areas and that we will be able to integrate with our existing automatic subscription mechanisms, to hopefully get to even smoother dues and membership processing. Another area that needs work are institutional memberships. While the new dues structure has resulted in a number of institutions making use of the possibility to register faculty as a group, the administrative procedures on our end still need work. Adding individual institutional members requires manual changes to the database at the moment, which, again, takes time. We will therefore work on a new module for the backend interface in the coming months to facilitate this process, and also integrate institutional memberships with the new payment mechanisms, which should also result in smoother dues and membership processing for this group of members. Then there are a few smaller projects that the Board has been discussing for a while, and that we’ll hopefully also tackle soon: The Journal, which has just had its 10th anniversary, will need a visual refresh; the SAS turns 30, and we’ll look into if we can get a small module for the site that allows us to collect tributes and testimonials.