1. What are you working on today?
Meeting with a production designer, calling a few actors, working out deals with a sound designer and a musician, and working on storyboards for a web series we’re producing next month called “Coma, Period.” Hmm, I suppose I could have just said “pre-production.”

2. What have you found is the best tool or innovation that has come out in the last year?
In 2008 I was all about syncing. Plaxo, which has been around for years, now syncs PERFECTLY between macs, pcs, outlook, gmail, yahoo and hotmail. I love it, because I change a number on my phone and it ripples automatically to my 2 work computers, my home computer, and the web. Dropbox, (www.getdropbox.com) is a free tool you can use to setup syncing folders on multiple computers, which is great if you’re used to creating multiple drafts on multiple computers, or working on something with someone else. Why waste all your time emailing and ftp-ing when you can just save a file, and have Dropbox automatically update everyone? (It also saves previous drafts online, so you don’t have to worry about overwriting something by accident.)

3. The project (film, television, commercial or music video) that most impressed you in the last year? Why?
Wall-E. If you told me that an animated film with barely any dialogue would be a blockbuster, I would have told you to get out! [shoves you back, like Elaine from Seinfeld.] Then you would have told me it came from Pixar, and then it makes sense. When you are consistently the best, you can afford to experiment, and make amazing new masterpieces. Pixar is the Beatles of computer animation.

4. The best or favorite project that you worked on in 2008? And why?
Last year we did a project called “The Real Deal” for The Venetian in Vegas. It’s a live poker show where they pull people out in the audience, and pit them against the best pro’s in poker. Simultaneously, the everyone else in the theatre is playing the same hand of Texas Hold’Em via wireless device. We handled all the interactive graphics for the game, on scoreboards, HD screens, and the handheld devices. So that was pretty cool for us, because this was something that had never been done before—300 people playing poker. It was quite an experience.

5. Name the top four artists on your iPod.
Blonde Redhead
U2 (just went to Joshua Tree National Park, and it does indeed make a perfect soundtrack)
My Morning Jacket
Band of Horses

Recent Project

PSYCHIC BUNNY EMBRACES A HEART FULL OF LOVE
Animated Film Helps Kids Cope With Divorce
Press Release
Los Angeles, CA – (January 13, 2009) — Hybrid production studio Psychic Bunny is the animation team behind A Heart Full of Love, a new adaptation of the children’s book by the same name aimed at helping children of divorce cope with their parents’ separate lives. Available to librarians and educators on DVD and soon to be available to the general public, Heart Full of Love is a companion to the original, award-winning book and a complement to a workshop for children on the subject of divorce.

A Heart Full Of Love is about 8-year old Allison, a child of divorce who relates her conflicting feelings about her parents’ divorce, their significant others, and their eventual remarriages. Torn between sadness, grief, and the fear of the changes in her life, Allison ultimately makes peace with herself, family, and stepfamily with the compassionate understanding and guidance that they offer her.

"What is different about the story is that the adults aren’t shown fighting with each other, and each adult reaches out and tries to be of help and comfort to Allison, who is clearly upset and frightened by her circumstances," says Producer George Schwimmer, Ph. D. "The story not only validates Allison’s feelings (and by extension the feelings of children reading the book or listening to it being read), but—by example and counsel of the adults in the story—teaches her how to deal with situations that children shouldn’t have to deal with at such an early age."

Heart Full of Love book author Bette Margolis partnered with George Schwimmer, Ph.D. to create TV programs and films, with Heart Full of Love as the inaugural project. Psychic Bunny first got involved at the earliest stages of conception of the animated version of her popular and award-winning book. Bette Margolis was using the book in her workshops, and wanted a way to take the message far and wide. She had already adapted it into a rough script when Psychic Bunny joined forces to take the illustrations of the characters and settings into an animated world.

In 2008, the evening after submitting the final script for Heart Full of Love, Bette suddenly passed away. After the immediate shock of her death had passed, George Schwimmer decided to finish Bette’s project and Heart Full of Love went into production with Psychic Bunny in May 2008.

"As a child of separated parents myself," says Psychic Bunny’s Asa Shumskas-Tait "I know how hard divorce can be for kids, and so it was easy to throw myself into this project to try to make a difference for kids who are having a rough time. Animation provides the opportunity to have style truly serve the story, with the wide range of expressionistic choices an animator can make at each stage. Both the book and the animated short are structured around the main character, Alison, writing in her journal, so it seemed natural to let that inform the animation. We chose a crayon art style that is obviously more refined than an 8 year old’s drawings, but makes use of bold strokes and crayon textures that give each frame a coloring book feel."

This was made possible in large part by Adobe AfterEffects CS3’s Puppet tool, which allowed Psychic Bunny to create these crayon-textured images in Photoshop, and animate them in AfterEffects. Puppet tool was new at the time, and it took some experimenting to strike the right balance between the Puppet tool and traditional joint rigging, but the end result was what the production team was striving for.

"All of this was in the service of a higher purpose," comments Asa Shumskas-Tait "We hoped to provide that spoonful of sugar with images that were inviting and familiar to a small child. It was important that these lessons about opening your heart and accepting that families can take many forms truly seemed to come from an 8 year old girl – someone their age, even if she is illustrated as a puppy. One of the best parts of the experience for me was when someone watched a rough cut and said, ‘I think that’s going to really help a lot of kids.’ That meant the world to me."

George Schwimmer continues the quest to put A Heart Full Of Love on the air and to market the DVDs via national online and brick and mortar retailers. He also hopes to create a series around this concept of healing a child’s soul through the lives of friendly animated dogs, depicting rather than instructing, putting forward concepts that even a five-year-old can utilize to help achieve peace and emotional balance.