ADG Awards: Art Directors Guild Draws Up New Category For Animated Feature Production Design
The Art Directors Guild has penciled in a new category for its 22nd annual trophy show. Coming to the ADG Awards stage in January for the first time will be a category for Excellence in Production Design for an Animated Feature Film. The 2018 hardware will be handed out January 27 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.
For the past 11 years, animated features have vied for an ADG Award as part of its Production Design for a Fantasy Feature Film category.
It is our intention to honor and celebrate great Production Design achievements in the remarkable and evolving art form of animation through this new award,” said Thomas A. Walsh, who made today’s announcement with fellow ADG Awards producer Thomas Wilkins. “By separating feature animation into its own constituent category, we wish to pay tribute to these creative works in a manner equivalent to all our other feature design categories.
The new category comes one awards season after Kubo and the Two Strings became the first animated film to earn a Visual Effects Oscar nomination since Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1994 and also scored a Costume Deisgners Guild nom.
Here are the qualifications for the ADG’s newest category, per the guild:
Animated feature films representing 2D (hand drawn), 3D (CGI), clay animation/puppet and motion capture (live-action/CGI hybrid) will all qualify for this award category.
A feature film must have the majority of its sets and locations created using a frame-by-frame technique, and usually falls into one of the two general fields of animation: narrative or abstract.
Some of the techniques of animating films include but are not limited to hand-drawn animation, computer animation, stop-motion, clay animation, pixilation, cutout animation, pinscreen, camera multiple pass imagery, kaleidoscopic effects created frame-by-frame, and drawing on the film frame itself.
Motion capture and real-time puppetry are not by themselves considered animation techniques.
Animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s total running time.
A narrative animated film must have a significant number of the top eight (8) major characters animated.
If the picture is created in a cinematic style that could be mistaken for live action, producers must submit information supporting how and why the picture is substantially a work of animation rather than live action.
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