 Unbelievable. We got farmland. We got stopping slavery. What could be next? Animation! That's what I think people like the most, Barry. So Chris is a founder of VIT Films, which is an animation studio that runs out of Amherst. He's also got great credits with Pixar Animation out of Emoryville. Was it Emoryville or Richmond back then? It was Richmond. It was Richmond. So, you know, Toy Story films. Chris was the technical director. He's got some chops, man. Are you ready? I'm ready. You ready? And by the way, so everybody else has a very specific format, which is 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide. Of course, Chris is an animator and said, I'm happy with that. Chris' entire presentation is an animation. So, yeah, I'm hoping you're just going to watch the screen and not watch me reading my notes. Alright, so animation is a place where imaginations can run free. It leverages the power of allegory and metaphor the way poetry does. And once combined with all the other tricks of filmmaking, it can be moving in very profound ways. My particular specialty is computer graphics or CG, which in movies is about as old as I am. But CG's real coming of age was in the really to mid-90s when films like Jurassic Park pushed technical and visual boundaries and certainly blew me away. And then Toy Story, which was a pretty monumental piece. 31 minutes of computer animation and suddenly you can make an entire animated film in your garage with relatively inexpensive tools. You put Jurassic Park together with Toy Story and a pretty thrilling future emerges. A future filled with photorealistic but imagined worlds. Directors with total control over every pixel who don't have to answer to anyone. What does this utopia hold in store for me? So Toy Story's an answer to a question which is can we make an entire film on a computer? And so computer animation is a medium for future film production. It was born in November 95 with Toy Story. We have 16 years of past and according to Wikipedia something like 86 computer animated films have been made. That's a lot of movies so has our baby, our little medium, matured well. Has she lived up to her potential? Well if you like smiley happy cute and generally white male or at least male identified daggers then you're in love. There are tons of them and they're supported by a cast of goofy ethnic minorities. Or fragile psychotic women. So films are homogenized. They've almost all been rated G or PG. They have happy endings. They've been directed by men. They've come from only one of a few studios. They've cost tens of millions of dollars and they feature famous actors and famous composers. Now my kids, if you rate this they would say that Wally is nothing like Poe. They'd be right if all they ever saw was this kind of stuff. So literally Marvel for them and shamelessly reference Marvel McLuhan. I don't know who it was who discovered the full potential of animation but I don't think it was the people who watched Hollywood movies. So what Hollywood has produced is effectively turning this medium and I'm talking all the animation into a genre. Consider that all of this potential and it's being used on a very small range of stories but I have good news to share. And that is that there's work being done outside of Hollywood. Independent work. Capable of yes medium. There's work you've probably not been seeing but after tonight maybe you'll start seeking it out. All over the world and even here on the Hampshire campus or there on the Hampshire campus where all of the clips you're now seeing were produced people are pushing the potential of this medium with dramatic, tragic, personal, abstract, experimental even documentary films. Let me give you a taste of what's out there to find. Bob Saviston developed and tested an amazing expressive rotoscoping technology by producing animated documentaries like this one about an autistic boy making a visit to a 7-Eleven. There's Emily Hubley who along with Bill Clinton, Signed Balmain, Pat Smith and a host of others in the New York area are continuing to produce vibrant independent work that's rooted in illustration but it heavily leverages computers as well. Serious psychological issues are explored by Don Hertzfeld's acceptable stick figures as well as Thomas Baginski's thrilling and devastating CG creations of his independent studio in Poland. And there's the work of Irish director David O'Reilly whose external world is playfully post-modern and helpfully self-referential. That influence? Don't worry, it's just our nation. It's really our victim. Don Hertzfeld did a great collaboration taking place on the Hampshire campus. We are just wrapping on this film called There Are About a Young Woman Who Struggles with Mental Illness. These aren't your typical Hollywood cartoons. And there is some more good news. Some of this work is even making inroads into Hollywood. Although it was produced overseas, Persepolis by Marge Anson Trappi and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Bullman, there are two animated memoirs that were distributed in the United States. And then, actually produced in the U.S. were films like Waking Life, 9 and Chicago 10 which were targeting different new audiences with new kinds of animated stories. This is small but exciting in progress. So, the experiments are happening. Animation is thriving, but it's doing so largely unseen. So what can you do? You can seek out this work. Where's my little slide? There it is. And support those who make it. Watch it by the films. Tell your friends about it. Fund them filmmakers and help us reinvent the medium of animation. Thank you.