2010

2010: Wow, I cannot believe everything that happened this year. Insane. A great, great year.

But it started badly: Laura broke her right heel showing Burton how safe it was to sled down the slope in our backyard. This is while I was going in to Magnetic Dreams to work on Iron Man: Extremis. So I became our family's sole driver while she recuperated.

After that project wrapped, MD began work on a Thor & Loki motion comic. I only worked on the first episode of that, since I began to have two more Weston Woods films to do: Scaredy Squirrel and All the World. Work on those lasted through the year.

My friends at the Nashville Public Library and I made a whirlwind trip to Atlanta to do a video puppetry workshop with Steve Whitmire.

I did a great number of animations for Quaver's Marvelous World of Music, those also lasting throughout the year. Plus, there was just a little bit more puppeteering of Beethoven too.

I created Astaire Unwound, my deconstruction of Fred Astaire's ceiling dance, and one of my most popular YouTube uploads!

I did a fun music video for Ralph's World, to the tune of My Magic Trick. Great to animate Laurie Keller's art again!

This year I seemed to see just how many times I could go to Memphis! The answer was: four. All were happy occasions: A celebration of retiring MSU professors Gloria Baxter and Susan Chrietzberg; a performance by Voices of the South; a Nicholas Nickleby 25th anniversary reunion; and finally, seeing Barry Fuller in A Christmas Carol at Theatre Memphis.

But was all that enough? Oh, perish the thought! I'm Dirty! got accepted in the London Film Festival in October, and we three Fotts took that as an excuse to go there ourselves! So we saw the festival, Abbey Road, Shakespeare's Globe, the Tower, the Don Sahlin/Jim Henson bench at Hampstead Heath, the Natural History Museum, Hamlet, and Hamley's. But maybe best of all was the day we spent at Ashdown Forest, site of the Pooh stories. We took some sticks from Dorothy Ann Russo's farm with us, and dropped them off the Poohsticks Bridge. This required an immense amount of walking, but Laura was an incredible trouper.

Oh yes: And somewhere in there, I turned 47. Burton turned 10. And Laura turned...her sled toward a tree? Something like that.

Great year.