Hana Sasaki Makes Her Debut

I'd like to announce an exciting animated collaboration with my friend and writer, Kelly Luce. Kelly and I met at the MacDowell Colony during the Great Ice Storm of '08. A week without power in rural New Hampshire lays a good foundation for friendship.

Kelly is releasing her debut collection of short stories this October and I have had the privilege of an open creative license to animate a few scenes from her book. This may result in future collaborations... a supernatural toaster is a tempting plot point. But for now, enjoy this glimpse into Ms. Luce's strange and wonderful mind.

Three Scenarios in which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail 
https://vimeo.com/cfparks/hanasasaki 

And please do your social media duty for us both with a like, comment, tweet, tumble, blog, embed or otherwise share.

Mr. Blue Sky

Want a fun, psychedelic break in your workday? Take a look at this music video for Mr. Blue Sky, the groovy song by Jeff Lynne and ELO.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Light_Orchestra. This was a collaboration between USC animation students and alumni, directed by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger. You may remember them from the famous 1985 A-HA music video Take On Me. Mike and Candace were great directors for this complex project, bringing together dozens of artistic styles from the animators working on different parts of the film. So much fun. Enjoy!

2011 Studio Recap

December is flying by and before the Christmas rush starts, I thought I would try to remember all the interesting projects that came through my studio in 2011.

The year started off with a snowstorm and my little white sand Christmas animation was posted on Cartoon Brew and Motionographer! The attention encouraged me to submit the film to several festivals this year. Including the Aspen Shortsfest. Being a neighbor to this wonderful festival, I not only was able to attend, but I also make their festival trailer, featuring a very Smart Bear!


Getting back into sand animation inspired me to start working on my own work as well this year. I pulled an underwater love-story off the back burner and began animating in earnest. After a successful kickstarter campaign this fall, A Tangled Tale is under full production and will hopefully be swimming around the festival circuit by late summer!


I had the joy of being in the wedding of a dear friend this fall. We've shared many adventures in the snow and sun together, during our time at Tahoe. I wanted to give her and her new husband a special gift, so I animated  a wedding invitation to one of their favorite songs. It was fun trying to capture the story of their adventurous courtship in a simple narrative!


And finally, what would the Christmas season be like without another animated Christmas card? This year I offered to donate my services to Women of Vision - an organization that advocates for women and girls internationally. I liked how the final piece turned out so much, I decided to send it as my own Christmas card. If you are looking for a worthy charity to give to during the holidays, I highly recommend you see what these women are doing to create a brighter and healthier future for impoverished women around the globe.


And so, as the New Year springs upon us, please take a moment to give thanks, call someone you love, and eat a Christmas cookie for me!

Warm Wishes,
Corrie Francis Parks

MOPS Reach More Moms Grant

With the wealth of information on the web, more small companies are looking for a way to engage their target audiences. Telling a simple story with animation taps into the power of our visual and emotional memories. Done right is can be immensely more effective than scrolling through pages of text and links on a website!

Mother's of Preschoolers (aka MOPS) is a non-profit group based out of Denver. In order to get the word out about a new grant opportunity for their members, they opted for a short and sweet story rather than a big write up. And they hired me to do it!Tell me, do you get the picture?

Smart Bears come to Aspen

The Aspen ShortsFest is just around the corner! To support the festival with a little local love, I made them an animated promo. The aim was to encapsulate everything about the festival in 30-second. Not an easy task when you have 83 films from 24 countries, all genres and all ages represented, all presented in the most beautiful place in the world, Aspen, CO! Tell me, do you think we got it all?


Concept, animation and sound design by CFParks.

A few fun facts about the upcoming festival:

• 23 of the 83 films are animated!
• According to IndieWIRE, ShortsFest is a Top 50 Festival. And it's Oscar-qualifying, which means if a film wins a prize it goes up for Oscar consideration.
• There are 143 bear drawings in this animated promo.
• The mountains in the background are our beautiful Maroon Bells. I am looking forward to exploring up there when the snow finally melts. Until then, time to watch films!

To Women (and Men) of Vision

Joy and Peace to all those special people in our lives! I send you this recent project as an animated Christmas greeting and as that you pass it along to the women and men who inspire you!

This was a delightful project. Women of Vision is a volunteer ministry of World Vision, a Christian relief and development organization, which equips women to serve impoverished and oppressed women and children worldwide. WoV seeks to educate and inspire women to action in an effort to alleviate the injustice and inequities that exist for women and their families.

My inspiration was the Women of Vison logo.

The design seemed to dance, even before it was animated. We wanted to convey the feelings of Joy, Laughter and Unity as women around the globe join together to bring peace and relieve to the oppressed.

The music was composed specifically for the piece by Salvador Santana. You may recognize that last name, but this young musician is making his own way in the world. Listen to more of his work and find out where he and his band are playing next on his website.

World of Color Opens Today!

This is a great promo video that give you all you need to know about the show in a nutshell. About a minute into the video you'll see me demonstrating the sand animation, which appears at the beginning of the Aladdin sequence. My 17 seconds of fame! Another cool artist who contributed to the project is a paper sculptor, Megan Brain. Read more about my role in the show below.

A World of Color, with a bit of sand animation too!

June 11th, a new evening spectacular will premier at Disney's California Adventure Park. World of Color is a light, water and music extravaganza, staged on a pool the size of a football feild. If you have ever seen the Belaggio Fountains of Las Vegas, extrapolate that out 300 times and you might come close to what Disney is aiming for here. The fountains are choreographed to music recorded by the London Philharmonic and animation being projected onto the largest mist screen in the world. That's where I come in. I collaborated with the imagineers to create some sand animation during the Aladdin segment of the 25 minute show. It's a very short segment, so don't blink, but I think the idea of projecting sand animation on a water screen is just sorta neat.

Sand animation is usually done on a light table and comes out black and white, but obviously for the World of Color, brilliant colors were a priority. After a lot of experimentation, I've come up with some new ways to use sand and color. You'll have to go see the show to see the work I did for Disney, but the film which inspired Steve Davidson to give me a call was my sand animation film Tracks. Working on the show was an awesome experience. I had free reign to pour my creativity into taking the timeless orchestral score from "A Whole New World" and create unique images based on one of my favorite Disney films of all time. To find out more about sand animation and see some more examples, read my recent blog entry on Sand Art vs Sand Animation.

Thom and I were lucky enough to get a behind-the-scenes tour a few weeks ago. 30 days before opening night, the crew of engineers, sound gurus, fire and water experts and laser players were working from dusk til dawn. They weren't projecting animation the night we were there, so we didn't get to see the full glory of the world's largest water projection screen (50 x 380ft!), but they ran through the entire fountain show twice with music at full blast. Thom and I are hard to impress, but there were several moments during the show when we both pulled a Keanu Reeves matrix-esque "Woah." LED lights under each fountain bring a full spectrum of choreographed color to the pool. Lasers interacting with the mist create some amazing patterns. Not to mention flame throwers. Only 6 of the 24 were going that night and it was still a hot blast in your face. Talk about a multi-sensory experience!

A few interesting facts we learned:

The best (standing) seat in the house is on the top of the first set of curves steps on the pavillion. You will feel the heat of the flamethrowers and the cool kiss of the mist, but not get drenched by it. And you will be able to see over most of the people standing in front of you.

The platforms, which hold the 1,200 fountains, are designed to float so they can be on the surface for maintenance. They take in water to submerged for the show. the control room is a submerged, water-tight container which is activated remotely from the tech room across the studio backlot.

There's a hot tub in the backlot. This was installed for the scuba engineers who would spend hours submerged in 50 degree water while installing the equipment. They would stay under until their core temp dropped too low and then take a turn in the hot tub before getting back to work.

Since this is a laser show, there were and will be airplane spotters whenever the show is playing. If an airplane looks like it is going to cross over the extended sky space of the show, the technicians knock out a few lasers until it has past. Don't worry, there will be so much else going on, you probably won't notice a few missing ones.

One of the coolest laser effects, during the "Little Mermaid" sequence, actually started out as an accident. The water guys were testing on one side of the pool and the laser guys were doing their thing on the other side and someone happened to look up and notice the eerie wave-like bands of color rolling through the mist. It was so astonishing, they gave it a prime spot in the show.

The fountains can blast up to 200ft. On a windy night that means the water gets blow all the way to the bridge. Raincoats, anyone?

To read a very thorough description of what the show is like, check out the Disneyland Examiner. The best pictures of the development of the show are on the Facebook Fan site for World of Color.

A Whale Tale

Last season at Cardrona, I made a fun little kid's video based on the books by Amy Sheehan. Check it out!



You can read the story books online and find out more about the fantastic kids programs at Cardrona on their website.