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genres of animation explained; man setting up stop motion animation

Subgenres of Animation Explained

Ask ten people what animation looks like and you'll get ten answers: a desk lamp that hops, a Ghibli sky, a clay dog with a nervous owner, a logo that assembles itself before an ad. They're all right. Animation is a medium, and the subgenres of animation are the techniques inside it. Each has its own look, budget, and workflow. Here's what each one is, what it costs, and who does it best.

TIFF: The Market Explained: What It Is, How It Works, and Where LAFS Alumni Already Fit In

Blog, Articles

Every September, the Toronto International Film Festival fills the city with red carpets and premieres. Starting in 2026, TIFF added something the festival has never had before: an official market. Running September 10 to 16 alongside the festival, TIFF: The Market gave North America its own version of what the Cannes Marché du Film has done since 1959, a dedicated space where films, series, and other screen projects get bought, sold, and financed, separate from the public-facing side of the festival. This year, LAFS had a real stake in that room. Seven alumni worked across eight projects connected to the festival and market, including one who directed a feature.

The Algorithm Is a Distributor: What Media Companies Learned From Creators

Blog, Articles

Ten years ago, a distribution deal was the finish line. Land one, and your show, your song, or your film found an audience. Now the finish line has moved. An algorithm decides who actually sees your work, and the companies that figured that out first weren't the studios. They were creators working out of bedrooms and garages, and legacy media has spent the last several years catching up.

L.A. Film School Alumni Credited on 32 Wins at the 2026 Emmy Awards

Alumni News & Interviews, Blog, Featured

Alumni were credited across both of this year's top winners, The Pitt and Pluribus, with additional wins spanning Margo's Got Money Troubles, The Muppet Show, Palm Royale, Fallout, Hacks, and more.

Autotune Is an Instrument: The Aesthetic History of Pitch Correction

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You've heard it a thousand times, whether you clocked it or not: that shimmering, quantized vocal glide that turns a human voice into something closer to a synth line. Autotune started as damage control, a way to quietly nudge a flat note…

An Epic, a Web-Slinger, and a Coyote’s Comeback: LAFS & LARS Alumni on 2026’s Biggest Productions

Alumni News & Interviews

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. A new Spider-Man. The Looney Tunes lawsuit Warner Bros. tried to bury. Disney's live-action Moana. The last ride for the Pogues. Dolly Parton's life, set to music, on Broadway. Six of the year's buzziest productions, and LAFS and LARS alumni show up in the credits of every one of them. Here's who did what.

Podcast Production 101: From Recording to Publish

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Anyone can hit "record" on a phone and call it a podcast. Almost nobody does it well enough to make a stranger stop scrolling and hit play on episode two. The gap between those two outcomes isn’t luck, and it isn’t a pile of expensive podcast equipment — it’s process. If you’re trying to figure out how to start a podcast, or how to produce a podcast that actually sounds like a show instead of a phone call, this guide walks you through the exact production chain professionals use to turn a conversation into a polished, published episode, from the mic on your desk to the feed on someone’s phone.

Everything Is Beige Now: The Flattening of Contemporary Color

Blog, Articles

Queue up a prestige drama, scroll a friend’s new apartment on Instagram, then glance at your streaming homepage. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, all three landed on the same look: cool shadows, warm skin, and an awful lot of beige in between. That’s not one trend copying another. It’s four separate pressures, streaming compression, the teal-and-orange color grade, algorithm-driven thumbnail design, and a decorating shift some call millennial gray, arriving at the same answer from different directions. This is the flattening of contemporary color, and it has an origin story.

The Gear Nobody Warns You About: What Students Actually Need in Year One

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Every new term, a fresh class of students shows up with a gear list a mile long and a credit card ready to prove it. Almost none of that list survives contact with the first semester. Here's the honest version: what your program already puts in your hands, what's worth adding in year one, and what should sit in your cart until you've earned the reason to buy it.

Twelve Principles, Ninety Years Later: What Disney’s Animation Rules Still Get Right

Blog, Articles

Ninety years ago, a room full of Disney animators was quietly inventing the vocabulary of believable movement, years before anyone wrote it down as a rulebook. The 12 principles of animation wouldn't be published as a formal list until Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's 1981 book The Illusion of Life, but the techniques trace back to the studio's earliest experiments with weight, timing, and personality on paper. Today those same rules get quoted in 3D animation software, motion graphics templates, and game engine documentation that nobody working in the 1930s could have possibly imagined. So the real question for a modern animator isn't whether the rules are old. It's whether they still work.

Subgenres of Animation Explained

TIFF: The Market Explained: What It Is, How It Works, and Where LAFS Alumni Already Fit In

The Algorithm Is a Distributor: What Media Companies Learned From Creators

L.A. Film School Alumni Credited on 32 Wins at the 2026 Emmy Awards

Autotune Is an Instrument: The Aesthetic History of Pitch Correction

An Epic, a Web-Slinger, and a Coyote’s Comeback: LAFS & LARS Alumni on 2026’s Biggest Productions

Podcast Production 101: From Recording to Publish

Everything Is Beige Now: The Flattening of Contemporary Color

The Gear Nobody Warns You About: What Students Actually Need in Year One

Twelve Principles, Ninety Years Later: What Disney’s Animation Rules Still Get Right

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