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arts & culture
KANSAN.COM | MONDAY, NOV.28, 2016
HOROSCOPES
>> WHAT'S YOUR
BIGGEST
Aries
(March 21-April 19) Enjoy a two-day expansion phase. New opportunities present themselves. Put on your traveling shoes, or stay home and make your discoveries through book
and film.
Taurus
(April 20-May 20)
Discuss shared finances over the next two days.
Changes necessitate budget revisions. Figure it out, and reward yourselves with something tasty. Save for
the future.
Gemini
(May 21-June 20)
Work with your partner today and tomorrow. Take care of each other. Together you get farther, faster.
Keep on budget to really
Cancer
(June 21-July 22)
Work demands more attention today and tomorrow.
Include love and creativity in the mix. Prioritize good food, exercise and rest,
to keep your fire burning
Leo
(July 23-Aug. 22)
The odds are in your favor now. Take more time for play over the next two days. Flex your artistic muscles. Share your heart with someone attractive.
Virgo
(Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
Family comes first, especially over the next few days. Make household decisions and changes.
Cooking projects feed spirits as well as bodies. Share
a simple feast.
Libra
(Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
You're exceptionally charming and witty over the next two days. Share stories and something delectable. Learning new skills leads to new friends.
Socialize
Scorpio
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) Bring in the money for the next two days. Maybe you can get something from your wish list; spending also seems easier. Keep the budget balanced.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)
You can get whatever you apply yourself to over the next two days. Your confident energy inspires others. Take leadership to contribute for an inspiring
Capricorn
(Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Slow down to contemplate your next move. Relax in hot water. Consider different options and potential consequences. Rest and recuperate over the next
two days.
Aquarius
University alumnus produces award show
(Jan. 20-Feb. 18)
Get into a two-day party phase. Good things come through your network of friends. Support each other through changes. Collaborate on a creative project.
Andrew Ward, a University alumnus, is a founder and coordinator of the Reality Television Awards, which celebrated its fourth anniversary this year.
Pisces
(Feb. 19-March 20) Consider new professional opportunities over the next few days. Crazy dreams seem possible. Prepare for inspection, and smile for the cameras. Assume new competence.
responsibility.
Contributed Photo
▶ COURTNEY BIERMAN
@courtbierman
Hundreds of people in gowns and tuxedos climb out of black town cars onto a red carpet. They chat with reporters, pose for photos and sign autographs.Most of them have never appeared in a film or recorded an album.They're not writers or producers—some might argue that they don't do anything at all. They're reality television stars,and it's the night of the fourth annual Reality Television Awards at the Avalon Hollywood nightclub. University alumnus Andrew Ward is one of the event's executive producers.
Ward, who graduated from the University with a business degree in 2006, started the show with his colleague Kristen Moss in 2012. Each had several years of reality casting and production work under their belts on shows such as "Master Chef" and "The Celebrity Apprentice."
More than 300 reality television shows are on the air, but they receive little recognition from professional organizations such as the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Ward and Moss wanted to honor the stars of reality television and the people behind the camera.
"A lot of people think when they're watching [reality television] that it looks so clean and professional at home," Ward said. "You think they just threw up a camera in a kitchen somewhere and made it happen. You have art department,
you have writers, you have the talent, travel, production, grip, writing - you name it. I think a lot of people don't realize how much it takes to put together."
People don't realize how much it takes to put together."
Andrew Ward University alumnus
Talent producer John Barra is in charge of production on the night of the ceremony. He directs 125 crew members that make sure the presenters are in place and the stars are on time. Despite managing to book more than 700 reality TV stars, Barra said he managed to get every single one to show up.
This year's show aired on Nov.2 and drew more than 15,000 viewers to the live stream on the award show's website.
The show is designed to be a balance between fun and serious. Ward said he wants people to think of the Oscars meeting the MTV Video Music Awards. This year's ceremony included 25 categories, each with five nominees. The winner is chosen by a combination of industry selection and fans' online
voting. A category like "Bad Ass Crew," won by Discovery Channel show "Deadliest Catch," honors the hard, and often dangerous, work of a reality TV production crew, while "Reality Queen," won by Vicki Gunvalson of "The Real Housewives of Orange County," recognizes more visible talent.
The concept of the Reality TV Awards does not escape criticism. Barra said he's been questioned by colleagues about the legitimacy of an awards show that recognizes a genre many consider to be superficial. Barra pointed out that 65 percent of shows on television are reality.
. "I'm like 'Look at what's
Hank Driskill is the technical supervisor for the new Disney film, "Moana," which opens in theaters Wednesday.
on television right now. Look at what people are doing," he said.
Moss said a lot of shows are technically reality television, not just structured reality series like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" or "Big Brother." Competition shows and most of the programming on HGTV and the Cooking Channel fit into the reality genre as well.
"For all of those people who say reality TV is the downfall of society, I want them to look at their DVR, I want them to look at what they watch weekly, and I guarantee they watch something that is reality TV," she said.
Q&A: Hank Driskill, 'Moana' technical supervisor
CAMERON MCGOUGH @cammcgough
Disney's latest animated film "Moana" will be released on Wednesday. The Kansan got a chance to have a conversation with Hank Driskill, a University alumnus and technical supervisor for the film. Read as he discusses his Kansas beginnings, his work at Disney and "Moana."
Contributed Photo eaters Wednesday
Kansan: How did your Kansas beginnings help prepare you for your career in Hollywood?
Driskill: I went to high school in Gardner, Kansas, which at the time was a small town of 2,000 people, and they didn't have AP classes. Most of the students were kids who were going to go back onto the farm afterwards. Even a good chunk of the students weren't going onto college. So when I hit KU, I was suddenly surrounded by people — really smart people who wanted to teach me all kinds of stuff
- so I became a sponge in college. I was taking a lot of math and physics classes, as well as computer science classes, English, history and Western Civilization. That really built a great foundation for me for coming out into this industry. Computer graphics, at its core, you're drawing pixels on the screen, but what you're doing underneath is a lot of math and physics. On "Moana" alone, one of the big pushes was in water simulation. That is, at its core, physics. Computer
science is the foundation for building the thing, but what you're building, physics and all of that is a big component to solving those problems. I credit my four years at KU a lot for preparing me to come out into this industry.
Driskill: The technical supervisor's job, early on, is to figure out all the nuts and bolts of the "how?" What can we do with tools we already have? What do we need to build new technologies for? Every one of our films is ambitious, and in every one of our films early on we're looking at some points going. "How are we going to do this, again?" So, it's spear-heading all the R&D teams during preproduction, building all
Kansan: What does your role as the technical supervisor for Disney films entail?
the new technologies, and then as we get into the actual making of the movie and we wrap up all the tool development, I become kind of chief fire fighter. We're trying to hold everything together, tying to keep everything moving, trying to keep all the artists productive and get shots finished.
That really built a great foundation for me for coming out into this industry."
Hank Driskill University alumnus
Kansan: Speaking of fire fighting, were there any particularly large fires you had
to put out while working on "Moana?"
Driskill: It was funny. In an early screening, John Lasseter on the story retreat the next day gave a really memorable quote that all of us quoted many times in the months that followed, which was, "Moana' makes 'Big Hero 6' looks like a one-man show.'" The visual effects supervisor, Kyle Odermattecq, and I had just come off of "Big Hero 6," and we were feeling that same thing — that this movie was just tremendously ambitious in what we were trying to pursue. And with each screening, it kept getting bigger. As the story was evolving, it kept having new challenges. The scope and scale kept growing, and we kept being faced by things we didn't know how to do, so we
kept having to invent pipelines and processes to just be able to pull the movie off.
Driskill: This is the first movie I've worked on at Disney where we felt a weight of responsibility early on. One of the fun things about working at Disney is after the movie is out, there's a world. Our movies touch people. Regularly, I go around, and I give talks. For instance, after "Big Hero 6," I had people coming up and talking about what that movie meant to them: how it celebrated STEM, how it showed a future that wasn't dystopian. There were all these positives from the movie after it was released. With this movie, I gave a talk at D23 a year and a half ago, and I had a couple from Hawaii come up and talk to me. They couldn't get two sentences out without tearing up. We felt such a sense of responsibility with this movie, in particular. Because it was celebrating the Pacific Island culture, it was important. Everybody working on it felt that this was an important movie for us to get right and to work really, really hard in creating something special. I'm hopeful that everything we put together, you know, that people see that on the screen and that they feel something special.
Kansan: What makes "Moana" unique?
—Edited by Cody Schmitz