Spoiler Alert Radio

Ellen Lake is a documentary filmmaker, sculptor, and installation artist from Oakland. CA.

She received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2002, where she studied sculpture, film and video, and installation.

She has worked on an extensive group of experimental documentary short films about collecting, including Trina's Collections and Ann's Hoard.

Her films, sculptures, and installations have been been screened at in the San Francisco Bay area at New Langton Arts, The Exploratorium, Pacific Film Archives, Other Cinema, and the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, in addition to the Echo Park Film Center and Midnight Special Bookstore in LA, and The Pioneer Theater in NYC.

She was the recipient of the 2005 Bay Area Video Coalition Mediamaker award, which is a competitive, in-kind grant of post-production, new media services, and certified training classes, awarded to filmmakers in the San Francisco Bay area each year to help them complete public media projects.

Aideen McCarthy is a a writer and director of short films, commercials, and music videos.

Aideen McCarthy decided to pursue her dream of becoming a filmmaker in 2001 after originally getting her law degree, obtaining her Masters Degree in Film Studies at the UCD School of Film in Dublin.

She started out working in the camera department on a mix of large scale feature films and short films, including Adam and Paul, Lassie, and Becoming Jane. In 2005, she went onto produce her first dramatic film called The Widow which explores the five stages of grief from a unique view.

Her latest work is a five-minute film called The Formorian about a mythological race of Ancient Ireland. Additionally, she came in fourth place in the Jameson Whiskey Film Festival Trailer competition and has directed nine music video promos for the Academy of Theatre Arts in London.

Spoiler Alert Radio interviewed renowned animator and sex expert, Signe Baumane.

Signe Baumane was born and raised in Latvia, graduating from Moscow University in 1989 with a B.A. in Philosophy. She started work at Dauka Animation Studio in Riga as an animator and cel painter.

Her animation ranges from her 1991 debut The Witch and the Cow to more recent works including The Teat Beat of Sex, one of few animated films accepted into both Sundance and Berlin, and Veterinarian, about the circle of life and death.

Since 1995, she has lived in NYC, having worked on I Married a Strange Person with Bill Plympton and animation inserts for XX/XY among many other projects.

In addition to animation, Signe has illustrated books, worked in puppet theater design, taught animation at Pratt Institute, and is periodically publishing parts of a novel about her adventures in New York in Una, a Latvian women’s magazine. She is a 2005 Fellow in Film of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the recipient of an individual artist grant from The Jerome Foundation, a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.

Richard Rosenblatt is the publisher of the Filmfestivalworld.com.

FilmFestivalWorld.com is a membership site targeted to networking people who make films and mixed media with those whose professional focus is programming, distributing, financing and writing about films and media.

By using the tools and resources that FFW has assembled, any filmmaker can level the playing field in launching and promoting a film. Unique areas like genre gateways also make it easy to focus on genre-specific film festivals for planning film submissions and festival attendance amd for selecting films.

Brendt Barbur is the founding Director of the Bicycle Film Festival.

The Bicycle Film Festival celebrates the bicycles and bicycle culture through art, film, music and performance and brings together various aspects of bicycling together to advocate its ability to transport people in many ways and to have a good time.

The Bicycle Film Festival has traveled from its home base in New York City to San Francisco, Tokyo, Melbourne and many other small and large cities worldwide with each site having thier own customized festival with a variety film shorts and features, art, and music.

The Bicycle Film Festival has been a major catalyst for the urban bike movement, one of the most powerful and culturally relevant forces of the last decade. The BFF is sure to carry this momentum into the next decade.

Judy Laster is the Founder and Executive Director of the Woods Hole Film Festival. The Woods Hole Film Festival is a week long festival held in Woods Hole on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, from the end of July to the beginning of August. The festival includes workshops, panel discussions, staged readings and parties as well as eight days of film screenings. 2008 will mark the 17th year of the festival, which will have continued great offerings of film and related events for international filmmakers, the Woods Hole community, local filmakers, and fans of the festival from around the world. The Woods Hole Film Festival also presents other film events throughout the year.

Casey Safron is a film professor, filmmaker, and founder of Animation Block Party. Taking place in late July in Brooklyn, New York, the Animation Block Party (ABP) is a four-night film festival party with the best and most unique animated shorts from around the world with special themed nights and music, attended by over two animation lovers. ABP has also toured with a one-night "best of fest" as a midnight screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts, where Casey went to college.

Anne S. Lewis is a featured writer for the Austin Chronicle and writes a monthly column covering the the Austin Film Society documentary tour. Separate Vacations is an animated short film about a dog owner, boarding her dog before leaving for a vacation, is thrown a curve by one of the kennel's information forms. It is Anne's first animated film. It played the SXSW Film Festival and also debuted in New England at the 2007 MergingArts Short Short Story Film Festival and was an audience favorite. Anne discussed with us her experiences covering the documentary film tour and the process of her past, present, and future film ideas.

Liz Van Verth is a filmmaker from Buffalo, NY, who received her BFA in Illustration at Syracuse and her MFA at Pratt Institute in New York. She worked as a graphic artist for NBC Nightly News and eventually as a 3-D animator for show graphics on Dateline NBC. She has also worked on projects for both CBS Sports and MTV.She also has taught at Pratt Institute and Lehman College, and currently teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her MFA thesis animation is called

Lyn Elliot is a filmmaker who incorporates both narrative and experimental elements into her movies and creates short films that bring to the surface the strange undercurrents of everyday life. Her short films include The Boy in the Air and Mild People in Aggressive T-Shirts, which have screened at film festivals across the United States, along with her latest film, Fish But No Cigar, which was the recipient of the Soul of Wit Award at the 2007 MergingArts Short Short Story Film Festival. Fish, But No Cigar is a four-minute animated short about a woman who literally has bigger fish to fry. Lyn Eliot's films have been compiled onto a DVD available here.