For most of this year, we at fps HQ have been giving a lot of thought to the direction of fps—not in terms of mandate, but in how we achieve the goals we've always had.

One manifestation of this rethink is the Animation Innovator series, which fulfills our goal of bringing the inner workings of animation to the public. Our first two (with guests Ray Harryhausen and Mike Johnson) have worked out very well, and we're busily planning four more for next year.

The second manifestation is visible right here. Since the relaunch of the magazine, I've been thinking about how to balance the content of the magazine with the content of the website. Our solution: the four sections in which we divided articles (Reviews, Features, Commentary and Festival Watch) are, as of now, pretty much preserved in amber. The reviews, spotlights, interviews, commentary and festival overviews that we carefully consdier, write, reconsider and rewrite will for the most part be reserved for the magazine. Photo galleries from fests and conferences will continue to appear in Festival Watch, and the promised final instalments of our Rock & Rule interview (still being painstakingly transcribed) will appear in Features.

All other written content will appear in the blog, which is now the landing point for fpsmagazine.com. This includes reviews (as evidenced by my recent writeups of Chicken Little and Kakurenbo), commentary, festival reports and announcements, but they'll be more immediate. Formerly my own little area to write comments, the blog has been opened up to include a team of writers: Tamu "Kino Kid" Townsend, fps publicist and media maven; Marc Hairston, anime scholar; Marc Elias, fps's longtime anime skeptic and original design guru; and Jason Vanderhill, who made his debut with a fantastic interview with Tadeusz Wilkosz that appeared in our fourth issue. Others will eventually join the roster.

Meanwhile, fps has been expanding in other areas. The magazine's page count has been steadily increasing. Our three-month-old careers section, powered by the fine folks at CreativeHeads.net, connects job seekers and employers in the animation industry. Our nascent audio archive contains fps-related audio files; right now, there are three recent radio interviews in MP3 format, but a wider range of material will fill the section out in the coming year. And there are still more developments on the way.

Incidentally, one by-product of this reorganization is that our old RSS feed for site updates will soon go dark. However, this blog has its own feed, so you can still stay current. (If you're already subscribed to the In-Betweens feed, you don't have to do anything—you're already here!)

The year 2005 has shaped up to be one of fps's best, but so far as we're concerned, this is just setting the stage for 2006. Come along for the ride.

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