Animation Festivals

Over this year I am planning to try and get to more animation festivals to network and get a better understanding of the industry. There were a few I came across last year that I found interesting however I wasn't able to make it due to deadlines from my course and not finding out about them soon enough. The one I was really excited about was FMX - Stuggart, Germany. This festival covered not only animation but VFX, games and films and had some big studio names giving talks last year - Pixar, DNeg, Dreamworks, LAIKA, Axis Animation and Aardman to name a few. What's really good about this festival is that is covers a wide range of topics within the industry, movie screenings, gives masterclasses, portfolio reviews and so much more. I had previously looked into going to Fantoche as this was meant to be the best animation festival out there, however after seeing the line-up for FMX last year I think that I will definitely be trying to get to this one.

One that is closer to Leeds is Animex held at Teeside University, again I had seen this last year but never really got round to getting tickets for the event. Animex is the international festival for animation and games and previous guest talks have been given by Eric Goldberg, animator and director from Disney, Production Designer, Karen deJong, Epic Games, Naughty Dog, animators from Valve. Along with these talks, there are masterclasses and workshops to attend as well. I need to start looking more into these masterclasses and workshops that are available at these festivals as they can be of great use to myself as I would be learning from an industry working person.

Animated Exeter is one that could be nice to go to however it all depends on whether I could get there or not as it would cost a fair amount of money to travel all the way down there and to also pay for accommodation; I think I will wait until November (when the programme is announced) before I make my decision on this one. Animated Encounters in Bristol is close to my actual home and would have loved to have gone, however the dates for this year had changed and I was already moved back up to Leeds when it had started. The problem with some of the animation festivals is that they tend to not be anywhere close to where I am and involves paying out quite a bit to attend them. Because of this I think I will only try to make it to a couple but the one at the top of my list will be FMX. It definitely seems worth the money going by the programme last year and so I'm going to try and see if other people in my year will be interested in attending this in April.