Bradford Animation Festival - Day 2

Day 2, I was quite looking forward to as Vanessa Boyce from Double Negative would be doing a talk in the afternoon. Before this there was a couple more things to be seen, the first one being Professional 2, it was similar to the screening on the previous day however these shorts were created by professionals. Again there were 8 films shown in total, however due to me arriving a bit late I missed out on two of these shorts. I may see if I can find these online or on their sit as I caught the ending for one of them 'Bendito Machine IV' (Spain) and it seemed very intriguing and the animation was all done with silhouettes. There was an interesting short called 'Father' that was directed by a handful of people all from different countries. They used a combination of 3D and 2D which produced a hybrid of styles. The characters differed from one another quite drastically, some being quite stylised whereas another looked more realistic compared to the others. The story itself was quite haunting and really immersed me into the whole story about a dialogue between father and child that never happens. 'Edmond was a Donkey' was probably my most favourite one as not only did it include a lot of 3D elements, but the story itself was something different and really made you feel for the character. There was dialogue during this film however the main character it revolved around never spoke a work. I find that no dialogue is such a strong thing sometimes and more emotion can be shown just through their actions and expression. I really liked the lighting in this film as well, the majority of it was mainly a grey scale however when it switched it was really beautiful, especially seeing it contrasting against the grey.

I attended a talk after this about creating virtual urban environments. Vanessa Boyce from Double Negative, Martin Walker a lecturer in 3D computer graphics and animation, Ben Hall from Criterion Games and Jonathan Gales founding member of Factory Fifteen were bought together to talk about creating photorealistic urban environments. It was interesting to see the different approaches and what was produced from people who were coming from different areas of the industry. A recurring thing that came up with each speaker was the fact that because these environments are created virtual, 3D programmes have the tendency to make everything perfect and this is not how it is in real life. If they left it now it was, the environments wouldn't be believable and would distract the viewer from the overall experience. To get over this, they would go in and physically make it 'imperfect' adding in little details, textures, making sure lines are not dead straight etc. I had never really thought about this before but it is a very good point that I will keep in mind when I create photorealistic environments in the future.

The next talk was by Vanessa Boyce again but this time going into more detail about Double Negative's newest film 'Total Recall'. VFX is something that has caught my attention for awhile now, I love how companies are able to create vast environments that are so realistic, it really amazes me. Double Negative only had about a year to create pretty much everything from scratch so that was a massive job in itself. It was quite impressive how much was achieved in that time and the overall outcome of it. In my notes it explains the process they took when creating the environments. Vanessa is the CG supervisor and made the point that in the film they had 2 different types of vfx to do, putting the filmed shot into the modelled environments but also putting modelled characters into already filmed shots. Both of these ways, even though similar had to be approached in different ways. Seeing this talk it really makes me want to explore the industry of vfx and create some photorealistic work that I could put in my portfolio. I have been looking into internships this year and Framestore a vfx company in London normally do summer internships each year so I may apply for this and see how it goes.

The last talk of the day was from Valerie Kausen, the granddaughter of Chuck Jones. It was lovely to hear what it was like to have an amazing animator like her grandfather in her life and influencing the things she did. We got to see some of his shorts which was really inspirational and really makes me want to study 2D animation more for the principles and take that into my 3D work. I think this will be something I explore further as at the end of the day the principles of animation are the foundations to any good animation. Without a good understanding of them you can't get your animation to achieve it's fullest potential.