Bradford Animation Festival - Day 3

Friday was the busiest day of the festival, lots of talks to attend and I planned to go to a networking event that All Animated had organised. The day began with a talk from Jason Theaker a freelance animator and tutor from Bradford Uni. He spoke about how at Bradford Uni they have a programme where students, along side tutors work on a professional brief. This gives the student more experience, skills and knowledge about working with a real client. The short that was shown had been nominated for a national prize so this would have given the students a lot of exposure. James Thompson, a student who worked on the short film was there to give us his point of view on working on it. He took us through the process and spoke about a few things that I had never really thought about before. If you're working in a group as long as the rigger has a rough model (all proportions should be correct) even if it's not completely finished, they can get started on the rigging process while the character is still being completed. Once it has been finished it can be passed onto the rigger who can then just apply the rig and send it on to the animators. This is a good way of using time, especially if there is a strict time scale on the project. After this talk, it really got me thinking about possibly doing a masters after my 3 years.

The next talk was given by Amanita Designs and Red Kite Games. They spoke about animation and games for new platforms and why they chose to produce mobile games. Jaromir Plachy who is an animator and graphic artist, showed some of his work that led up to him creating Botanicula for Amanita. I really enjoyed the animations that he created, they were so simple in terms of design but his humour translated through the characters and created a thoroughly enjoyable watch. It goes to show that even something so sim sole can really engage with the audience. Simon Iwaniszak, Managing Director of Red Kite Games previously had worked at Rockstar Leeds but decided this was the right time to go ahead and set up his own company. By being an indie studio you have more of a creative say with what goes on and with mobile gaming becoming ever more popular; you have the ability to create a game that you want to make.

The big talk of today was from Mark Shapiro of LAIKA, the independent animation studio that created Coraline and ParaNorman. I was really excited to see this as I saw ParaNorman when it came out and was blown away at the technical side and also the versatility of the characters. Mark showed a wide range of videos that explained how they achieved the look of ParaNorman and the process they used for creating the faces using 3D colour printing. Some of these videos I had seen before, after researching into it once I had seen the film. There were a couple videos though that really broke down the process of the animation, and it really makes you appreciate and gain a new found respect for the animated that work in the stop motion industry. There is so much accuracy and dedication needed to create a stop motion film, objects and characters have to be moved a tiny fraction each frame and if it isn't accurate that one frame could cause quite a lot of problems. As Mark is the head of entertainment, brand marketing he also spoke about how they marketed the film to get people interested and excited about it. They created lots of short videos explaining the making of ParaNorman and placed these on the web with the hash tag 'WeirdWins'. This got people tweeting about the film and spreading the word. What was really interesting was that someone I know in America was really hyped up about this film, before I spoke to him I knew nothing about it but I had seen all his tweets and it got me intrigued about ParaNorman. I think because he ended up being a big promoter of the film by using twitter, LAIKA actually sent him merchandise from the film in appreciation, which I think is really lovely of them to reward the fans out there. It's really interesting to see how social media can affect the promotion of a film and how they use it to get more attention.

Even though I had previously seen ParaNorman, I saw it again but this time in 3D. After having the talk from Mark I found that I ended up paying attention to all the small details he spoke about and really concentrating on the faces. I noticed things I never did the first time I watched it and it made me appreciate the film more for what it was, now knowing more of the process behind it. I am normally not a big fan of 3D films, as I feel that sometimes it is a bit distracting and I find myself not being able to be fully immersed within the film. This was different however, I found that there were some areas that really benefitted from being 3D and made me feel more of a part of the film. I also got a chance to take a few pictures of the puppets themselves after the talk, it was great to see them up close and see all the detail that was put into them, for example for each character their clothing was individually hand made and sew on to them.

After the film I hopped on along to a networking event that All Animated had organised. Seeing as I missed the previous one in Leeds I knew I wanted to take advantage of this one. Whilst there I met the lovely Aaron Wood, Managing Director of Slurpy Studios and Billy Allison who gave me some really useful advice within animation and also a bit more confidence as I always worry that my way of working isn't the 'right' way. I spoke to Aaron about the Animex conference up in Teeside and he said it is definitely worth going as it would suit me very well what with wanting to go into CG, so I think this is the way to go and hopefully I will be able to catch up with Aaron again up there.

The last thing of the day for me was attending the animation pub quiz, this was a first for me as I had never even been to a pub quiz before and I was worried my lack of animation knowledge would fail me! Myself and Alex ended up teaming with Kath and Kim from All Animated, it was a good laugh and I learnt new things about animation I didn't know previously. There were prizes at the end, but seeing as we didn't come first we missed out on the art books, however I got myself a Rango Cactus Cup that I was pretty chuffed about! This is something I definitely want to attend again as it brings everyone together in a relaxed and fun setting and it's just something enjoyable to do.