19th Bradford animation Festival

We had the pleasure of attending the 19th Bradford Animation Festival in the National Media Museum. We've seen many beautiful and inspiring animations done by professionals as well as other students. Some of them I'll remember well because of the interesting technique used, some of them because of their story and some of them because they were disturbing in a way. For example "Edmund Was A Donkey" and "Tram". Edmund was a donkey is about a very silent and unpopular type of person, who also seemed very depressed all the time. Till one day, he found a place where he belongs. This was next to a female donkey in a city zoo I believe. I suppose the very disturbing scene was when he wakes up one day, completely naked next to his lover with lots of people staring at him. Cause that actually makes you think of bestiality and how bad it is. Maybe there is a deeper meaning to the whole thing but for me the bestiality really overshadows any other possible meaning. “Tram” was also weirdly sexual. It was about a simple woman at work, she was a tram operator, and as time went by she started picturing everyone and everything around her as a male reproductive organs. But with this one it was easier to deal with it, it wasn’t as overwhelming and I could sort of get a message the creator was trying to send and that is that it’s not only men that have sexual fantasies. But even though both the animations were very disturbing, they were really beautifully done. They looked very professional and I must say that with both of those animations lighting played a big part and they pulled it off with making “Edmund Was A Donkey” really creepy and rather dark, and the “Tram” lit just like the tram is, which left you with a silhouette of a tram and an occasional lamp post. Both of those animations seem really rebellious with a strong message and I suppose it pushes you to produce whatever you want without really thinking that it may cause a bit of a conversation because, after all that is how you get your message across.

Another thing I really enjoyed were the talks by people from the industry, we were lucky enough to attend two of those and they were Valerie Kausen - Chuck Jones’s granddaughter and Vanessa Boyce - from the Double Negative company. I found both of those talks very helpful because from both of them I got information on how to improve my work. Valerie Kausen mainly talked about the process her granddad went through when trying to figure out how to draw things for example certain animals swimming, for this purpose he happened to tie her brothers hands together and throw him into a swimming pool to see how he’d swim. Vanessa Boyce went into a lot of detail, showing us the process her team went through to create a city for the movie called “Total Recall”. It was really amazing, because it was all based on photographs, she said that they start off with taking thousands of photographs for reference to make sure the city looks similar to the one they’re trying to recreate. And from there it’s just many many layers of reflections lights and more buildings to make it realistic. Overall it was a very useful experience.