At University we have a 'Creative Futures Week' were all sorts of professionals from the Creative Industry came in and gave talks on what they do etc....
Monday 7th March 2011
To start it off we had a talk that opened up the week to all of the creative students which was followed by a talk by Barry Purves! The titale of his talk was 'Passions and a Passport'. I was very excited when I found out that he was going to be there having previously seen him in November at BAF where he presented the awards evening! He didn't disappoint..the animators. It seemed that he hadn't been informed that the students sitting watching him weren't all animators, in fact only a fraction were animators. Bracing the audience as animation students he talked about his work on animation and where he got his inspiration from. Nothing that he said was to do with the title of his talk (well apart from the passion part..he has a lot of that!). From this I found out that he wanted to be an actor before becoming an animator, his main inspiration is from ballet, dance and theatre. He also gave some advice...every animator should try and learn to play an instrument. I really enjoyed his talk and found what he had to say very interesting.
'From Commercials to Feature Films: Life as a Professional Animator by Harriet Buckley'
This was the third talk of the day and the last that I went to. I really enjoyed it and found it as informative as some of the talks at BAF. Harriet Buckley worked on The Illusionist, a film I saw at BAF and loved. She took us through all the production stage, from the beginning all the way through to the end. She showed us this through images and clips making each change and stage really clear and easy to see and understand. She also talked about littler animations she had helped out in, for example on was of an advert for knife crime which used the same technique and style as BLU - another team of animators work of whom I had seen at BAF, which was stop motion of painted characters on ordinary walls in ordinary streets. In fact Harriet informed us that the streets they used were streets that had the highest knife crime! She also took us through the stages of this animation...from prep and research right the way through to the final outcome.
Another useful thing she told us was what it was like living as an animator, what its like when getting a job, how to find work and what roughly to expect for different rolls within the animation industry.
Tuesday 8th March 2011
'Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Paul Gravett'
This was a bit of an eye opener, I had no idea about half of the things he was telling us about before! All the conventions, the comics and graphic novels. I didn't know that people were creating comics and putting them up on the internet, I didn't know that the man who created superman etc didn't have the right to it and didn't get paid any money from it (luckily this has changed since then). Even though I don't do Comics, Manga or Graphic Novels I still found this interesting and made me think that there are different ways of doing you're work and showing it to people rather than the conventional ways.
'Tiny Elephants, Stop Motion Animation Company - Three Years On by Linda McCarthy'
This was ok...Linda McCarthy is a ex-animation student from our university who has done a few short stop motion animations with a running theme. Its something that she did at University for her final film and since has made more improving on each one. Since leaving University she hasn't made a penny from creating animations but has entered into numerous animation festivals including BAF..of which she was successful with.
Wednesday 9th March
'Computer Games - Concept Art and Illustration in the Entertainment Industry by Lee Carter'
Lee Cart is also a previous student from the university from many years ago. He showed us a number of different projects he has worked on, unfortunately he didn't have enough time to show all that he wanted to, which I found kind disappointing as I would have loved to have seen some more. A lot of what he showed was concept art that he had done, mainly for characters in games. It was amazing and the quality of work was mind blowing. I thoroughly enjoyed this talk.
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