The Animated Century
Dir. Irina Margolina & Adam Snyder
"An entertaining and comprehensive look at the history of animation worldwide. Animated characters, the Professor and Horace demonstrate different animation techniques, including pin screen, pixilation, rotoscope, and cutout and puppet animation. They discuss the most significant animated films of the past 110 years - everything from Emile Reynaud and Windsor McCay's early works, to Fleischer, Disney and Warner Brothers in the United States, to historically important films from every continent.
I didn't see the last 30 minutes of this as we slipped out to go and see the next one (which was well worth it). It wasn't a brilliant documentary, the 'host' characters used to explain things got on my nerves and the animations shown wasn't brilliant and very well known either, some very crude. It was quite interesting when they went through the history of animation, what techniques used to be used and what's used now etc! I would say that it would be a good thing for young animators or beginners that are thinking of taking up animation as introduction.
Mainframe
"Mainframe is a high-end animation and visual effects studio which is home to some of Europes top directors, producers, animators and vfx artists all working closely to produce a plethora of groundbreaking and visually stunning work."
This talk was brilliant, they did the vfx in Cher Lloyds music video 'Swagger Jagger' and showed us the processes and how they did it. The only negative to this was that he made us listen to the whole of her song at the end. But that nothing compared to what he had to go through when making it!
Andy Schmidt - Pixar
"Andrew L. Schmidt is a senior animator with Pixar Animation Studios.He has worked in the animation industry for twenty seven years and has a long list of credits in both traditional 2D animation and CG animated films.
He began his career in 1990 in London, UK at Amblimation Studios where he worked on Fievel Goes West, We're Back and Balto.
In 1996, Schmidt relocated to loas Angeles, California where he worked for Dreamworks Feature Animation on the Prince of Egypt, then moved to Warner Brothers Feature Animation where he animated on the Iron Giant and Osmosis Jones.
Since he joined Pixar in 2000, he has animated some of the most recognised Pixar characters to date: Mike and Sully in Monsters Inc, Marlin Dory and Bruce in Finding Nemo and Bob and Helen in the Incredibles. He has also animated on Ratatouille, Wall-e, Up, toy Story 3, Cars 2 and various Pixar short films including supervising animation on Partly Cloudy.
Schmidt is currently creative director of promotional material for the upcoming Disney Pixar feature film Brave, scheduled for release on 22 June 2012."
Last year we had Paul Mendoza from Pixar do a talk at BAF which was brilliant and so I was automatically excited when I found out that there was another guy from Pixar coming again this year! And he didn't fail to please! He spoke about, again, the processes that are undertaken to create the films, the different teams involved and how he got to work at Pixar (who knew that you didn't need to already know how to animate on the computer with programmes like Maya to get a job there!)
It Lives! It Lives - The Re-animation of Frankenstein's Cat
"The development of a successful cartoon series, from book to script to screen with Curtis Jobling and later development to show running with Alan Gilbey."
This one was good too, it gave a bit of variety, especially as it was bout a children's series and how Alan Gibley was employed to reinvent it. I found it interesting as the two gentlemen took us through the whole story, from the beginning when Curtis Jobling was on a train to an important meeting and doodled the main character all the way to the end where it was screened on TV. And what a journey they went on to get there! It made me realise that in order to make a children's series possible you need to keep it loose enough with some good interesting characters that have a lot of opposite characteristics and strong clear relationships with each other (not always good relationships) to be able to come up with tons of stories for lots of different programmes, otherwise you have no chance of getting your series on the screen.
Barry Purves: Frame by Frame, Note by Note
"Stop motion animator Barry Purves has won over sixty major international awards, including Grand Prix, Best Director, Best Film, and OSCAR and BAFTA nominations. Barry's films are known for their innovation, passion, elegance, lush visuals and fresh interpretations.
In addition Barry has directed and animated some 70 commercials, title sequences and animation inserts for films and pop promos"
One word to describe this man is passionate! He spoke about two of his most recent films - Tchaikovsky and Plume, Tchaikovsky being my favourite! His films are beautiful, stunning and a piece of art. Tchaikovsky was one of Studio MIR's Tales of the Old Pianos programmes, and was a massive improvement compared to the others that I saw. It was beautifully made and worth seeing if you haven't already. Plume wasn't so good, I didn't understand it the first time I saw it. Unlike Tchaikovsky, Plume had no background and consisted of mainly the four characters and feathers!
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