Bradford Animation Festival

Bradford animation festival proved to be a mixed bag of nuts really.
Films and exhibitions that stood out for me.(what i can remember)
"Purple and Brown " for pure juvenile humour and character observation.
"Shaun the sheep" and"Frankensteins cat" for great scripts and voices.
Other films I enjoyed~
"Off Beat",
"The Simpsons movie",
"Beowulf",
"Fishing with Spinoza".
Most of the 3D computer animation fell flat and was fairly uninspiring, the look tends to be flat and plastic while the animation is slow and floaty.

The 2d stuff was much better and interesting top watch. not a big fan of most of the personal peices but of those that seemed to have an audience in mind "the pearce sisters", "the beard collecter" more then a few nods to 60s style toons were made by some films whose titles I cant remember but there was a great observational peice from Korea,"Bab Mook Ja " that was amazing in pace, style and movement.
Also met Alan Gilby and Barry Purves, both showed an interest in coming down to falmouth and lending their expertise to us fledgling animators!

I was disapointed by the lack of info on tickets for the game development talks as this is one area where a lot of animators will be looking for work but the one event I did manage to catch was really inspirational "samorost2" had some fantastic concept design using photos of rusted machinery and natural organic objects. check it out!
http://www.amanitadesign.com/

The retrospective of God Bobfrey (God to his friends!) was interesting and the talk from Nick Park offered a little insight into his realm, his post war world of nostalgia doesnt exist in reality-
he revealed that he was brought up on Tintin and the Beano, similar in many ways , safe worlds where nothing bad really happens. I dont think he really wanted to be there, perhaps he was tempted on stage with cheese and crackers!
Did manage to see some puppets and sets for stop motion films in the gallery up-stairs which was extremely useful, just to get an idea of scale and the level of detail required.
And so back to School...

the blog entry that time forgot

This should have been posted last week but had problems with the internet!
The next few animation excercises were about conveying mood and emotion through body language and the relasionships between characters. I tried the pose to pose approach and produced some rough thumnails of the key action poses which I then proceeded to ignore as I began drawing! harder then it looks. however the end result wasnt as bad as all that, if I can boil a few of the poses and slow it all down it could be a lot better. I find it very difficult working on two characters on the same paper as well as redrawing the same background over and over again, am I just a lazy ****?, is this what animation is about? I would like to try with multiple layers so that one character can be boiled while the other goes ahead an does its thing.
My walk cycle is coming on, pretty much got it down except for a few inbetweens, once I had broken the character down into its basic primitive shapes it became a lot easier, I will add detail after Im happy with the flow of the animation.
I have recently found a book of stills from the Buster Keaton films which is really useful for understanding what he is doing to convey the characters emotions and drive the story.
Wonkey films gave a lipsync workshop which was very interesting and gave me a few ideas in producing some animations using modified gloves. I have been told that this idea has been developed by some other animators so will have to investigate.