Bradford animation festival 2010

It was cold, wet and windy in Bradford. But the National media museum was packed with warm people who all love animation. Something like 700 people had shown up to join the event, said the lady at the box office when I asked.
This was the 17th edition of the Bradford animation festival and it really is a likeable event, right in my taste. Lots of good stuff to take part of, but still small enough to have a certain familiar and cozy feeling about it. You do have a chance to talk to the bigshots here too after screentalks and workshops, no one is too distant.

The audience is pouring into pictureville cinema waiting for
the screentalk by Paul Mendoza of Pixar.

There were all kinds of animation gathered here at this festival, in the competition class you found newer productions from the recent years, but there were also room for retroperspectives, lookbacks, children's productions (ASIFA), classic narrative storytelling and more abstract shorts experimenting in form and style.

At every festival there is usually some kind of sneak preview of upcoming features, so also this time in Bradford. At the festival opening night we saw "Chico and Rita". A fresh english-spanish production telling a story full of jazz music, love and heartache, all placed in Cuba, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, Hollywood with the story beginning in the year of 1948. The film is seductive and creates a strong atmosphere, much thanks to the wonderful way in which the music is used throughout the film. A really good music film!





Sadly I didn't get the chance to participate in as many workshops as I would have wanted to. Actually I only got into one of them, a motion capture workshop demonstration, which was both cool and interesting.  (jeez, there is REALLY a lot of cleanup to do after each capture !!!)

But I enjoyed more of the screentalks instead, don't think I missed any of them... Here are two of the highlights from this year's screentalks. 


NEXUS RETROSPECTIVE

Adam Foulkes, Alan Smith and Jim LeFevre at Nexus, an independent production company and animation studio in London, gave a very interesting insight to the creative aspect of their work and how they go about it when they decide on HOW to meet a customer's order for a commercial or a television short. Very intersting how openmindedly they weigh pros and cons of different animation styles and what a broad palette of production types they choose from. As they are brainstroming ideas and/or investigating the script or idea they are presented they always ask themselves if this idea would be best done with live action, stop motion or CG or some kind of mixture of these...  their showreel proved them also to be a very creative crew, IMHO.

INCEPTION TALK

Paul Franklin of the VFX company double negative gave us a detailed and thorough insight to the production of all the visual effects of the film "inception". Lots of behind-the-scene-photos, lots of examples from the process of making the visual effects made this appearance one of the most interesting at the festival.

This is the giant mirror that was used for
some of the special effects in Inception

GENE DEITCH

Maybe the most interesting and certainly most heartwarming appearance was done by Gene Deitch and his wife Zdenka - partners in life AND in animation.  We got to hear the story of a young animator who was asked to move to Prag in the late 50s and 60s to work at a studio there.  An amazing story of the development of the animation artform unfolded, as told by Gene, we learned what it was like to be "the only free American in Prague during 30 years of Communism." - and we also got to hear a wonderful love story.

You can read about Gene at his site: http://www.genedeitch.com/

 

For a little while I thought that I would be the only representant from animation mentor at this festival, but my classmate Ian Yale met up for friday's show and joined us at the talk that Paul Mendoza from Pixar gave.

You know what? Webcam and chat on skype is nice - but meeting
in real life is better. :) 

In conclusion, I can only give my warm recommendations to everybody to go and visit this festival upcoming years - IF you like the cozy atmosphere of the somewhat smaller festival.  I know I do. 
Cheers!