Manchester Animation Festival Pt.3

For the final day at MAF, I got to see some really interesting stuff. I went to the Ray Harryhausen Retrospective and got to learn all about the history of one of the most famous stop motion special effects artists and directors of the 20th Century. I learned a lot about how special effects were made before the digital era, as well as some of the methods that went into the ways of making his models. Afterwards we got to see a film version of the classic film Clash of the Titans.

 The film was taken out of a vault and hadnt been used since the 1980s. You can see that it's turned pink due to it aging over 40 years.

 After the film they had some of the props and models used in the film, so I had to grab a picture with them. MAF this year was really fun, I hope that i'll be able to attend it again one day.

Manchester Animation Festival Pt.2

Today we went to go see more commissioned films, although I didn't take pictures of them. I had a few things on my to do list for this day. I got to go see the BlueZoo: HooDoo presentation and master class, as well as ask some very impertinant questions since im planning on making a VR animation for my final project of the school year. I got a good look into what I need to get done in order to make this thing, so I was very useful for me. I also went to a Foley Design Workshop, where we got to make the foley sound for a sequence from Shaun the Sheep. It was very fun and informative to see just how the methods in making foley sound.

Manchester Animation Festival Pt.1

On the first day of the manchester animation festival, I went to go see some pretty interesting things. I went to see the shorts, many of which were weird, some were very interesting as well.

This one was pretty strange. Basically it was humans acting like birds. and all of them were naked.

 I enjoyed this one a lot. I was a piece about a group of birds wanting freedom from an underground civilization. it was very conceptual as well.

 

 This was a strange one. It was a stop motion piece about the concepts of heaven and following a "supreme being". Or at least thats what i got out of it.

 

As the compilation went on it seemed to get stranger and stranger. I could get very little meaning out of this one. It was a loose animation with very random imagery against a technobass backing.

 While this picture started out cute, it ended as a metaphor for going into war and the expectations versus the reality of both historical and modern warfare.

 This one was very vague in its story telling. It was roughly about an ice breaker and her living with some kind of schizophrenia, I think. It was very graphic.

 I really enjoyed the ideas behind this one. It was about a father losing an opportunity to communicate with his daughter, and emphasizes on the stresses modern workers face when it comes to balancing family and work life.

 At first this one was both strange as it was creepy. It was about a woman and her small baby messing up her life. The twist at the end was that the 'baby' was actually her cat.

 This was a 3D piece about a robot working as a dishwasher, and breaking out of his servitude and traveling the world. pretty straightforward.

 This was a piece about a man holding a secret for his entire life about killing one of his friends.

This piece was about a Chinese woman asking her grandmother what it was like growing up under Mao in China. This was probably one of my favorite ones, just due to it having a clear message in its making.

After this we went to go see Phantom Boy, a 2D french film about a child with cancer having the ability to go out of his body when he sleeps. Afterwards, we saw My Life as a Courgette, a french stop motion film about a child going to an orphanage. I also attended the Aardman Retrospective, where I learned much about the history of Aardman Studios.

ThoughtBubble

On Saturday I went to a local comic book convention, Thought bubble. I went for only one day, and went around the artist panels. I met up with one of the owners of the Travelling Man Comic book store, who used to be my Dungeon Master. I also met some web comic artists I follow online, bought merchandise and gave them my business card. I probably passed out around 20 business cards to different artists, so it was a decent networking experience. Sadly this might be the last time I'm able to go, since this is my last year here.