OUDF502: Bradford Animation Festival

Bradford Animation Festival seems to be becoming bigger and better every year, with over 800 delegates 2012 BAF was a very interesting experience for myself and my peers as it was another eye opener and confidence boost that we needed. There were very interesting people at the talk who shared they're visions and the hard work, they also gave some notable advice on what to expect in the industry. They spoke about how they went about finding a job after graduation, how long it took them to find employment etc. During the talks, I learnt that making an interesting show reel of your work is very important as that is what employers target.

We had panel talks from the following interesting delegates: 

• Professor Paul Wells of the Animation Academy from Loughborough University
• Chris Williams from Bournemouth University
• Tony Prosser of Real Time UK
• Caroline Parsons from Newport University 
• Sophie Jenkins from Double Negative 

We viewed a number of student films and they were the following:

• Buy Buy Baby

Buy Buy Baby was a very interesting piece, it was made at an estimated budget of £4000. The animation to is is very 1920's it worked well with the music soundtrack.

Other shorts that we viewed were:

• The Other Side
• Drawl 
• Snowflake

During the Panel talks, I really enjoyed the presentation by Sophie Jenkins from D-Neg. "Double Negative is a British full-service visual effects/computer animation company located in London. The company was set up in 1998 with a team of 30 staff and has since grown to over 1000 staff, making it Europe's largest provider of visual effects for film." She spoke about her journey as the visual effects supervisor for the 2012 blockbuster film Total Recall. She spoke about how it was hard to work with an American director Len Wiseman through conference call all the time as the ideas kept changing. She mentioned that at some point they had to build an entire city (Federation of Britain) I believe it was called, without any reference whatsoever, these were some of the challenges she faced.