BAF 2013 - Animations from Professional 1 and Student 1 Reels

The Bradford Animation Festival was just such an amazing experience, for the first two days, I was already exposed to so many different works, that I was nearly overwhelmed. There were some really interesting and insightful talks from various animators, illustrators and VFX artists who were all just so keen on sharing their experiences with us (I will write about a few of them in separate posts).

For now I will share with you about the few animations I particularly enjoyed:

Professional 1

Boles (Spela Cadez, Germany, Slovenia)

It's amazing how such a short animation can create two such endearing characters, aside from how gorgeously detailed the puppets and settings were, there was just something about the voice acting done for these two that really added to it all. Filip and Tereza are just so astoundingly that I am so sure that I have met people like them before.

I really love how well their body language was conveyed (Such as Tereza's tipsy walk at the very beginning), and even simple actions such as Filip crushing balls of paper in frustration, it's these little details I always find myself appreciating in stop motion animations as compared to more dynamic sequences, especially since these puppets need to be so carefully controlled due to their size and delicacy.

In the Air is Christopher Grey (Felix Massie, UK)

While the simplistic art style used was aesthetically pleasing (Especially when it came to the effective use of vibrant colors to differentiate the main characters from one another, as well as the slight differences in their silhouette shapes and sizes), it is probably the humorously dry-witty narrative that made this one of the more memorable animations to me (It's also a plus that they got some pretty decent voice actors for it).

This animation short was just such a breath of fresh air as a couple of the ones that were shown before it were honestly quite… depressing (Though that doesn't stop me from admiring the animation techniques used in them). 

I would love to do a CGI 2D animation similar to this in the future.

Student 1

The Kiosk (Anete Melece, Switzerland)

There was always something I liked about cutout animations, while they might seem a tad simpler as compared to other forms of stop motion, it does allow them to explore with more traditional mediums whilst still in the creation process (It is especially nice to see how the designs are made to look more traditional even when done digitally).

Cutout animations especially give the illusion of a picture book coming to life, what with the somewhat stiff movements of it's rather flat characters and objects. This was perhaps one of the cutest and sweetest animations that I saw on the first day.

Ab Ovo (Anita Kwiatkowska-Naq-vi, Poland)

Short and sweet, this clay animation conveys the journey of a pregnant woman, from beginning to end, and how she physically and emotionally changes over that period. It is only fitting that clay was used in illustrating that very transition.

Plug and Play (Michael Frei, Switzerland)

I will end this post with another 2D Computer animation, while there might have been some deeper context to this animation, I was just enjoying the randomness of each sequence (Computer voices used for satirically emotional scenes are always hilarious to listen to as well)  I believe this was one of the more amusing ones to me.

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