Stoke your fires - Day 1 of the festival

So, the day after the Master Class the actual festival started. It kicked off with Scott Tom, the Lead Fabricator from LAIKA (The Company who made Coraline). Scott’s talk was really insightful, and it gave me a better understanding of how the whole stop motion process works on a bigger scale. Can you believe that there were 10,000 faces for the Coraline Model alone!! I’ll never complain again about making one stop motion model with a few faces.

In the afternoon there was a talk by Paul wells, Director of the animation academy at Loughborough University. Paul talked about the writing behind animation, how relevant animation is and the archive of British animation collections which is a project he is working on, trying to archive all the British animation created in the past. The archive of British animation was something which intrigued me. When I thought about it, there wasn’t that many British animation companies that I could think of that I knew about from the past. Most of the research I had done resulted in studying American animation, Disney, Warner Bros, Hanna Barbara. These were the foundations of my knowledge of animation. The only real British influence has been Aardman animations.